1 Kings 2:10-12

So David slept with his fathers

Views of life and death

The view which is presented in the Scripture of the death of saints is the exact opposite of that which is popular to-day.

You nearly, without exception, find death painted as a reaper coming with his sickle. That is merely a human idea. What is God’s idea in the Word? Death is not the reaper; death is the sower. That is a very different thing. It is not death that comes and gathers in the harvest: it is death that sows the seed. The agriculturist goes out with his basket of bare grain, and that is cast into the earth and it is covered up and lost to sight; but it germinates because it dies. It dies to live under the soil, and by and by there comes the rich golden harvest. Death will lose half of its gloom if you view death, not as the reaper, but as the sower. It is because we limit our idea of life to the brief period we spend in this world, that we make death the terminator of life. It is not so, but the true beginning of life. Death may take the beautiful form of your loved one, and cast it in the ground; but it is all that death can do: Death sows the seed, but God reaps the harvest in the dawn of His coming. (R. Venting.)