son. At 3:00 one morning this great Bible teacher received a telegram asking him to preach the sermon at the funeral of Dr. A. J. Gordon, an other marvelous man of faith. Unable to sleep, Dr. Pierson spent the rest of the night searching his Greek Testament for what it might say about the subject of death. He made an important discovery. To the great crowd who gathered for the occasion, Dr. Pierson said to his own surprise he learned that after the resurrec tion of Christ the apostles never used the word “death” to express the close of the Christian’s earthly life. They always referred to it as the passing of the Christian to be at home with the Lord, or to depart and be with Christ. It was a loosing of the moorings to forever be with the Lord. This is a wonderful thing to contemplate and in which to revel. It will be a glorious day, and oh, how we look forward to its coming! THE CHRISTIAN’S RUGGED GOING It's the rough and rugged going That makes heroes brave and strong, Not the soft and easy sailing When men compromise with wrong, That will count when life is ended In the final great reward, And we hear the blessed greeting: “Enter heaven with thy Lord.” If you only seek for comfort For your body and your soul, While the masses stray from Jesus And the way to Heaven's goal, Letting Satan take them downward And you offer no protest, Don’t deceive yourself in thinking God will crown you with the blest. There are battles for each Christian As he goes the way of life; And he must fight against the forces That are filled with sin and strife, If he longs for heaven’s glory Where the saints and sages dwell, And to hear the blessed plaudit: "You have fought your battles well."
the body can come out of the grave. The Bible doesn’t teach anything about soul-sleeping whatsoever. The word resurrection signifies that the body is going to be restored to the highest possible degree of perfection in that day of its glorification. Sin wrought havoc with the body, but it will be refashioned after a new pattern (Rom. 8:28, 39). Paul here is talking about the body. God did not allow the devil to get possession of the body of Moses though Satan contended with all of his might for it (Jude 9). If the Lord didn’t allow the body of Moses to fall into the hands of the devil, neither will He allow the devil or any other power, to keep the body of the Christian from being resurrected, glorified and reunited with its soul and spirit at the coming of Jesus Christ. By the atoning work of Jesus Christ on the cross, the sentence is no longer death for the believer’s body, but simply sleep. In reading the New Testament carefully, note the number of times that the word sleep is used to describe death. “She is not dead but sleepeth.” “Our friend Lazarus sleepeth.” “S tep h en fell asleep.” “We as believers shall not all sleep.” “Them also which sleep in Jesus.” Hence, the early Christians called the burial grounds by the word cemetery because it means sleeping places. This was the place to deposit the body. When one goes to Rome, he visits the catacombs. Christians buried their dead under the ground in these long caves that extended block after block. This expression sleep with reference to the body of the believer who goes into physical death is sweetly significant for sleep is transitory. It implies a reawaken ing. It is only temporary from which there is presently a rising up again, just as we get out of bed in the morning. The body is said to go into sleep. It was Dr. Barnhouse who gave us an illustration about Dr. A. T. Pier- 8
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