The Saints’ Everlasting Rest

There remaineth therefore a rest to the people of God. HEBREWS 4:9

In 1647 Baxter was thirty-one years old and dying, or so everyone including himself believed. He had collapsed after two years as an army chaplain, was taken in by friends at a country house a long way from his library, and lay for months with almost no books to consult. He decided to spend what he assumed were his last months thinking about where he was going, and to write down what he thought. The result was The Saints’ Everlasting Rest, and it made him famous across England. He recovered, and lived another forty-four years. The book he wrote for his own deathbed was read at thousands of other people’s.

What rest means

Baxter began by defining the word, because it is easily sentimentalised. Rest is not idleness. The heavenly rest, as he expounded it, has two sides: a ceasing from what has wearied us, and an entering into the enjoyment of what we were made for. It is the end of labour and the beginning of possession.

Blessed are the dead which die in the Lord …that they may rest from their labours; and their works do follow them. REVELATION 14:13

The negative side is easy to state, and Baxter, in constant pain, stated it with feeling. There will be an end of sin — not merely of its guilt, which is already dealt with, but of its presence in us. An end of sorrow, of illness, of temptation, of persecution, of the fear of death, and of the sight of God’s church divided and harassed.

And God shall wipe away all tears from their eyes; and there shall be no more death, neither sorrow, nor crying, neither shall there be any more pain. REVELATION 21:4

The positive side

But Baxter was impatient with a heaven described chiefly by what will be absent. The substance of the rest, he insisted, is God Himself. He set it out under three heads, corresponding to the three great faculties of the soul.

There will be perfect knowledge. Every believer who has ever struggled with the obscurity of Scripture, the silence of providence, or the reasons for his own suffering will have the answer — not as an argument, but by sight.

For now we see through a glass, darkly; but then face to face: now I know in part; but then shall I know even as also I am known. 1 CORINTHIANS 13:12

There will be perfect love. Baxter thought this the heart of it. The faculty we have used most poorly, spending it on things that could not repay it, will at last have an object worthy of the whole of it, and nothing in us will hold back. And there will be perfect joy, which follows from the other two, since joy is what happens when a soul knows and loves what deserves it.

Thou wilt shew me the path of life: in thy presence is fulness of joy; at thy right hand there are pleasures for evermore. PSALM 16:11

Rest with a Person

The organising idea is that heaven is not a place we enjoy but a Person we see.

Beloved, now are we the sons of God, and it doth not yet appear what we shall be: but we know that, when he shall appear, we shall be like him; for we shall see him as he is. 1 JOHN 3:2

Baxter drew out the sequence in that verse. Seeing produces likeness. The transformation we have been labouring at all our lives, with such partial success, will be accomplished instantly and completely by the sight of Christ. This is why he regarded a self-centred picture of heaven — reunion with the family, relief from trouble, the crown and the harp — as true but drastically inadequate. Those things are real. They are not the point. A believer whose hope of heaven could be satisfied by comfort and company has not yet understood what he is hoping for.

Why he wrote it

One more thing, and it explains the book’s tone. Baxter did not write The Saints’ Everlasting Rest as a work of speculative theology, and it contains very little curiosity about the mechanics of the next world. He wrote it as a practical remedy for a specific disease, which he considered nearly universal among Christians: that we believe in heaven and never think about it. The consequence, he argued, is a religion of dutiful misery. A believer who never contemplates his destination finds obedience burdensome, suffering intolerable, and death terrifying — not because his doctrine is wrong but because he has left the best part of it unused. The remedy is the subject of the next chapter.

There is a question worth carrying out of this one, and it is a fair test of whether the doctrine has become real. If heaven consisted of everything you currently associate with it — the absence of pain, the reunion, the rest — but God Himself were somehow not there, would you still want to go?

A rest we enter together

There is a dimension of the heavenly rest that Baxter felt more keenly than most writers on the subject, and it grew directly out of his circumstances. He spent his life watching the church of England tear itself apart. He was ejected by one side and distrusted by the other. He worked for forty years on schemes of reconciliation that came to nothing. Every party he tried to unite concluded that he belonged to the opposition. So when he wrote about heaven, the ending of division was not a minor item on the list. It was near the centre.

But ye are come unto mount Sion, and unto the city of the living God, the heavenly Jerusalem, and to an innumerable company of angels, to the general assembly and church of the firstborn. HEBREWS 12:22–23

The general assembly. One gathering, undivided, containing all of them — the parties that would not sit at the same table, the men who wrote against each other, the traditions that anathematised one another. Baxter found this an extraordinary comfort, and also a rebuke. The rebuke is the useful part. If we shall spend eternity in the unbroken company of Christians we currently cannot be in a room with, then our present divisions are temporary in a way our theology admits and our behaviour denies.

That they all may be one; as thou, Father, art in me, and I in thee, that they also may be one in us. JOHN 17:21

Baxter’s practical suggestion was to think about heaven whenever a church quarrel becomes bitter, and to ask how the matter will look from there. He found it shortened a good many disputes, though not, he admitted, all of his own.

FOR REFLECTION AND ACTION

1. Write down what you actually picture when you think of heaven. Notice how much of it is about you. 2. Take 1 John 3:2 and dwell on the sequence: seeing produces likeness. That is the mechanism of the change you have been labouring at. 3. Name the thing in your life that most needs the answer only heaven will give. Bring it to God as something to be waited for rather than solved. 4. Ask whether your religion has become dutiful. If so, consider whether you have left your destination unused. 5. Answer the question above honestly. If God were not there, would you still want it?

A PRAYER

Father, I believe in heaven and I almost never think about it, and my religion has grown heavy in consequence.

Forgive me for a hope so small that it could be satisfied by comfort and company. You are the rest. Not the absence of my troubles — Yourself.

Teach me what I am waiting for. Let the thought of seeing You do in me what my own labour has never managed.

And when the pain and the confusion and the divisions of Your church weigh on me, remind me that there remains a rest for Your people, and that I am on my way to it. Amen.