'Go thou thy way, for thou shalt rest.' Now, I suppose, to most careful
readers that clearly is intended as a gracious, and what they call a
euphemistic way of speaking about death. 'Thou shalt rest'; well, that
is a thought that takes away a great deal of the grimness and the terror
with which men generally invest the close. It is a thought, of course,
the force of which is very different in different stages and conditions
of life. To you young people, eager, perhaps ambitious, full of the
consciousness of inward power, happy, and, in all human probability,
with the greater portion of your lives before you in which to do what
you desire, the thought of 'rest' comes with a very faint appeal. And
yet I do not suppose that there is any one of us who has not some burden
that is hard to carry, or who has not learned what weariness means.
But to us older people, who have tasted disappointments, who have known
the pressure of grinding toil for a great many years, whose hearts have
been gnawed by harassments and anxieties of different kinds, whose lives
are apparently drawing nearer their end than the present moment is to
their beginning, the thought, 'Thou shalt rest,' comes with a very
different appeal from that which it makes to these others.
'There remaineth a rest for the people of God,
And I have had trouble enough for one,'
says our great modern poet; and therein he echoes the deepest thoughts
of most of this congregation. That rest is the cessation of toil, but
the continuance of activity--the cessation of toil, and anxiety, and
harassment, and care, and so the darkness is made beautiful when we
think that God draws the curtain, as a careful mother does in her
child's chamber, that the light may not disturb the slumberer.
But, dear friends, that final cessation of earthly work has a double
character. 'Thou shalt rest' was said to this man of God. But what of
people whom death takes away from the only sort of work that they are
fit to do? It will be no rest to long for the occupations which you
never can have any more. And if you have been living for this wretched
present, to be condemned to have nothing to do any more in it and with
it will be torture, and not repose. Ask yourselves how you would like to
be taken out of your shop, or your mill, or your study, or your
laboratory, or your counting-house, and never be allowed to go into it
again. Some of you know how wearisome a holiday is when you cannot get
to your daily work. You will get a very long holiday after you are dead.
And if the hungering after the withdrawn occupation persists, there will
be very little pleasure in rest. There is only one way by which we can
make that inevitable end a blessing, and turn death into the opening of
the gate of our resting-place; and that is by setting our heart's
desires and our spirit's trust on Jesus Christ, who is the 'Lord both of
the dead and of the living.' If we do that, even that last enemy will
come to us as Christ's representative, with Christ's own word upon his
lip, 'Come unto Me, ye that are weary and are heavy laden, and
I'--because He has given Me the power--'_I_ will give you rest.'
'Sleep, full of rest, from head to foot;
Lie still, dry dust, secure of change.'