I took a break from meditating about tomorrow’s Super Bowl to read Chapter 16 of a book by Michael Allen Rogers with a news-you-can-use title, What Happens After I Die? (Crossway, 2013). Early in that chapter, titled “A Sabbath Rest for God’s People,” Rogers describes an interview “with an NFL quarterback, one of the very best in the game. This man is an automatic all-pro nearly every season, and he has three Super Bowl rings from his five appearances at that big game. His wife is a gorgeous former model. He could buy anything his heart desired. Despite phenomenal success that any young male might consider the pinnacle of life, Tom Brady mused to the interviewer …”

Finally—since football is obviously a subject more important than death, Tom Brady is an alumnus of the University of Michigan (which my wife attended as an undergrad and I as a grad student), and I grew up with the New England Patriots—Pastor Rogers had my full attention. He quoted Brady mentioning his championships but still thinking “this can’t be all that it is cracked up to be.” The interviewer asked Brady what he wanted, and Brady replied, “I wish I knew. I love playing football and I love being quarterback of this team. But at the same time, I think there are a lot of other parts about me that I’m trying to find.”

Rogers then writes that Brady won’t find what he’s looking for without turning to Christ. Rogers then explains how the quarterback could find fulfillment—but I hope you’ll read this for yourself, and maybe, in God’s providence, Brady will also. —Marvin Olasky

“For if Joshua had given them rest, God would not have spoken of another day later on. So then, there remains a Sabbath rest for the people of God, for whoever has entered God’s rest has also rested from his works as God did from his.

“Let us therefore strive to enter that rest, so that no one may fall by the same sort of disobedience” (Hebrews 4:8–11).

“And I heard a voice from heaven saying, ‘Write this: Blessed are the dead who die in the Lord from now on.’ ‘Blessed indeed,’ says the Spirit, ‘that they may rest from their labors, for their deeds follow them!’” (Revelation 14:13)

Chapter Sixteen: A Sabbath Rest for God’s People

On May 10, 1863, in the Chandler farmhouse near Fredericksburg, Virginia, one of the most skillful military tacticians this country ever produced lay dying from friendly-fire wounds received at the battle of Chancellorsville. In his final hours, General Thomas J. Jackson lapsed in and out of consciousness. His wife Mary asked him, “Do you not feel willing to acquiesce in God’s allotment, if he wills you to go to heaven today?” In a firm voice Jackson said, “I prefer it.” Told that he would almost surely die before the day closed, Stonewall Jackson, the devout Christian, answered, “Yes, I prefer that. It will be my infinite gain to be translated to glory.” Later he said, “It is the Lord’s day. I have always desired to die on Sunday.” He spent further time in a comatose state, but then the General rallied enough to say distinctly, “Let us cross over the river and rest … under the shade of the trees.” With that desire voiced, Tom Jackson went home.

Stonewall’s often repeated dying words no doubt arose from a subconscious memory of a military command. But his words beautifully testified to a Christian’s immediate prospect of enjoyment in Christ. The biblical word rest holds strong associations for a disciple entering the final heaven.

Futile Pursuit of Rest

Consider the moment when you put your head on your pillow after a rough day, as your whole body aches for sleep and at last you can blissfully close your eyes. Or, remember how your ten-year-old legs ran homeward from the school bus after the final day of fourth grade, as you savored a seemingly endless summer of unrestricted playtime stretched out before you. We all have an innate desire for release from toil, suffering, conflict, pressing duties, and physical strain. We yearn for true relaxation of mind, body, and soul. This desire is not only physical in nature. In our strife-torn, confrontational, too-busy society it includes escape to some place where tensions of daily coping can be released. This rest always proves elusive.

The psalmist wrote a theme song for millions of twenty-first-century leisure seekers when he wrote, “Oh, that I had wings like a dove! I would fly away and be at rest; yes, I would wander far away; I would lodge in the wilderness; I would hurry to find a shelter from the raging wind and tempest” (Ps. 55:6–8). Americans invest billions of dollars in glass-fronted beach homes in the Outer Banks of North Carolina, rustic hunting cabins, time-shares in Florida, and gated golf communities. These are payments against the often futile pursuit of the biblical ideal of authentic “rest.” The respite we seek is spiritual; its cry arises from the deepest part of us. Do you realize we are longing for Eden to be restored?

I was startled by an on-line interview with an NFL quarterback, one of the very best in the game. This man is an automatic all-pro nearly every season, and he has three Super Bowl rings from his five appearances in that big game. His wife is a gorgeous former model. He could buy anything his heart desired. Despite phenomenal success that any young male might consider the pinnacle of life, Tom Brady mused to the interviewer, “Why do I have three Super Bowl rings and still think there is something greater out there for me? I mean, maybe a lot of people would say, ‘Hey man, this is what it is. I reached my goal, my dream, my life.’ Me, I think, ‘God, it’s got to be more than this.’ I mean this isn’t, this can’t be all that it is cracked up to be.” The interviewer asked the Patriots’ quarterback, “What’s the answer?” Brady replied, “I wish I knew. I wish I knew. I love playing football and I love being quarterback for this team. But at the same time, I think there are a lot of other parts about me that I’m trying to find.” Without Christ, this yearning for inward fulfillment and peaceful repose will never find resolution.

