'Jesus Christ, who died for us, that, whether we
wake or sleep, we should live together with
Him.'--1 THESS. v. 10.
In these words the Apostle concludes a section of this, his earliest
letter, in which he has been dealing with the aspect of death in
reference to the Christian. There are two very significant usages of
language in the context which serve to elucidate the meaning of the
words of our text, and to which I refer for a moment by way of
introduction.
The one is that throughout this portion of his letter the Apostle
emphatically reserves the word 'died' for Jesus Christ, and applies to
Christ's followers only the word 'sleep.' Christ's death makes the
deaths of those who trust Him a quiet slumber. The other is that the
antithesis of waking and sleep is employed in two different directions
in this section, being first used to express, by the one term, simply
physical life, and by the other, physical death; and secondly, to
designate respectively the moral attitude of Christian watchfulness and
that of worldly apathy to things unseen and drowsy engrossment with the
present.
So in the words immediately preceding my text, we read, 'let us not
sleep, as do others, but let us watch and be sober.' The use of the
antithesis in our text is chiefly the former, but there cannot be
discharged from one of the expressions, 'wake,' the ideas which have
just been associated with it, especially as the word which is translated
'wake' is the same as that just translated in the sixth verse, 'let us
watch.' So that here there is meant by it, not merely the condition of
life but that of Christian life--sober-minded vigilance and
wide-awakeness to the realities of being. With this explanation of the
meanings of the words before us, we may now proceed to consider them a
little more minutely.