Death does no harm to the Christian

Let me just briefly point out three ways in which sleep very wonderfully and encouragingly describes the experience of Christians who die. First, sleep does no harm—and that can certainly be said about the death of a Christian, one who dies in Christ. One of my favourite texts showing this is Psalm 121:7, which says, The Lord will keep you from all evil; he will keep your life. Now, he is not saying that nothing bad is going to happen to you—people are going to die—but the Lord is not going to let it harm you if you are a Christian. And Psalm 121:8 goes on to say this: He will keep your going out and your coming in both now and forevermore. So it is a promise that God will keep our lives in eternity. Though we die, yet we shall live. Our lives are kept by him, and so death is not able to harm the Christian.

And we go back to the great confession of 1 Corinthians 15:1–58: Where, O death, is thy sting? Where, O death, is the penalty? The sting of death is sin, the power of sin is the law—and that is why death does not truly harm the believer, because Christ has satisfied righteousness for the believer by keeping the law in our place. His righteousness is imputed to us so that we stand before God after death in the righteousness of Christ, and our penalty is paid by the death of Christ in our place. A. W. Pink says this: Jesus underwent the full horror that is death, and in so doing, transformed death so that for his followers, it may be seen as nothing more than sleep. And so death does not harm us any more than sleep does.¹

Richard D. Phillips