Psalm 139:18, ‘I awake, and I am still with you.’
In context, this verse speaks of the Lord’s faithfulness to preserve His people through the night and waken them to His presence in the morning. However, bearing in mind the double meaning Scripture assigns to the concept of ‘sleep’—i.e., both the sleep of physical rest, and the sleep of death—we can see something truly beautiful in these words.
When the crucified Jesus wakes from death on the third day, He transforms death into sleep for all those united to Him—those whose deaths are embraced in His death and whose resurrections are achieved in His resurrection. Just as surely as He woke on Easter morning to the True Waking of everlasting, embodied life, so too He will wake all those in Him.
And—as this text emphasizes—*when* we wake on the True and Final Morning, we will realize with a shock of mingled newness and familiarity that the glorious one before our waking eyes, the one who is all our joy and hope, IS HIMSELF the one who was always with us throughout our sojourn in the shadow lands…The veil will be torn from our eyes, and we will see the Shepherd whose everlasting arms carried us through the Valley, and will rejoice that here—In the dawning of the Day—we are still with the one who was our song in the Night.
