p. 8 | The Sleep of Death by N. D. Anderson

Review and Herald Publishing Association · Takoma Park, Washington, D. C. · Jul 24, 1913

The Sleep of Death

By N. D. Anderson

N. D. ANDERSON

AFTER you have retired for the night, and are asleep, the question of the time which will intervene during your unconsciousness causes you no anxiety. You are ignorant of the exact moment you fell asleep, and you do not know whether you will awake again or not. Neither is it possible for you to determine while in your somnolent state the length of its duration, or the hour at which you wish to arise. You have no physical sense of pain or bliss, no mental sense of worry or contentment, no moral sense of good or evil. You do not hover, a disembodied spirit, above the secret comings and goings of your loved ones, remarking the sorrow and grief and sin they seek to hide from all but their own souls and God; neither do you helplessly flutter about the light of your own memory, witnessing the desecration by soulless enemies of all that you held dear. This would be a refined torture, which happily the Almighty would not inflict. When you sleep, you rest; and when you wake in the dawn, the whole world wakes with you, and each goes to his appointed place and labor, without the aid of spirits who, perhaps, ceased their earthly activities years before the ingenious machine with which you do your work was thought of.

How, then, when you fall asleep in death,—when you go to that long quiet wherein even those lingering shadows we know as dreams are no longer cast, for their substance is not? Would you delight, in the nightmare of your consciousness separated from your body at rest, in seeing the sufferings of the mother you left behind, or in witnessing the degradation of your promising brother, or in helplessly beholding the shame of your sister?—No, it is unbelievable. You would be left in peace, leaving these conditions which you can neither ameliorate nor destroy to the care of Him who can ameliorate and destroy them. Is not the thought more pleasant that all are only sleeping and will rest, with no knowledge of time or place or happening, until that dawn when all will be awakened? To those who have resided in oblivion for thousands of years it will seem but yesterday that they laid them down.

God teaches in his Word, what man should be only too happy to believe, that he does not compel us after death to be witnesses to the living, but that he covers us with his mantle of unconsciousness until all will have lived their little round, and then wakes us all together, that none may have advantage over another in the glory of God's presence. Have you who go to your couch at night with faith that you will awake in the morning, so little belief in the Being who watches over you during those few hours as to distrust his power to hold your consciousness in abeyance and to guard your soul in sleep for twice that short period, or for days, or years, or ages?

It seems easier to believe that death is sleep, that awakening is the resurrection, and that God is merciful, loving, and just, than to believe in the twisted hallucinations of cloistered theologians, who teach that death is an awakening, that resurrection is death, and that God is a Moloch, delighting in the suffering of the helpless. It is well for such as they, and for you, and for me, that immortality is not inherent in us, that it is not a terrible jinnee let loose by Jehovah, over whom he is unable to regain control; for what should we have to fall back on, then, were the ladder of our spiritual endeavor to give way under us?

Immortality and eternal oblivion are both blessings bestowed by the Creator upon his creatures,—immortality to those to whom immortality is due; oblivion to those to whom oblivion is due. Blessed be the name of the Lord.

Baltimore, Md.