Present And Future Rest
Present and Future Rest
Excerpted from “Heavenly Rest”
Sermon #133
Delivered on Sabbath morning, May 24, 1857, at the Music Hall, Royal Surrey Gardens
Are you weary, whether from your work, from the suffering you’ve endured, or simply from living in a world bogged down by sin? God offers us true rest, heart-level rest—both now and in eternity.
There remains a Sabbath rest for the people of God.
Hebrews 4:9
“My rest,” says God (Hebrews 4:3-4), the rest of God! Something more wonderful than any other kind of rest. It is not the Sabbath, but the rest of the Sabbath—not the outward ritual of the Sabbath, which was binding upon the Jew, but the inward spirit of the Sabbath, which is the joy and delight of the Christian.
Now this rest, I believe, is partly enjoyed on Earth. “We who have believed enter that rest” (Hebrews 4:3), for we have ceased from our own works, as God did from his. But the full fruition and rich enjoyment of it remains in the future and eternal state of the blessed on the other side of the stream of death.
If God should help me to raise but one of his feeble saints on the wings of love to look within the veil and see the joys of the future, I shall be well contented to have made the joy-bells ring in one heart at least, to have set one eye flashing with joy, and to have made one spirit light with gladness. The rest of Heaven!
Here, too, on Earth, the Christian has to suffer. Here he has the aching head and the pained body. His limbs may be bruised or broken; disease may rack him with torture. He may be an afflicted one from his birth. He may have lost an eye or an ear, or he may have lost many of his powers. Or if not, being of a weakly constitution, he may have to spend most of his days and nights upon the bed of weariness.
Or if his body be sound, yet what suffering he has in his mind! Conflicts between depravity and gross temptations from the evil one, assaults of Hell, perpetual attacks of diverse kinds—from the world, the flesh, and the devil.
But in Heaven, no aching head, no weary heart. There, no palsied arm, no brow plowed with the furrows of old age. There, the lost limb shall be recovered and old age shall find itself endowed with perpetual youth. There, the infirmities of the flesh shall be left behind, given to the worm and devoured by decay.
There, they shall flit, as on the wings of angels, from pole to pole and from place to place, without weariness or anguish. There, they shall never need to lie upon the bed of rest or the bed of suffering, for day without night, with joy unflagging, they shall circle God’s throne rejoicing and ever praise him who has said, “No inhabitant will say, ‘I am sick’” (Isaiah 33:24).
There, too, they shall be free from persecution. There shall be none to taunt them with a cruel word or touch them with a cruel hand. They are in the society of saints; they shall be free from all the idle conversation of the wicked, and from their cruel jeers set free forever. Set free from persecution!
You army of martyrs: you were slain, you were torn apart, you were cast to wild beasts, tormented. I see you now, a mighty host. The clothing you wear is torn with thorns. Your faces are scarred with sufferings. I see you at your stakes and on your crosses. I hear your words of submission on your racks, I see you in your prisons, I behold you in your shackles. But
Now you are arrayed in white, Brighter than the noonday-sun Fairest of the sons of light, Nearest the eternal throne.a
These are they who for their Master died, who love the cross and crown. They waded through seas of blood in order to obtain the inheritance, and there they are, with the blood-red crown of martyrdom about their heads, that ruby brightness, far excelling every other. Yes, there is no persecution there. “There remains a Sabbath rest for the people of God.”
Alas! In this mortal state the child of God is also subject to sin; he fails in his duty and wanders from his God; he does not walk in all the laws of his God blameless, though he desires to do it. Sin now troubles him constantly, but there sin is dead, there God’s children have no temptation to sin, from without or from within, but they are perfectly free to serve their Master. Here God’s children have sometimes to weep in repentance of their backslidings; but there they never shed tears of penitence, for they have never cause to do so.
And last of all, here, the child of God has to wet the cold ashes of his relatives with tears.
But there never once shall be heard the toll of the funeral bell, no hearse with plumes has ever darkened the streets of gold. The immortal are strangers to the meaning of death; they cannot die—they live forever, having no power to decay and no possibility of corruption.
Oh, rest of the righteous, how blessed you are, where families shall again be bound up in one embrace. Where parted friends shall again meet to part no more. And where the whole church of Christ united in one mighty circle shall together praise God and the Lamb throughout eternal ages.
