Dying Thoughts

For I am in a strait betwixt two, having a desire to depart, and to be with Christ; which is far better. PHILIPPIANS 1:23

In 1683, at sixty-seven, widowed and infirm, Baxter published a book of meditations on Paul’s words about departing to be with Christ. He called it Dying Thoughts, and he wrote it, as he had written The Saints’ Everlasting Rest thirty-six years earlier, for himself. The two books frame his life. He wrote the first at thirty-one expecting to die within months, and the second at sixty-seven, still expecting it, and by then with rather better grounds.

Preparing before it arrives

His central practical argument is that dying well is a matter of preparation, and that preparation cannot begin when the event does. A man who has spent fifty years avoiding the subject will not acquire, in his last fortnight, a settled mind about it. The habits of thought that carry a person through will have been formed decades before, in health, when nothing was pressing.

So teach us to number our days, that we may apply our hearts unto wisdom. PSALM 90:12

Baxter recommended the deliberate contemplation of one’s own death, at intervals, as a Christian discipline — not morbidly, and not as a way of frightening oneself, but as the only realistic way of getting one’s affairs, priorities and affections into proportion.

It is better to go to the house of mourning, than to go to the house of feasting: for that is the end of all men; and the living will lay it to his heart. ECCLESIASTES 7:2

Why it is far better

Paul’s phrase carried the weight of the book, and Baxter took it apart. Far better — not merely tolerable, not merely a release. Better than the best of what we have here, including the things we most love. He set out why, and it is a summary of everything in this book. Because sin will end. Because the struggle will end. Because we shall see Christ, whom we have loved without seeing. Because we shall understand what we have spent our lives failing to understand. Because the church will be gathered and undivided — a point Baxter felt with unusual sharpness, having spent forty years watching it tear itself apart.

For we know that if our earthly house of this tabernacle were dissolved, we have a building of God, an house not made with hands, eternal in the heavens. 2 CORINTHIANS 5:1

Fear, honestly treated

Baxter did not pretend that believers face death without fear, and he was notably gentle here. He distinguished the natural shrinking of the body from the fear of God’s wrath. The first is instinctive and is no more sinful than flinching from fire; the Lord Himself sweated in a garden. The second is dealt with, and if a believer is still labouring under it, the remedy is not more resolve but a clearer sight of what Christ has done.

O death, where is thy sting? …The sting of death is sin; and the strength of sin is the law. But thanks be to God, which giveth us the victory through our Lord Jesus Christ. 1 CORINTHIANS 15:55–57

He added counsel for those attending the dying: not to press them with examination at the end, not to demand expressions of assurance from people too weak to produce them, and to speak the promises rather than ask questions. A person’s safety at that hour does not rest on the state of their feelings, and it is cruel to make them think it does.

How it ended

Baxter died on the eighth of December, 1691, at seventy-six, in London. He had been in pain most of his life and considerable pain at the end. He had outlived his wife by ten years, the parish he loved by nearly thirty, and most of the causes he had fought for. He had seen the Toleration Act pass two years earlier, which was the nearest thing to a victory he ever had. Those with him reported that when asked how he was, he answered that he was almost well. It is a small joke and a whole theology. He had spent fifty years telling people that this life is the sickness and the next is the recovery, and at the end he was still saying it, from the bed, to whoever asked.

I have fought a good fight, I have finished my course, I have kept the faith: henceforth there is laid up for me a crown of righteousness. 2 TIMOTHY 4:7–8

He is one of the few writers who can be trusted entirely on this subject, because he never wrote a line about heaven that he was not shortly expecting to test.

And I heard a voice from heaven saying unto me, Write, Blessed are the dead which die in the Lord. REVELATION 14:13

There remains a rest for the people of God, and Richard Baxter went into it, having written about it for forty-four years longer than he thought he would.

Those who have gone before

There is a dimension of the Christian’s hope that Baxter felt with particular force after 1681, when Margaret died and he was left alone for the last decade of his life. The New Testament describes the church as one body which death does not divide. The believers who have died are not gone; they are elsewhere, and we are told where.

Wherefore seeing we also are compassed about with so great a cloud of witnesses, let us lay aside every weight …and let us run with patience the race that is set before us. HEBREWS 12:1

To the general assembly and church of the firstborn, which are written in heaven, and to God the Judge of all, and to the spirits of just men made perfect. HEBREWS 12:23

Baxter took considerable comfort from the thought that the company he was going to already contained people he knew — his wife, his friends, the parishioners he had buried at Kidderminster, and the writers whose books had converted and formed him and whom he had never met. He was careful about the limits. Scripture does not encourage us to address the dead or to imagine we can communicate with them, and he had no patience with speculation of that kind. What it does teach is that they are alive, that they are with Christ, and that the separation is temporary.

For if we believe that Jesus died and rose again, even so them also which sleep in Jesus will God bring with him …Wherefore comfort one another with these words. 1 THESSALONIANS 4:14, 18

For the bereaved reader, that is the entire point of the doctrine, and Paul says so in as many words. It is given to be used.

FOR REFLECTION AND ACTION

1. Think deliberately about your own death this week — not morbidly, but long enough to see what it does to your priorities.

2. Put your affairs in order: the will, the debts, the letter you have been meaning to write, the reconciliation you have postponed. 3. Distinguish natural fear from the fear of wrath. The first is human; the second has been dealt with. 4. If you sit with the dying, speak the promises rather than asking questions. Do not require assurance from those too weak to produce it. 5. Ask what you would want to be doing at the end, and do more of it now.

A PRAYER

Lord, I have arranged my life as though it would not end, and I will not have the sense to prepare at the last minute if I have not begun now.

Teach me to number my days. Let the thought of standing before You sort out what matters from what does not, while there is still time to act on it.

Take away the sting. Whatever natural fear remains, let me not fear Your wrath, for Your Son has borne it.

And when the hour comes, let me be found where Your servant was — almost well, and nearly home. Amen.