The rest we crave cannot be obtained from a bottle of alcohol or Valium. It will not be found in extramarital sex, vigorous exercise at the health club, or travel to exotic new places. The reprieve we long for gnaws at us in the core of our being. We begin to know its resolution in a restored relationship with God our Savior at the cross; and it will be enjoyed unendingly in the new heaven and earth Christ prepares for his believing family.

A Prospect of Sabbath Rest

Genesis 2:2–3 lays a foundation for this subject, speaking of God the Creator resting on the seventh day of creation: “On the seventh day God finished his work that he had done, and he rested on the seventh day from all his work that he had done. So God blessed the seventh day and made it holy.” The seventh day of creation is a continuing day; it is not concluded by the phrase “there was evening, and there was morning,” which marks a definite end to each of the first six creation days. The Lord God is not a man who needs labor union regulations to limit him to a forty-hour workweek. Genesis features God’s continuing rest as a pattern for humanity’s blessing through the ages. After six days of hard work, all men and women need a respite for worship and bodily refreshment with the worship of the Lord as the keynote. Scripture calls this institution “Sabbath.” Those who ignore the God-ordained pattern become slaves to their own commercial materialism. They never learn that “man shall not live by bread alone, but by every word that comes from the mouth of God” (Matt. 4:4).

Later in biblical history Israel was promised rest, as they left Egyptian slavery. Chattel slavery was the worst existence imaginable, antithetical to all notions of rest. Bodies were treated as machines, and minds were dominated by tyranny. Moses led the Israelites toward their Promised Land as an earthly home, which Deuteronomy 12:9 called their “resting place” (NIV). Exodus 20:8–11 tells how, along the way, the concept of Sabbath rest transitioned from being an ordinance born in creation to the fourth commandment Moses brought from Mount Sinai. Yet because the Israelites doubted both Moses and the word of the Lord, they endured forty more years of aimless wandering. Spiritual rebels always miss God’s rest. Later still, kings David and Solomon built Israel up materially and politically until it could be said they “rested” from warfare with their enemies for extended periods. It may have briefly seemed that rest was achieved by wealth and political power. Then in years after Solomon, the kingdom divided and collapsed under strife against one another and God.

The biblical Sabbath was never meant to be a joyless day hedged about with thorny rules. God intended it to be a visit to heaven each week! On the Sabbath day the Lord’s good things were served up; milk and honey could be had without price. It was never meant to be a day for passive dormancy. Nor was it God’s aim that a man keep the Sabbath best by attaining the greatest state of physical inertia, as Pharisees seemed to claim.

Through the prophet Isaiah, the Lord signaled how a weekly Sabbath day ought to provide a foretaste of divine rest in the fullest, heavenly sense: “If you … call the Sabbath a delight and the holy day of the LORD honorable … then you shall take delight in the LORD, and I will make you ride upon the heights of the earth” (Isa. 58:13–14). Jesus corrected Sabbath negativism in his declaration taught in all the Gospels: “The Sabbath was made for man, not man for the Sabbath” (Mark 2:27). One day in seven was set apart for our good, foreshadowing eternity’s rest. However, to all who have rebellious, unbelieving hearts toward him, the Lord made his classic declaration in Psalm 95:11: “They shall not enter my rest.”

These broad strokes of biblical development regarding Sabbath rest bring us to Hebrews 4, where the author reminds Christians that Joshua did not lead God’s people to experience politically or physically God’s final rest, which they so long had sought. The fault was not in the leadership of Joshua, nor Moses before him. The breakdown came from deficient faith in Jehovah by the people of Israel. They lost what was promised by not looking for the Lord to be the apex of faith’s fulfillment.

Today the prospect of enjoying this Sabbath rest of God is offered to all persons who embrace the cross and resurrection of Jesus. Only as the community of faith in Christ comes one final day before God’s eternal throne will we enter the full blessing of God’s Sabbath rest, mirroring God’s own repose of satisfaction and delight in his works. Hebrews declares, “So then, there remains a Sabbath rest for the people of God, for whoever has entered God’s rest has also rested from his works as God did from his. Let us therefore strive to enter that rest, so that no one may fall by the same sort of disobedience” (4:9–11).

