A Believer's Last Day, His Best (continued)
Death is another Moses: it delivers believers out of bondage, and from making bricks in Egypt. It is a day or year of jubilee to a gracious spirit—the year wherein he goes out free from all those cruel taskmasters which it had long groaned under. The heathen gods held death to be man's summum bonum, his chief good; therefore, when one of them had built and dedicated the temple at Delphos, he asked of Apollo for his recompense the thing that was best for man: the oracle told him that he should go home, and within three days he should have it—within which time he died. Thus the very heathens themselves have consented to this truth, that a man's dying-day is his best day.
6. Death is a change, which brings the soul to an eternal REST.
Death is the bringing of the soul to bed—to a state of eternal rest.
[Death is a rest from the trouble of our labors, a rest from afflictions, a rest from persecutions, a rest from temptation, a rest from desertion, a rest from sin, and a rest from sorrow, Gen. 8:8.] That is the last demonstration of the point, that a believer's dying-day is his best day. Now while we are here in this present world, the soul is in a perpetual agitation. The godliest man in the world—who is highest and clearest in his enjoyments of God—is too often like to Noah's dove, which found no rest: either he lacks some temporal mercy or spiritual mercy—and will do so until his soul is swallowed up in the everlasting enjoyments of God! Death brings a man to an unchangeable rest!
Rev. 14:13, "Write: Blessed are the dead who die in the Lord from now on." Why? "They will rest from their labor." Oh, says he, write it down as a thing of worth and weight, "Blessed are the dead who die in the Lord from now on. They will rest from their labor." Death brings the soul to unchangeable rest.
"The righteous perish, and no one ponders it in his heart; devout men are taken away, and no one understands that the righteous are taken away to be spared from evil. Those who walk uprightly enter into peace; they find rest as they lie in death." Isaiah 57:1-2
Oh, death is a change which brings a soul to unchangeable rest; it brings a soul to bed. This was that that made Paul long "to be dissolved, and to be with Christ;" and the Corinthians to groan for deliverance. [Laurence Saunders kissing the stake, said, Welcome the cross of Christ, welcome everlasting life. Faninus, the Italian martyr, kissed him who brought him word of his execution. It was a notable saying of blessed Cooper, "Many a day have I sought death with tears; not out of impatience or distrust," says he, "but because I am weary of sin, and fearful to fall into it." You know how the martyrs hugged the stake, and welcomed every messenger of death which came to them, and clapped their hands in the midst of the flames.
Death is a believer's coronation-day, it is his marriage-day. It is a rest from sin, a rest from sorrow, a rest from afflictions and temptations, etc. Death to a believer is an entrance into Abraham's