Sleep and temporal death

Meaning

The passage distinguishes spiritual dying to sin from bodily death before calling temporal death a natural dissolution of body and soul and, for the godly, a gentle sleep. The “wages of sin” remain acknowledged; the consoling image does not deny that bodies die. Its final explanation concerns the continuing union of God’s Spirit and the soul. English “understand this of the godly” retains the source’s explicit scope restriction. The sleep image therefore must not be generalised into an assertion that every death is only an appearance, nor confused with the earlier spiritual separation while the believer’s body is still living on earth.