1 Thessalonians 4:13

1 Thessalonians 4:13. we would not have you to be ignorant. ‘A phrase by which St. Paul frequently introduces a new and important topic.' See references.

Them which are asleep. Death is called sleep by Pagan as well as by Christian writers, and it is therefore probable that the euphemism was first suggested by the stillness and repose, and cessation of intercourse with outward things, which characterize both conditions. What we know of sleep is, that it is a state in which there is no consciousness of the objects of sense; and this is a chief characteristic of death. But to the Christian the resemblance is fuller and more significant. No sleep lasts for ever, else it is not sleep; a waking follows every sleep. And so death is called a sleep, to remind us that it is not a final cessation of life, even in the case of the body, but only a transitory state out of which body and soul shall together arise. And secondly, what sleep is to our day's work, death is to our life's work. The frame that is worn by toil or wasted by disease lies back into the arms of death, and all its weariness is over, all its pain forgotten. Under shelter of that insensibility the man is rehabilitated and revived from all that has worn him out.

That ye sorrow not. These words do not merely forbid such sorrowing as the hopeless indulge in, but all sorrowing. They who look for no resurrection sorrow for the dead, but ye are not to do so. To bewail their condition is wholly out of place, though to utter our own grief and bewail our own loss is natural and fit.

No hope. Here and there an individual among the heathen speaks of death as the ‘interruption, not the extinction of life' (Seneca), or is driven by the death of a noble friend to hope for a life beyond (Horace, Odes, i. 24), but at the best that future life is shadowy, colourless, cold, and unattractive (Propertius, El. 1 Thessalonians 4:7). The fact is, that without the knowledge of the resurrection of the body, the hope of immortality and the notions of a future life must be dim, perplexed, and vacillating.