Blessed Are the Dead

Somebody will read this verse over a coffin this year, and half the room will quietly wonder whether it is really about the person lying there. At a graveside it can sound like a blanket spread over everybody. Yet in Revelation a voice from heaven says it about a particular group of people, people who are about to be killed for holding on to their faith.

Look four verses up. The warning there is for anyone who will "worship the beast and his image, and receive his mark in his forehead, or in his hand." For them there is "the smoke of their torment," and "they have no rest day nor night." Then verse twelve names the other group: "Here is the patience of the saints: here are they that keep the commandments of God, and the faith of Jesus." Only after that does the voice from heaven speak, and what it promises those saints is "that they may rest from their labours." So two verses apart you find people with "no rest day nor night" and people given "rest from their labours," and what stands between them is a refusal to worship the beast.

That is why the blessing is narrower than it sounds at a funeral. The verse names one kind of death, the dead "which die in the Lord," and that phrase is what decides who is meant. Their works do not buy the blessing either. "Their works do follow them," which means the works walk along behind them. The words "from henceforth" are harder, and readers have argued for centuries over whether they belong with the dying or with the blessing.

What the verse gives is rest, and it gives it to people whose whole trouble was that they had none. Straight after it comes the harvest. John sees one sitting on a white cloud, "like unto the Son of man," with "a golden crown" on His head and "in his hand a sharp sickle," "and the earth was reaped." The blessing sits in a narrow space between the mark of the beast and that sickle.

So think of this verse as a medal given out on a battlefield more than a painkiller handed round at every funeral. Read that way, it holds every person who died holding on to Christ, and it holds them completely. Spread over everybody, it stops meaning anything, even at the funeral where you need it most. That is the warning, and the hope is inside it. Whether a person dies "in the Lord" is settled while they are still living, so you still have a say in it today. The Lord on the cloud is the same Lord who calls you to Himself now, and for everyone who belongs to Him, rest is waiting when their labours end.

Daily Manna runs on a two-year cycle. The year one reading for day 226 is Inherit the Earth (Psalm 37:9).

All 365 readings in Daily Manna, Year Two