Rest for Your Souls

Jesus spoke with the weight of Old and New Testament doctrine behind him in Matthew 11:28, issuing his classic invitation: “Come to me, all who labor and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest.” One day when I was almost eight years old, I sat in the front seat of my grandfather’s car, waiting for him to return from a brief errand to purchase something in a store. He was delayed, and I was bored. I opened the glove compartment of his Chrysler New Yorker to see if there might be anything there to read. I found a Christian tract with its message built around Matthew 11:28. Mind you—I was a young boy in the midst of a secure, carefree childhood and under no peculiar stress. I surely had not been a Hebrew slave, nor had I experienced any unusual pressures of a broken home, abuse, severe illness, or suffering to weigh down my spirit. Nevertheless, I vividly recall how Jesus’s words in the tract, promising he would give me “rest,” made a piercing appeal. A sweet yearning was born, and I know today that the Holy Spirit was beginning to woo me to the Savior. Not long afterward I consciously gave my heart to Christ. My enduring rest in him began in 1957, the year America as a nation discovered a new source of angst, when the Soviet Union sent the Sputnik satellite into orbit and we as a people collectively felt the pressure of another superpower beating us in the race for space conquest and possible world dominance. Perhaps our prosperous and free American way of life was not the total panacea we thought it was?

Jesus added in Matthew 11:29–30: “Take my yoke upon you, and learn from me, for I am gentle and lowly in heart, and you will find rest for your souls. For my yoke is easy, and my burden is light.” The burden he promised to take away is described by the same Greek word used for the unloading of a ship’s large cargo. Christ promised us the exchange of our crushing weight of sin, shame, and the empty pursuit of something unnamed (which we cannot find apart from him), for his light yoke of disciple-faith.

Have you begun to taste God’s Sabbath rest, as you trust fully in Christ? He can bestow a gyroscope of peace that remains steady in the midst of turmoil in this world. It consists of certainty about your place in God’s eternal plans. Forgiveness of sin in Christ is the foretaste of every heavenly enjoyment. Either you already know something about this, or you remain caught up in the worrisome, angry spiral of contemporary life. If you doubt that most people are bereft of the rest of God in Christ, try sitting on a bench at a busy shopping mall for an hour. Study the faces in the crowds that pass by. How many would you say appear to be at peace within, or are even conversing happily with a companion beside them?

Practical Implications of Heavenly Rest

Whenever a member of our congregation dies, I announce it the following Sunday morning. After mentioning the member’s name and the funeral service arrangements, my people hear from me the solemn yet wonderfully comforting words of Revelation 14:13: “Blessed are the dead who die in the Lord from now on. … They may rest from their labors, for their deeds follow them!” What John was told about rest is a reality now for the dead in Christ. And that text further exhorts us that a legacy is left behind by each one who has faithfully walked the path of a disciple of Jesus. Let’s think about a few of many things this can mean.

Puritan author Richard Baxter wrote a nearly seven-hundred–page book about heaven called The Saint’s Everlasting Rest. Baxter said that at last we will enter a life of total satisfaction and pure enjoyment. When we are with Christ face-to-face, no waves of unrest can toss us about. We will not struggle against sin, because there will be no sin. We will be beyond Satan’s reach and influence, for he will have been destroyed. Our new bodies will not suffer our present weaknesses of temptation.

Today when we see something beautiful in this world, it very soon becomes new bait to our lust. We can scarcely open our eyes without seeing new dangers for our covetousness to feed on. Paul said, “I do not do what I want, but I do the very thing I hate” (Rom. 7:15). We all identify with that, daily striving against our own flesh. But at last, vulnerability to sinful weakness will be gone from all of us. In heavenly rest, our mental understanding will not be vexed with unresolved questions. There will no longer be such a thing as “unanswered” prayer. Nor will we blame God for misfortunes we experience, or question his mysterious providence. In heaven the weakest Christian will comprehend more theology than the most spiritual scholar of God’s Word knows today. Our present ignorance will give way to light, and we will be satisfied with all the ways of God. Think of the relief to us when human pride is extinguished. All the saints will see themselves as equals before God’s grace; human relations will be free from rivalry, strife, racism, competition, misunderstandings, and rudeness. Richard Baxter spoke of life as a person “in motion.” Then he offered this definition: “Rest is the end and perfection of our motion. The saint’s rest … is the most happy estate of a Christian, having obtained the end of his course. Or, it is the perfect, endless fruition of God by the perfected saints, according to the measure of their capacity, to which their souls arrive at death, in both soul and body most fully after the resurrection and final judgment.”

The rest we seek is not a motionless yoga pose. It will be rest from the opposition, strain, and stress arising from powers that aim to destroy the joy of God in our souls. We shall rest from all varieties of suffering. Today, we know what fragile vessels are these bodies in which we dwell. We are “frail children of dust, and feeble as frail,” as one hymn writer phrased it. Resurrection bodies will be free from disease, injury, and disability. Heaven will abolish every form of persecution; no antagonist will malign God’s loved ones. And what about tragic divisions with other Christians that too often fracture us into so many denominational boxes? Just think of this: no Presbyterians, Lutherans, Methodists, or Baptists will be registered as such in heaven’s final home. Every secondary issue of doctrine that is not germane to the gospel of grace will fall away, and our worship will be consumed with Christ alone. That is true rest!