In 1649, Puritan pastor Richard Baxter wrote The Saints’ Everlasting Rest, which Spurgeon read and treasured a few hundred years after its publication. It was for centuries the most influential book on Heaven ever written. Baxter, whom Spurgeon called “a man who above all other men loved the souls of men,” marveled that we don’t set everything else aside to consider Heaven and make sure we’re going there. Somehow, he lamented, Heaven hasn’t captured our imaginations or shaped our lives. Baxter and Spurgeon both latched onto the biblical picture of Heaven as a place of ultimate rest.
When God created the world, he rested on the seventh day (Genesis 2:2). That’s the basis for the biblical Sabbath, when all people and animals were to rest (Exodus 20:9-11). God set aside days and weeks of rest, and he even called for the Earth itself to rest every seventh year (Leviticus 25:4-5). This is the rest we can anticipate on the New Earth—times of joyful praise and relaxed fellowship, “united,” as Spurgeon writes, “in one mighty circle.”
Our lives in Heaven will include rest (Hebrews 4:1-11). “Blessed are the dead who die in the Lord from now on.” “‘Yes,’ says the Spirit, ‘they will rest from their labor, for their deeds will follow them’” (Revelation 14:13, NIV).
Eden is a picture of rest—meaningful and enjoyable work, abundant food, beautiful environment, unhindered friendship with God and other people and animals. Even in Eden’s perfection, one day was set aside for special rest and worship. Work will be refreshing on the New Earth, yet regular rest will be built into our lives.
Part of our inability to appreciate Heaven as a place of rest relates to our failure to enter into a weekly day of rest now. By rarely turning attention from our responsibilities, we fail to anticipate our coming deliverance from the Curse to a full rest.
Spurgeon speaks of another sort of rest—a rest from persecution: “There shall be none to taunt them with a cruel word or touch them with a cruel hand.” Those who know Spurgeon’s life will pick up the meaning behind lines like these. In a day when newspapers held sway over public opinion, Spurgeon was bitterly opposed by many newspaper editors, secular as well as religious.
For instance, in April 1855, the Essex Standard carried an article that described Spurgeon this way: “His style is that of the vulgar colloquial, varied by rant. . . . All the most solemn mysteries of our holy religion are by him rudely, roughly and impiously handled. Common sense is outraged and decency disgusted. His rantings are interspersed with coarse anecdotes.”b
In 1857 Spurgeon wrote in one of his sermons, “Down on my knees have I often fallen, with the hot sweat rising from my brow under some fresh slander poured upon me; in an agony of grief my heart has been well-nigh broken.”
Spurgeon’s wife, Susannah, kept a scrapbook of the slanders spoken against her husband. She filled a huge volume with clippings and produced for Charles a framed wall text quoting Matthew 5:11-12: “Blessed are you when others revile you and persecute you and utter all kinds of evil against you falsely on my account. Rejoice and be glad, for your reward is great in heaven, for so they persecuted the prophets who were before you.”
This public criticism surely influenced Spurgeon’s understanding of this text: “Make every effort to enter that rest” (Hebrews 4:11, NIV). He knew he needed to carve out rest for his body and his mind and step back from the battles on every front. Even so, he admitted that he did not excel at doing this.
It’s ironic that it takes such effort to set aside time for rest. For many of us, myself included, it’s difficult to guard our schedules, but it’s worth it. A day of rest points us to Heaven and to Jesus, who says, “Come to me, all you who are weary . . . and I will give you rest” (Matthew 11:28, NIV).
What feels better than putting your head on your pillow after a hard day’s work? (How about what it will feel like after a hard life’s work?) It’s good to sit and have a glass of iced tea, feel the sun on your face, or tilt back in your recliner and close your eyes. It’s good to have nothing to do but read a good book or take your dog for a walk or listen to your favorite music and tell God how grateful you are for his kindness. Rest is good, so good that God built it into his creation and his law.
Some people thrive on social interaction; others are exhausted by it. Some love solitude; others don’t. On the New Earth, we’ll likely all welcome the lively company of others but also crave times of restful solitude. We’ll enjoy both.
God rested on the seventh day, before sin entered the world. He prescribed rest for sinless Adam and Eve, and he prescribed it for those under the curse of sin. Regular rest will be part of our future lives in God’s new universe.
a From the hymn “What Are These Arrayed in White,” by Charles Wesley, 1745.
b Erroll Hulse and David Kingdon, eds., A Marvelous Ministry: How the All-Round Ministry of Charles Haddon Spurgeon Speaks to Us Today (Ligonier, PA: Soli Deo Gloria Publications, 1993), 39.
From the book
