What Happens When You Die as a Christian? — Baxter on the Saints’ Rest
⏱ 14 min read
The question is older than the asking of it, but you are asking it now in a way you have not asked it before. Perhaps because someone you love has died, and the polite Sunday-school answers — they’re with Jesus, they’re in a better place — have begun to feel too thin to hold the actual weight. Perhaps because your own body has started to remind you, quietly, that the road has an end on it. Perhaps because you read a verse this week that opened the question wider than you wanted it to be opened, and you cannot close it again.
This is the slow version. Not the diagram with the arrows pointing to heaven and the new earth and the intermediate state, useful as those diagrams sometimes are. The slow version reads three substantial passages from Richard Baxter — a Puritan pastor who spent twenty years writing and rewriting The Saints’ Everlasting Rest because he believed his own death was so near that he wanted the book finished before it arrived — and lets the vocabulary do its work. Baxter was writing for the dying Christian, the grieving Christian, and the Christian living in the long middle who has begun, quietly, to notice that the middle has an end on it. He was writing for you. The Everspring Christian Healing Journal carries this kind of slow reading into a daily companion for the soul carrying loss or facing its own, if you would like a place to take the practice afterwards. For now — read slowly. There is no hurry. The book Baxter wrote was finished in his sickbed. The book you are reading from him should be read at the same pace.
What Baxter understood, and what very few modern accounts of dying understand, is that the question what happens when you die as a Christian is not really a question about geography. It is a question about relationship. The where matters less than the with whom. The Christian who dies in Christ goes to the One who has been holding them the whole time, and the going is less an arrival in an unfamiliar place than the final unveiling of the One whose company they have, in part, already known. The dying is the lifting of the curtain that was there. The Christ on the other side of the curtain is the same Christ who has been with them on this side. The strangeness is not as great as you have feared.
That is the answer, in one sentence. The rest of this slow reading is the patient unfolding of why that sentence is more substantial than it sounds. (If grief is the ground you are walking on while reading this — if the loss is recent enough that the calendar has not caught up to it — the slow companion Christian journal prompts for women — healing after a hard year was written for exactly this season. The quieter a devotional for the woman healing after loss walks the same ground in evening pages, and if the only prayer you have left this week is please — prayer for healing — seven honest prayers with Bible verses holds that one for you.)
Baxter began the Saints’ Rest in 1647 in a sickroom, when he was twenty-nine years old and dying of what he assumed was tuberculosis. He did not die. He lived another forty-three years, but he wrote the book in the conviction that he was about to be received into the rest he was describing, and the prose carries the urgency of a man who is not theorizing about a doctrine but is preparing to enter the country it describes. You can feel the preparing in the sentences. They are written by a soul that is packing.
The first passage — the heart of God set upon you
Baxter’s first move, in the Rest, is to address the soul that has begun to wonder whether God is still minding it at all. The grieving soul wonders this. The dying soul wonders this. The soul holding a long silence wonders this. Baxter answers:
“Christian, dost thou not perceive, that the heart of God is set upon thee, and that he is still minding thee with tender love, even when thou forgettest both thyself and him?”
— Richard Baxter, The Saints’ Everlasting Rest
Read it once. Then read it again, slowly.
Notice the older verb. Minding thee. Not thinking about thee in the modern sense — the casual, intermittent attention of a busy mind passing through. Minding in the older English carried the freight of attending to, caring for, keeping watch over. The mother minds the child. The shepherd minds the flock. The verb is full of the steady, alert, gentle attention that does not lapse even when the one minded has, for a time, forgotten the minding.
Baxter then puts the sentence inside its severest test. Even when thou forgettest both thyself and him. The Christian who has lost — through grief, through illness, through depression, through the long weariness of a hard season — the felt sense of being held by God has, in Baxter’s vocabulary, forgotten. The forgetting is part of being human in a body that hurts. But the forgetting on the human side does not interrupt the minding on God’s side. The heart of God is set upon thee. The verb is in the present tense, not the conditional. He does not say will be set on thee when you behave better. He says, is set on thee — now, in this room, while you read this — and is still minding thee with tender love.
