What Does the Bible Say About Death? — Spurgeon on Dying Well
⏱ 15 min read
You did not search this question lightly. Nobody types these words into a search bar unless something in the actual life has made the question necessary — a funeral last month, a diagnosis last week, a phone call at the wrong hour, a slow loss that has been arriving in instalments for years. The question is older than your asking of it. But your asking of it now, today, in the quiet between things, has its own particular weight, and the answer the internet usually returns — the bullet-pointed verse list, the brisk summary of what scripture teaches — does not yet meet the weight you are carrying.
This is the slow version. Not the bullet-pointed verse list, useful as those sometimes are. The slow version reads three passages from Charles Spurgeon — a man who buried more grief than he ever publicly admitted, and who spent thirty-eight years preaching in London to a congregation that included widows, dying men, mothers who had lost children, soldiers carrying memories they could not name — and who, in Morning and Evening and in his other devotional writings, wrote about death with the quiet precision of someone who had sat at many bedsides and knew what kind of vocabulary would actually carry the dying and the grieving through. The Stilling Waves Christian Healing Journal carries this kind of slow reading into a daily companion for the soul in grief, if you would like a place to take the practice afterwards. For now — read slowly. There is no rush. Spurgeon wrote his evening pages to be read at the speed of an evening, and an evening is not in a hurry.
What scripture says about death, gathered into one sentence, is this: for the Christian, death is not the end of the relationship; it is the lifting of the curtain that was muting it. The verses run as a quiet chorus through the New Testament — to live is Christ, and to die is gain, absent from the body, and to be present with the Lord, neither death nor life shall separate us from the love of God which is in Christ Jesus our Lord, the gift of God is eternal life through Jesus Christ our Lord. The doctrine is not difficult. The difficulty is letting the doctrine become load-bearing — letting it carry the actual weight of the actual loss in the actual evenings — and that is the work the slow reading does. (If the loss is recent and the calendar has not yet caught up to it, the companion Christian journal prompts for women — healing after a hard year was written for exactly this season. The quieter a devotional for the woman healing after loss walks the same ground in evening pages. The slow what is evening devotion — and why it’s the quiet-time sweet spot gives the shape of the page you might be sitting at while reading. And if the only prayer you have left is please — prayer for healing — seven honest prayers with Bible verses holds that one for you.)
Spurgeon was twenty-two when he wrote his first published sermon and fifty-seven when he died. Between those years, he buried his mother, his father, his close friend Susanna, two infant grandchildren, and many of the congregants he had baptized as young men. He suffered from gout, kidney disease, and a long depression that surfaced in cycles. He preached on death almost weekly, not because he was morbid, but because his congregation included so many for whom the question was practical. The slow attention he gives the doctrine is the attention of a pastor who has buried his own. You can feel the burying in the prose.
The first passage — the delightful sense of perfect peace
Spurgeon recorded, in one of his evening meditations, an experience he had had himself — a small unscripted half-hour in which the doctrine of death became, briefly, an inside felt thing rather than only a preached outside thing.
“I was sitting, the other night, meditating on God’s mercy and love, when suddenly I found in my own heart a most delightful sense of perfect peace.”
— Charles Spurgeon
Read it once. Then read it again, slowly.
Notice the verbs. Sitting. Meditating. Found. The peace is not produced. It is found — discovered, as a small unexpected gift in the middle of an evening that was not promising anything in particular. Spurgeon does not say he prayed it down. He does not say he wrestled it out. He sat. He meditated on the mercy and the love. The peace arrived. The arrival was delightful and perfect, two adjectives Spurgeon never used carelessly.
The relevance of this small evening to the question of what the Bible says about death is not immediately obvious. Let it become obvious, slowly. The peace that Spurgeon found that evening — the delightful sense of perfect peace — is the same peace scripture promises the Christian at the moment of death. The peace that passeth all understanding. The peace Christ left with His disciples — peace I leave with you, my peace I give unto you; not as the world giveth, give I unto you. The peace that, in 2 Corinthians, is the inheritance of those who are absent from the body and present with the Lord. Spurgeon, in his living room, had been given a small foretaste of it. The foretaste was real. The foretaste was small. The full thing — the peace that arrives at the moment of dying for the Christian — is the foretaste made the steady weather.
This is what the Bible says about death, in its quietest register: that the peace the dying Christian receives is not a strange peace. It is the peace they have already been touched by, in small portions, across the years of their walking. The Most delightful sense of perfect peace that Spurgeon found in his chair one evening is the same peace that, on his deathbed thirty years later, became the medium in which he died. The dying did not introduce the peace. The dying removed the things that had been damping the peace. The peace was there the whole time. The peace was Christ. The dying simply let Christ become unmuffled.