All Anxiety Gone

When Revelation 14:13 says your “deeds follow [you]” into heavenly rest, this underscores our present influence as Christians. Many who have lived in quiet service to others will be surprised, even amazed, to find other souls present in glory who were somehow influenced to trust in Jesus by our example, prayers, and testimonies. Today, a serious-minded Christian ought to be burdened to pray for those he knows who do not walk with Christ. We strive to witness and pray for people we care about, pleading with God that they might trust in Jesus as Lord. Bearing this evangelistic burden, we have no complete ease regarding the desolate souls of certain family or friends who remain apart from the Savior. There is a strain of gospel concern for them. But this too, will be lifted at last. Eternal destinies will be resolved before the final heaven dawns, according to the mystery of God’s sovereign will. There can be no person we might anticipate ever being won to Christ who by then is not present and accounted for.

One problem is often discussed as if it represents a dark blemish on our bliss of heaven, namely, how can heaven be glorious when we are conscious of loved ones who are not there? Scripture does not directly address the matter in so many words. However, the Bible does suggest that “so clear will be our vision of the holiness of God and the sinfulness of man, and so full our deliverance from the presence of sin in our own hearts, that we will be able unhesitatingly to recognize God’s absolute righteousness in his acts of judgment.” Revelation 19:1–2 depicts “a great multitude in heaven, crying out, ‘Hallelujah! Salvation and honor and power belong to our God for his judgments are true and just.’” We will be among them. We will see that God has acted according to perfect justice and praise him accordingly. Today’s anxiety over anyone who is lost will dissolve. Incredibly, our relationship with persons not in heaven will have ended, and so we will neither miss them nor sorrow for them.

This sounds harsh for us to accept now, because we are still bound so close in earthly relationships of family love, friendship, or general compassion. You will be released from those bonds, by the firm separation that will exist between hell and the final heaven. Jonathan Edwards preached a sermon boldly titled The Torments of the Wicked in Hell—No Occasion of Grief to the Saints in Heaven. He declared according to biblical logic, “Then there will be no more remaining difficulties about the justice of God, about the absolute decrees of God, or anything pertaining to the dispensations of God toward men. …The heavenly inhabitants will then be perfectly conformed to God in their wills and affections. They will love as God loves and that only.” Edwards’s answer to how we could ever be at complete rest about this perplexing issue is that only human relationships sealed by commonality of belonging to Christ will endure beyond this life. We simply will have no occasion to remember others. Isaiah 65:17 speaks from the Lord: “For behold, I create new heavens and a new earth, and the former things shall not be remembered or come to mind.” Difficult as it may be to accept, all memories of people separated from Christ will be swept away in the sea of God’s perfect justice. The unrest we feel over them today cannot finally endure.

The Marriage Supper of the Lamb

Just try to take all this in. Who of us right now can claim that even one day in every year is 100 percent free from all strain, worry, conflict, or pain? How can we imagine an estate of perfected life when we shall never again spend a moment in such concerns?

Revelation 19:7–9 depicts the signal event of our entry into heaven’s rest as the marriage of the Lamb to his bride, the church: “Blessed are those who are invited to the marriage supper of the Lamb” (v. 9). In almost every world culture, a bride-to-be and her parents plan with exquisite care all the details of a wedding reception. Most people expect to look back on this occasion as the pinnacle social event of their lives. The guest list, food, table settings, music—all are designed to highlight a day of joy that signals a new phase of life begun. Using that imagery, which we can confirm from our own experience, the King of heaven intends to spread his table for each of us, and Christ Jesus will be delighted in his guests. Isaiah also pictures that wonderful day: “And the ransomed of the LORD shall return and come to Zion with singing; everlasting joy shall be upon their heads; they shall obtain gladness and joy, and sorrow and sighing shall flee away” (35:10). Randy Alcorn exhorts us accordingly: “We need to stop acting as if heaven were a myth, an impossible dream, a relentlessly dull meeting or an unimportant distraction from real life. We need to see heaven for what it is: the realm we’re made for. If we do, we’ll embrace it with contagious joy, excitement and anticipation.”

The homing instinct of Eden silently beckons me. Any peace I enjoy today has meaning only as a dim copy of my splendid, final rest in Christ. The sure prospect of being at home with him keeps me moving forward in this life to a goal that is nearer and sweeter all the time.

Taken from What Happens After I Die? by Michael Allen Rogers, © 2013. Used by permission of Crossway, a publishing ministry of Good News Publishers, Wheaton, IL 60187; www.crossway.org.