For the woman reading this who has not felt God in weeks or months, the line does a particular work. The feeling of having been forgotten is, by Baxter’s account, not evidence. It is the felt experience of a soul too tired to perceive a minding that has not stopped. The minding is the actual situation. The not-feeling is a weather inside it. The weather will change. The minding will not.
What does this have to do with what happens when you die? Everything. The Christian who dies has been minded with tender love the entire way, including the parts the Christian did not feel. The death is not the moment the minding stops. The death is the moment the minding becomes unmediated — when the curtain that the body had been hanging between the soul and the One who minds it is lifted, and the minding is finally received without the dampening that the mortal grain had been adding to it. The dying Christian does not enter unfamiliar care. They enter the same care, finally fully felt.
The somatic — for the chest that has been holding the question
Pause here. The teaching has a body to it, and Baxter, who lived in a sickroom for stretches of his life, knew the body and the question are not separate.
Sit somewhere quiet. Put both feet flat on the floor. Place one hand, lightly, on the centre of the chest — over the breastbone. That is the place the question of what happens when you die tends to settle in the body. It sits like a small weight, just there, that the breath has been working around for some time.
Take one slow inhale. Not deep. Just slow. Let the air arrive behind the hand. On the exhale, let the breath go all the way out, slower than the inhale. Let the shoulders, on the exhale, drop one small inch — not by trying to relax them, but by stopping the small ongoing effort to hold them up.
One more slow inhale. One more longer exhale. Then take the hand away and continue reading.
The body did not need to do anything with that. It needed to be acknowledged as the place the question has been living. The body of the dying Christian is, Baxter would say, being carried by the heart of God set upon it. The slow exhale is a small piece of the body learning to be carried instead of bracing. The longer exhale is, at the most basic physiological level, the same thing as resting in the minding. The body knows how. It has forgotten because nothing has asked it to remember.
The second passage — producing the excellencies
Baxter’s second move is a method, almost a recipe, for how the believer is to prepare for the rest while still in the body. It is one of the oldest devotional instructions in English — and one of the most quietly practical.
“Go to thy memory, thy judgment, and thy faith, and from them produce the excellencies of thy rest; present these to thy affection of love, and thou wilt find thyself, as it were, in another world.”
— Richard Baxter, The Saints’ Everlasting Rest
Read it twice. Slowly.
Notice the verbs. Go. Produce. Present. These are active verbs, but they are not the verbs of striving. They are the verbs of fetching — the soul going into its own stored rooms and bringing out the truths it already knows, then setting those truths in front of its own heart so the heart can see them.
What truths? The excellencies of thy rest. The substantial goods of the country the Christian is heading toward. The presence of Christ unmediated. The end of bracing. The freedom from the indwelling sin. The reunion with the saints who have gone before. The minding of God’s heart, finally felt fully. The redemption of the body in resurrection. The river that runs through the city.
Baxter is saying: bring these out of memory and faith and set them in front of your affection. Sit with them. Look at them slowly. Let your heart, which has been looking at the small heavy things of this week, look at these larger steadier things for a while. And thou wilt find thyself, as it were, in another world.
That phrase — as it were, in another world — is the line worth keeping near the page. Baxter is not promising mystical transport. He is describing, accurately, what happens when a tired modern soul slows down enough to look, with sustained attention, at the actual goods Christ has prepared. The looking moves the soul. The looking takes the soul, for a quarter of an hour, into the atmosphere of the country it is heading toward. The looking is rehearsal.
This is what the dying Christian has been doing, in small ways, the whole way. The verse memorized. The hymn sung. The doctrine slowly worked through with a friend in the kitchen. The evening sit-down with the journal. All of it has been going to memory and faith and producing the excellencies, presenting them to the affection of love. And the slow result has been a soul whose affections have been migrating, year by year, toward the country it is heading to. By the time the death arrives, the country is no longer foreign. The soul has been visiting in small portions for years.
The Everspring Christian Healing Journal is built around exactly this kind of small migration. One short passage each evening, a verse held close, room for the honest sentence about how the day went and the loss is sitting. The journal does not produce the rest. Christ produces the rest. The journal is the place where, evening by evening, you go to memory and faith and produce the excellencies and present them to your affection. The slow rehearsal is the work that lets the dying — when it eventually arrives — be a familiar entry rather than a strange one.
