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The last argument which our apostle offers to consideration, for enforcing the duty of reproving the unfruitful workers and works of darkness, is drawn from the example of God himself, whose great design it is, by his holy word, to awaken men out of the deep sleep of sin and death, that Christ may give them light.
Here note, The dangerous and deplorable, though not hopeless and desperate state, of an unconverted and impenitent sinner, namely, spiritual sleep and death. Every man by nature is in a dead sleep till the renovating change; he apprehends things as a man asleep; all his thoughts of God and Christ, of heaven and hell, of sin and holiness, are slight and hovering notions, not real and thorough apprehensions; the most substantial realities are with them but phantasms and imaginations.
Imaginary dangers startle them, like men in a dream; but real dangers, though never so near, do not affect them. As in natural sleep, all the senses of the body, so in spiritual sleep, are all the senses of the soul bound up; and accordingly, this sleep is not casual, but connatural to our present sinful state; a soul drenched in sensuality sleeps, as it were, by choice and not by chance.
But how, O sinner, canst thou sleep under such a load of sin and guilt, with so many wounds in thy conscience, with so many ulcers in thy soul? Can a diseased man sleep? Can a condemned man sleep? Can a man in debt sleep?
All this the sinner is: and yet though God thunders above, and hell gapes from beneath, and the sinner hangs over it by the fretted thread of this life, yet he is in a profound sleep; but his damnation slumbers not, if he doth not speedily awake, and arise from the dead, that Christ may give him light.