A27017:754
The Saints' Everlasting Rest
The saints everlasting rest, or, A treatise of the blessed state of the saints in their enjoyment of God in glory wherein is showed its excellency and certainty, the misery of those that lose it, the way to attain it, and assurance of it, and how to live in the continual delightful forecasts of it and now published by Richard Baxter ...The saints everlasting rest, or, A treatise of the blessed state of the saints in their enjoyment of God in glory wherein is shewed its excellency and certainty, the misery of those that lose it, the way to attain it, and assurance of it, and how to live in the continual delightful forecasts of it and now published by Richard Baxter ...
London: printed by Rob. White for Thomas Underhil and Francis Tyton, 1650
THE SAINTS Everlasting REST. PART. III. › Chapter 1 › Section 4
Modern spelling is a reading aid: the words are the author’s, only the spelling is modernized. Original shows the page as printed, with the transcription marks.
1SECT. IV.
- 1§. 4.
Secondly, But the great loss of the damned, will be their loss of God, they shall have no comfortable relation to him: Nor any of the Saints communion with him: As they did not like to retain God in knowledge;1 but did him, Depart from us, we desire not the knowledge of thy ways; So God will abhor to retain them in his household, or to give them entertainment in his Fellowship and Glory. He will never admit them to the inheritance of his Saints, nor endure them to stand amongst them in his presence; but bid them, Depart from me, ye workers of iniquity, I know you not. Now these men dare belie the Lord, if not blaspheme, in calling him by the title of Their Father; How boldly and confidently do they daily approach him with their lips, and indeed reproach him in their formal prayers; with that appellation, Our Father? As if God would Father the Devils children; or as if the slighters of Christ, the pleasers of the flesh, the friends of the world, the haters of godliness, or any that trade in sin and delight in iniquity, were the Off-spring of Heaven! They are ready now, in the height of their presumption, to lay as confident claim to Christ and heaven, as if they were sincere believing Saints. The ⟨p. 271⟩Swearer, the Drunkard, the Whoremaster, the Worldling, can scornfully say to the People of God, What, is not God our Father as well as yours? Doth he not love us as well as you? Will he save none but a few holy Precisians? O, but when that time is come, when the case must be decided, and Christ will separate his followers from his foes, and his faithful friends from his deceived flatterers, where then will be their presumptuous claim to Christ? Then they shall find that God is not their Father, but their resolved foe; because they would not be his people, but were resolved in their negligence and wickedness: Then, though they had preached, or wrought miracles in his name, he will not know them: And though they were his Brethren or sisters after the flesh, yet will he not own them but reject them as his enemies: And even those that did eat and drink in his presence on earth,