The third passage — the Spirit’s lifting
Baxter’s third move, near the end of the book, is a prayer that the writer prays for the reader and for himself together. It is, in many ways, the most consoling sentence in the Rest, because it places the burden of the lifting where the burden belongs — not on the dying Christian, but on the Spirit who carries.
“O thou Spirit of life, breathe upon thy graces in me; take me by the hand, and lift me from earth, that I may see what glory thou hast prepared for them that love thee.”
— Richard Baxter, The Saints’ Everlasting Rest
Read it once at speed. Then read it again, slowly.
Notice who is asked to do the work. Breathe upon. Take me by the hand. Lift me. All three verbs belong to the Spirit. The dying Christian is not asked to climb. The dying Christian is asked to be taken by the hand. The lifting is His.
This is the sentence that breaks the modern fear that you — or the one you have lost — must have managed the dying well enough. Baxter, who knew dying as well as any pastor in English Puritan history, is plain: the lifting is the Spirit’s work. The Christian who dies in Christ is taken by the hand by the same Spirit who breathed life into them at the beginning, and is lifted from earth into the seeing of the glory prepared for them.
The verb lift is precise. Not snatched. Not transported. Lifted — the way a parent lifts a tired child onto their hip when the child can no longer walk the last stretch of the journey home. The dying Christian does not have to manage the last stretch. The Spirit lifts them. The lifting is the part the dying do not have to provide. The Spirit has been waiting for that lift since the day they were given to Him.
For the woman reading this who has feared her own dying — or who has feared, more silently, that her loved one was not strong enough at the end to manage well — Baxter is quiet and exact. The Spirit lifts. The hand is His. The taking is gentle. The seeing of the glory follows. None of it requires more strength than the dying Christian has. The lifting is for the soul that no longer has strength. That is the entire point.
What happens when you die as a Christian, then, by Baxter’s account? You are minded with tender love the whole way. The excellencies you have been rehearsing in memory and faith become the actual country. The Spirit takes you by the hand and lifts you. The glory prepared is seen. The minding becomes unmediated. The rest, which had been hoped for and rehearsed, becomes the steady weather of the place you have now entered.
(The sibling articles in this Father-Analysis cluster sit at what is heaven like — Edwards on the world of love and what does the Bible say about death — Spurgeon on dying well. The three walks belong together. Read in order, they are the slow companion the cluster was built to be. If the writing is the part that has felt impossible — that you sit at the journal and have nothing to put on the page — faith-based healing devotionals that don’t spiritualize the wound walks the slower companion for the same week.)
What the slow reading will do over a year
If you sit with Baxter’s three passages — one a month, for three months, and then the Saints’ Rest idea as a whole for the rest of the year — what happens is not dramatic. The grief does not stop. The fear of dying does not lift entirely. What happens is that the centre of gravity of the question moves.
The question what happens when you die as a Christian begins, slowly, to be answered not as an outside diagram but as an inside vocabulary. Minded with tender love. Producing the excellencies. Lifted by the Spirit. The phrases become rooms in the mind you can step into when the question surfaces at three in the morning. The room is small but it is furnished. There is a chair in it. The chair was put there by Baxter, four hundred years ago, for the soul that would one day need to sit down inside the question and find the question already half-answered before the question finished asking itself.
The slow reading does not erase the missing of the one you have lost. The missing is its own sacrament. What the slow reading does is companion the missing. The grief and the rest can live in the same chest. Both are honest. Baxter has held them together for four hundred years’ worth of grieving readers, and the holding has not yet stopped working. The slow walk of the next year is the slow learning of how to carry both. The carrying is, in its own way, what dying as a Christian means while you are still alive — the patient learning of the country, one excellency at a time, until the country and the dying have grown small enough together to be entered without strangeness.
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A daily home for the slow reading
The slow practice we just walked has its 140-day form in Christian Healing Journal. Each evening, a short passage and a verse — a small daily place to hold the question next to the doctrine that Baxter wrote in his own sickroom for exactly the soul holding it.
The Everspring Christian Healing Journal carries Baxter’s slow vocabulary — minded with tender love, the excellencies of the rest, lifted by the Spirit — into a daily companion for the woman walking the question of what happens when you die, without rushing and without pretending the question is smaller than it is.
