Heavenly Contemplation

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

The last part of The Saints’ Everlasting Rest is the part Baxter cared about most, and it is the reason the book was so widely used. Having spent several hundred pages describing heaven, he turns and asks a practical question: how does a Christian actually think about it? His answer is a discipline he called heavenly contemplation, and he set it out with the thoroughness of a man giving directions to a stranger in an unfamiliar town.

Why it must be deliberate

His starting observation is that this does not happen by itself. Believers assume that if they hold the doctrine, the comfort of it 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. So he prescribed a set exercise, at a set time, on purpose.

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.

The practicalities

Baxter was almost comically practical about the arrangements, and it is the most useful part of the whole treatment. Fix a time. He recommended daily if possible, and at least weekly for those who could not manage it — and he preferred a set hour, because occasional intentions evaporate. Sunday afternoons and evenings he thought particularly suitable. Choose the place. Somewhere quiet, free of interruption. Baxter himself liked to walk in the fields towards evening, and thought open air and solitude helped more than a closed room.

Come with the heart free. He advised choosing a time when the mind is not fresh from a quarrel or heavy with business, since a soul in that condition cannot lift. Take a text or a scene, rather than trying to think about heaven in general. Vagueness defeats meditation. Begin with a specific promise, a specific description in Revelation, a specific attribute of God.

Consideration, and then the affections

The structure of the exercise itself has two stages, and Baxter was insistent that most people stop after the first. The first stage is consideration — the deliberate work of the understanding. Turn the truth over. Ask what it means, what it implies, what it is worth. Compare heaven with what you are currently pursuing. Reason from what God has already done to what He has promised to do. The second stage 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, hope in 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 observed that this is exactly what the psalmists do, and he made much of the practice of soliloquy — preaching to one’s own soul. The Psalms are full of it: 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.

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 ends up measuring 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 elsewhere, 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.

The most useful thing in this chapter is also the smallest. Fix a time this week — twenty minutes will do — and take one promise about the world to come, and think about it until you feel something. That last clause is the whole discipline. Most of us stop at understanding, and wonder why the truth never warms us.

Using what you know

One of Baxter’s more unusual directions concerns the use of the imagination, and it needs stating carefully because it is easily misunderstood. He observed that the mind cannot conceive of what it has never encountered. We have no direct experience of heaven, and so an instruction to think about it frequently produces a blank. His remedy was to reason upward from things we do know. Take the deepest joy you have experienced — a reunion, a recovery, a burden lifted, the first hour of a holiday after a hard year — and then consider that this is a shadow cast by something greater, produced by 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

Baxter used the same method with relief from suffering. A person who has been in long pain knows something about what the cessation of pain will feel like, and may reason from the lesser to the greater. Two cautions, which he supplied himself. This is comparison, not construction. We are reasoning from Scripture’s own images to what they signify, not inventing a heaven to our own taste. The moment the exercise starts producing a place shaped by our preferences rather than by God’s presence, it has gone wrong. And it is a help for the affections, not a source of doctrine. Nothing learned by this method may be taught as fact. Scripture governs, and where it is silent we are content not to know.

FOR REFLECTION AND ACTION

1. Fix a specific time and place this week for one deliberate meditation on heaven. Twenty minutes is enough to begin. 2. Take one concrete promise rather than the subject in general. Vagueness defeats meditation. 3. Do not stop at understanding. Having thought, deliberately stir your affections — longing, joy, grief at your own neglect.

4. Try soliloquy. Address your own soul aloud as you would address a friend who needed persuading. 5. If your mind will not settle because of grief or exhaustion, do not force it or condemn yourself. Read chapter fifteen instead.

A PRAYER

Lord, my mind goes wherever it has been trained to go, and I have trained it on money, work and grievances.

Teach me to look at what is unseen. Not occasionally, when trouble drives me to it, but deliberately, at a set hour, as a discipline.

Take me past understanding into desire. Let me not merely think about the rest You have promised, but long for it.

And where my heart is too heavy to rise, be gentle with me, and lift it Yourself. Amen.