For the woman reading this who has been wondering whether her loved one felt anything at the end — Spurgeon is gentle. The peace at the end is the peace that has been small-y arriving across a Christian life. The deathbed receives what the evenings rehearsed. If they were His, the peace was not strange. The peace was the same peace they had touched, half-knowingly, in the slow Sunday mornings, in the verses they had memorized as children, in the quiet moments in the kitchen when nothing in particular was happening but something inside them sat still for a moment. The peace had been there. The dying let it arrive without the muffling.
(If the body has been carrying the grief in places it has no language for — the throat, the chest, the upper back — the slow companion a journal for healing women — 30 pages that hold the hardest things is built for exactly that weight.)
The somatic — for the body that has been carrying the question
Pause here. The teaching has a body to it, and Spurgeon, who suffered from depression and chronic pain for the last twenty years of his ministry, would not have separated the doctrine of death from the body that is asking the question.
Sit somewhere quiet. Not the bed. A chair. Both feet flat on the floor. Place one hand, lightly, on the place at the base of the throat where the collarbones meet — the soft hollow there. That is the place the question of death most often sits in the body, especially for women carrying grief. The throat there has been small and tight for some weeks. The breath has been working around it.
Take one slow inhale. Not deep. Slow. Let the breath travel up behind the hand, until the soft hollow at the base of the throat receives a small portion of air it has not been receiving. On the exhale, let the breath go all the way out, slower than the inhale. As you exhale, let your jaw soften — not by trying to relax it, but by stopping the small ongoing effort to hold it set.
One more slow inhale. One more longer exhale. Then take the hand away.
The body did not need to do anything. It needed the acknowledgement that the throat has been holding the question. Spurgeon wrote about the heart in right tune — about the body and the soul being attuned together to the small music of God’s presence. The slow exhale is one small note in that tuning. The longer exhale is, at the most basic physiological level, a small piece of the body learning to receive the delightful sense of perfect peace that the dying Christian receives in full. The body knows how. It has forgotten because nothing has asked it to remember.
The second passage — the cool twilight
Spurgeon, in Morning and Evening, wrote one of the most quietly beautiful prayers in English devotional literature, in which the doctrine of dying becomes a small evening picture. The picture is so gentle that it is easy to miss what it is doing.
“Speak, Lord, for thy servant heareth. O that he would walk with me; I am ready to give up my whole heart and mind to him, and every other thought is hushed. I am only asking what he delights to give. I am sure that he will condescend to have fellowship with me, for he has given me his Holy Spirit to abide with me forever. Sweet is the cool twilight, when every star seems like the eye of heaven, and the cool wind is as the breath of celestial love.”
— Charles Spurgeon, Morning and Evening
Read it twice. Slowly.
Notice the small evening landscape. The cool twilight. The stars as the eyes of heaven. The cool wind as the breath of celestial love. Spurgeon is doing what Baxter called producing the excellencies — going to memory and faith and bringing the goods of the country into view of the affection. But Spurgeon is doing it through the body’s daily experience. The twilight he is standing in is a real twilight. The wind he is feeling is a real wind. The stars overhead are real stars. The seeing of celestial love in the cool wind is not metaphor. It is the noticing of a world whose furnishings are God’s hand, and the noticing is the rehearsal for the country the dying Christian is heading toward.
The line worth keeping near the page is the last clause. The cool wind is as the breath of celestial love. For the modern woman whose body has been bracing for months — for the woman who has not felt the wind as anything but weather for some time — Spurgeon’s sentence is a quiet correction. The wind that touched your face this morning was not random air movement. It was the breath of celestial love. The same Father who breathes the wind across your face this morning is the Father whose breath will, on the day of your dying, carry you home. The breath is not different breath. The wind on your face today is rehearsing the wind that will, when it arrives, be the medium in which the dying becomes the going home.
This is what scripture says about death, in another register. Into thy hand I commit my spirit. The spirit there is the older word for breath. The dying Christian commits the breath — the small living air inside the body — into the Father’s hand, and the Father, who has been breathing the wind across the world the whole time, receives it. The dying is the giving of the small breath inside back to the great breath outside. The breath was His all along. The dying is its homecoming.
For the woman reading this who lost someone whose last breaths were hard — whose dying was not a peaceful Hollywood scene but a long laboured exhale in a hospital room — Spurgeon is gentle. The breath of celestial love received the small laboured breath at its end. The labour did not interrupt the homecoming. The labour was the body, doing the last hard work of giving the breath back. The breath, given back, was received. The Father’s hand was already there, waiting for it, the way the Father’s hand had been holding the breath through every other breath the loved one ever took. The dying was, in Spurgeon’s vocabulary, the small breath finally arriving at the great breath. The labour belonged to the body. The receiving belonged to the Father. The receiving was not interrupted.
