The Pastor's Letter (Dated February 1977)
Dear Friends,
The remembrance that the people of God will one day be in heaven with God is a remembrance that should often be brought to mind as we still live on this earth. After the Lord God had made the heavens and the earth and all things that they contain in six days, we are told that He then, “rested on the seventh day.” (Genesis 2:2). Not only did God rest on the seventh day, but He “declared” the fact, so to speak, for, we read in the next verse that “blessed” and “sanctified” that seventh day of rest.
Now, for whose benefit could that declaration have been made, but for the “man” that God had created and made as the very last act of the very last day of His creating works? And when God declared a “rest”, it seems clear that He declared it as something that His creation would enjoy and enter into by God's graciousness to him. As we know, of course, that free entrance into all the benefits of God was forfeited in the fall of our first parents; but it, is now the very essence of the gospel word that man may yet enter into the rest of God and be with his God and Saviour for ever and ever. Thus, having made that rest for man at the very beginning, and now, by grace, permitting man to yet enter that rest in spite of his sinful fall, we might well expect that God will have us remember that rest to come in all the pages of the Word of God following on from the first few verses of the 2nd chapter of the book of Genesis. And this is exactly the case; for throughout the Word of God, the eternal rest that belongs to the redeemed of the Lord is set before us in its “physical”, “spiritual”, and “actual” expressions for our continued and continuing consideration. No wonder the mighty Augustine discovered, “O God, thou madest us for Thyself, and our hearts are restless until they rest in Thee.” And God will not let us forget that rest that remaineth, and points us to it throughout His truth.
So, in Israel of old, the eternal rest is displayed for us in its “physical” expression – a picture of what is yet to come. It is expressed in “word” and in “act.” In word, in the fourth of the Ten Commandments given to Israel at the hand of Moses: “Remember the sabbath day to keep it holy” etc. And with that command goes the reason for keeping that command: - “For in six days the Lord made heaven and earth … and rested … wherefore the Lord blessed the sabbath day, and hallowed it.” Their remembrance of the day is a remembrance of the rest of God – that rest which God first observed right at the beginning of this world's history.
The “rest” is also pictured in Israel's “land” that they were just about to enter into when Moses gave them those commandments from the Lord. That land was known as Israel's “rest,” for the apostle Paul reminds us how “God sware in his wrath (to the unbelieving of that old nation) they shall not enter into my rest.” And, indeed, the older generation didn't enter Canaan. But then, Paul goes on to show us that, indeed, Canaan was only a picture of the true rest of God, and proceeds with his conclusion, “There remaineth therefore a rest to the people of God,” That “rest” yet remains for us today if we are “born of His Spirit and washed in His blood,” for it is the eternal rest of the eternal presence of God in heaven above.
Now then, when we come into the New Testament, we find that the remembrance of this day of rest is no less set before us, but here, in the “spiritual” expression of it (for the Bible always moves from physical, to spiritual, to actual.) And when we consider the church of the N.T. meeting together on the “first day of the week to break bread,” we are immediately struck with the fact that she has left the “physical” Jewish sabbath behind and has moved into her own unique expression of the day of God's rest. They met to “break bread;” to “remember” in fact, the death of the Lord until He come. So, their gathering was a “remembrance,” and is a looking forward to something. And it was on “the first day of the week,” - the day “in which he left the grave, and Satan's empire fell.” And that, of course, was the “beginning” of the “new creation” of God in its fullest sense – and it began, in absolute accord with the old, on “the first day” when “light” poured forth from the darkened tomb in the resurrection of the Saviour. And so this “new” creating work of God will go on through all the necessary “days” that it will take to complete it, until – until the Sabbath comes, and all the new-created works of God are caught up in that eternal rest of God that shall never be broken throughout endless ages. Death, resurrection, coming again; these are the spiritual works of the church's sabbath – her Lord's day – and they are her remembrances until He come.
Then comes the “actual;” then comes heaven; then comes the one great thing that the people of God from the beginning have had in remembrance even from the beginning – in physical form in the Old, and in spiritual in the New. And what will that “rest” be like? We like Richard Baxter's description: “O blessed rest, where we shall never rest day or night, crying Holy, Holy, Holy, Lord God of hosts.”