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

Rest with a Person

But Baxter was impatient with a heaven described chiefly by what will be absent. The substance of the rest, he insisted, is God Himself, known and loved and enjoyed. There will be perfect knowledge: every believer who has 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. There will be perfect love, which Baxter thought 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 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

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 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.

A rest we enter together

There is a dimension of the rest that Baxter felt more keenly than most, and it grew out of his circumstances. He spent his life watching the church of England tear itself apart, and every party he tried to unite concluded that he belonged to the opposition. So when he wrote about heaven, the ending of division 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 the parties that would not sit at the same table and the men who wrote against each other. Baxter found this a comfort and also a rebuke. 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. His 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.

The disease the book was written to cure

Baxter did not write the book as speculative theology, and it contains very little curiosity about the mechanics of the next world. He wrote it as a remedy for a disease 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.

So the last part of the book, the part he cared about most and the reason it was so widely used, turns from describing heaven to a practical question: how does a Christian actually think about it? His answer is a discipline he called heavenly contemplation, set out with the thoroughness of a man giving directions to a stranger in an unfamiliar town.

If ye then be risen with Christ, seek those things which are above …Set your affection on things above, not on things on the earth. COLOSSIANS 3:1–2

Why it must be deliberate

His starting observation is that this does not happen by itself. Believers assume that if they hold the doctrine, its comfort will be available when required — at a graveside, or in a crisis. Baxter’s experience was the reverse. The mind does not go to heaven of its own accord; it goes to whatever it has been trained on, which is generally money, work, grievances and the immediate future. A truth we have never dwelt on will not be there when we reach for it.

While we look not at the things which are seen, but at the things which are not seen: for the things which are seen are temporal; but the things which are not seen are eternal. 2 CORINTHIANS 4:18

Look is an active verb. The unseen does not force itself on our attention; it must be looked at.

Baxter was almost comically practical about the arrangements. Fix a time — daily if possible, at least weekly — because occasional intentions evaporate; Sunday afternoons and evenings he thought particularly suitable. Choose a quiet place; he himself liked to walk in the fields towards evening. Come with the heart free, not fresh from a quarrel or heavy with business. And take a text or a scene rather than trying to think about heaven in general: a specific promise, a specific description in Revelation, a specific attribute of God. Vagueness defeats meditation.

Consideration, and then the affections

The exercise itself has two stages, and Baxter was insistent that most people stop after the first. The first is consideration — the deliberate work of the understanding. Turn the truth over. Ask what it means and what it is worth. Compare heaven with what you are currently pursuing. The second is the engagement of the affections, and this is the point of the whole thing. Consideration is the bellows; the affections are the fire. Having thought about the truth, deliberately stir yourself to love it, long for it, rejoice in it and grieve that you have neglected it.

Whom have I in heaven but thee? and there is none upon earth that I desire beside thee. PSALM 73:25

Baxter made much of soliloquy — preaching to one’s own soul, as the psalmists do: Why art thou cast down, O my soul? A man may plead with himself as he would with another, and Baxter thought most Christians would be transformed if they addressed themselves half as directly as they address other people. The exercise ends in conversation with God, the meditation turning naturally into prayer, which is where it was always heading.

He added a help for those whose minds go blank at the word heaven. Reason upward from what you know. Take the deepest joy you have experienced — a reunion, a recovery, a burden lifted — and consider that it is a shadow cast by something greater, from a God who invented joy and has not exhausted His stock.

But as it is written, Eye hath not seen, nor ear heard, neither have entered into the heart of man, the things which God hath prepared for them that love him. 1 CORINTHIANS 2:9

He was careful about the limits. This is comparison, not construction: the moment the exercise starts producing a place shaped by our preferences rather than by God’s presence, it has gone wrong. And nothing learned by it may be taught as fact. Scripture governs, and where it is silent we are content not to know.

Two cautions

First, this can become a technique, and a technique can become a burden. Baxter was writing directions, not laying down a law, and a believer who measures his spirituality by how well the exercise went has misused it. Second — and this matters — some people cannot do this, and it is not their fault. Those weighed down by grief, exhaustion or the illness of mind Baxter called melancholy may find that sustained meditation makes them worse rather than better. He knew this and said so, and we shall come to his counsel on it in a later chapter. Such a person should not conclude that heaven is closed to him because his mind will not settle.

There is a question worth carrying out of this chapter, 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?

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. Answer the question above honestly. If God were not there, would you still want it?

3. Fix a specific time and place this week for one deliberate meditation on heaven. Twenty minutes is enough to begin.

4. Take one concrete promise rather than the subject in general, and do not stop at understanding. Stir your affections — longing, joy, grief at your own neglect.

5. Try soliloquy. Address your own soul aloud as you would address a friend who needed persuading.

6. If your mind will not settle because of grief or exhaustion, do not force it or condemn yourself. Read the chapter Counsel for the Melancholy instead.

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.

My mind goes wherever it has been trained to go. Teach me to look at what is unseen, deliberately, and take me past understanding into desire.

And where my heart is too heavy to rise, be gentle with me, and lift it Yourself. Remind me that there remains a rest for Your people, and that I am on my way to it. Amen.