The Stilling Waves Christian Healing Journal is built around this kind of slow noticing — of the wind, of the twilight, of the small evidences of the Father’s hand in the day that is otherwise heavy. One short passage each evening, a verse held next to the loss, room for the honest sentence about the day. The journal is not the cure for the grief — Christ is — but the daily small noticing is the rehearsal of the country the dying entered. You are not making the country up. You are noticing what He has been doing in the wind on your face this morning, and the noticing is, slowly, the part of you that begins to recognise the country your loved one has gone to.
The third passage — the heart in right tune
Spurgeon, late in one of his published meditations, said something practical and exact about how the Christian prepares to die well. The sentence is not heavy. It is light, the way a tuning fork is light.
“Come, then, my Lord, and give me Thy love with Thy grace. Take good heed, Christian, that thine own heart is in right tune, that when the fingers of mercy touch the strings, they may resound with full notes of communion.”
— Charles Spurgeon
Read it once at speed. Then read it again, slowly.
The image is musical. The heart is a stringed instrument. The Christian’s small daily work is to keep the strings in tune. Not in performance. Not in concert form. Just in tune — the patient daily adjustment that lets the instrument be ready when the player’s hand arrives.
The arriving hand, in Spurgeon’s image, is the fingers of mercy. The fingers come at small moments across the Christian life — at the verse that lands in the kitchen, at the kind word from a stranger, at the slow Sunday morning, at the unexpected lifting in the chest during a hymn — and the heart that has been kept in right tune by the slow daily small adjustments resounds with full notes of communion. The heart that has not been tuned does not lose communion entirely; the strings simply make a smaller and duller sound when the fingers touch them. The tuning is the daily work. The playing is His.
At the moment of death, in Spurgeon’s account, the fingers of mercy touch the strings with the deepest touch they will ever give. The heart that has been kept in right tune across a lifetime of small daily adjustments resounds. The death is not the breaking of the instrument. The death is the fullest playing of it, in the room that has the best acoustics — the room of the country to which the dying Christian is going. The tuning was the years. The playing is the homecoming.
This is what the Bible says about death, in its most pastoral register. The dying Christian is the instrument coming home to the room it was built for. The small daily tunings — the verse read on the bus, the prayer at the kitchen sink, the slow Sunday morning, the honest evening sentence — are what kept the strings ready. The playing, when it arrives, is His. The strings did not have to manage the playing. The strings had to be kept in tune. The tuning is small. The tuning is daily. The tuning is what the journal is for.
(The sibling articles in this Father-Analysis cluster sit at what is heaven like — Edwards on the world of love and what happens when you die as a Christian — Baxter on the saints’ rest. The three walks belong together. Read in order, they are the slow companion the cluster was built to be.)
What the slow reading will do over a year
If you sit with Spurgeon’s three passages — one a month, for three months — and then the question what does the Bible say about death as a whole for the remainder of the year, what happens is not dramatic. The grief does not stop. The fear does not lift entirely. What happens is that the centre of gravity of the question moves.
The question, slowly, stops being a question you ask in panic at three in the morning and becomes a vocabulary you have. The delightful sense of perfect peace. The cool wind as the breath of celestial love. The heart kept in right tune. The phrases become small lit rooms in the mind that you can step into when the question surfaces. The rooms are furnished. There is a chair in each one. The chairs were put there by Spurgeon, a hundred and forty years ago, for the soul that would one day need to sit down inside the question and find it already half-answered before the question finished asking itself.
The slow reading does not erase the missing of the one you have lost. The missing is its own sacrament. What the slow reading does is companion the missing. The grief and the doctrine can live in the same chest. Both are true. Spurgeon held them together in his own life and in his pulpit for thirty-eight years, and the holding has not yet stopped working. The slow walk of the next year is the slow learning of how to carry both, and the carrying is — Spurgeon would say — the keeping of the heart in right tune for the day the fingers of mercy come, and for every small touch of those fingers in the days before that one.
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A daily home for the slow reading
The slow practice we just walked has its 140-day form in Christian Healing Journal. Each evening, a short passage and a verse — a small daily place to keep the heart in right tune, for the soul holding loss or carrying the question of the end of the road.
The Stilling Waves Christian Healing Journal carries Spurgeon’s slow vocabulary — the perfect peace, the cool wind as the breath of celestial love, the heart in right tune — into a daily companion for the woman walking the question of what scripture says about death, without rushing and without pretending the question is smaller than it is.
