The sleep the Bible describes

The word Jesus chose

When Jesus heard that His friend Lazarus had died, He chose His words carefully, and His disciples misunderstood Him in a way that is instructive.

These things He said, and after that He said to them, “Our friend Lazarus sleeps, but I go that I may wake him up.” Then His disciples said, “Lord, if he sleeps he will get well.” However, Jesus spoke of his death, but they thought that He was speaking about taking rest in sleep. Then Jesus said to them plainly, “Lazarus is dead.

Jesus called death sleep. The disciples took Him literally, so He said it plainly: Lazarus is dead. But He did not withdraw the first description; He had chosen it deliberately. Death, for Lazarus, was a sleep from which Jesus intended to wake him. And when He did wake him, four days later, Lazarus had nothing to report. He did not describe heaven. He did not complain about being called back from bliss. He had been asleep.

If Lazarus had spent four days in the conscious presence of God, John 11 would be the cruellest chapter in the Bible, because Jesus would have dragged him back into a world of sickness and death to prove a point. The chapter reads very differently if Lazarus simply slept and woke. Jesus wept at the tomb (John 11:35), not because Lazarus was in a bad place, but because death itself is an enemy and Jesus hated it, even while He was about to overcome it.

Not one verse but dozens

Sleep is not an occasional metaphor. It is the Bible’s standard way of describing death, used more than fifty times across both Testaments and by every kind of writer. A few examples show the pattern.

Of David: “So David rested with his fathers, and was buried in the City of David” (1 Kings 2:10). Paul says the same of him in a sermon: David “fell asleep, was buried with his fathers, and saw corruption” (Acts 13:36). Of the kings of Israel and Judah, one after another, “he rested with his fathers”. Of Job’s hope: man “lies down and does not rise” until “the heavens are no more” (Job 14:12). Of the psalmist’s fear:

Consider and hear me, O Lord my God; Enlighten my eyes, Lest I sleep the sleep of death;

Of the resurrection, in the clearest Old Testament statement of it:

And many of those who sleep in the dust of the earth shall awake, Some to everlasting life, Some to shame and everlasting contempt.

Notice where they sleep: in the dust of the earth. Not in heaven, not in torment, but in the dust, exactly where Genesis 3:19 said they would go. And notice that both the righteous and the wicked are described as sleeping until the same awakening.

When Stephen was stoned, Luke records:

And they stoned Stephen as he was calling on God and saying, “Lord Jesus, receive my spirit.” Then he knelt down and cried out with a loud voice, “Lord, do not charge them with this sin.” And when he had said this, he fell asleep.

Stephen committed his spirit, his breath of life, to Jesus, exactly as Jesus had committed His own to the Father (Luke 23:46). And then he fell asleep. Luke, a physician, chose the word under the inspiration of the Spirit.

When Jesus died, Matthew says “many bodies of the saints who had fallen asleep were raised” (Matthew 27:52). When Jairus’s daughter died, Jesus said “she is not dead, but sleeping”, and those who ridiculed Him “knew that she was dead” (Luke 8:52-53). Jesus was not denying that she had died. He was telling them what death is.

Paul’s word to the grieving

The most pastoral treatment of the subject in the New Testament is Paul’s letter to a church in Thessalonica that had lost members and did not know what to think.

But I do not want you to be ignorant, brethren, concerning those who have fallen asleep, lest you sorrow as others who have no hope. For if we believe that Jesus died and rose again, even so God will bring with Him those who sleep in Jesus.

Three times in this short paragraph Paul calls the dead “those who sleep” or “those who are asleep”. And look at where he locates their hope. He does not say, “Do not grieve, because they are already with the Lord.” He says, “Do not grieve as those who have no hope, because Jesus rose, and so they will rise.” Then he describes exactly when and how:

For the Lord Himself will descend from heaven with a shout, with the voice of an archangel, and with the trumpet of God. And the dead in Christ will rise first. Then we who are alive and remain shall be caught up together with them in the clouds to meet the Lord in the air. And thus we shall always be with the Lord. Therefore comfort one another with these words.

“Comfort one another with these words.” Which words? The words about the resurrection at the Lord’s return. If the Thessalonian dead were already enjoying the presence of Christ, that would have been the obvious comfort to offer, and Paul does not offer it. His comfort is a trumpet, a shout and a resurrection. The sleeping dead “will rise first”, and only then are the living “caught up together with them”, and only then, “thus”, in this way, “we shall always be with the Lord”.

Why “sleep” is the right word

Sleep is an honest picture of death for at least four reasons. Sleep is unconscious: the sleeper does not know the hours are passing. Sleep is temporary: the sleeper will wake. Sleep is restful: the day’s labour is over. And sleep is a state of the whole person: we do not say that a sleeper’s soul has gone somewhere while the body lies in bed. Every one of those features matches what the rest of Scripture says about death, as the next chapter will show.

It is sometimes objected that “sleep” refers only to the body, while the soul is awake. But the Bible never says that. It says Lazarus sleeps, David sleeps, Stephen fell asleep, those who sleep in Jesus. It is the person who sleeps. To insist that only the body sleeps is to add a word Scripture does not use in order to protect an idea Scripture does not teach.