And after that, we shall rest

In 1558, there was a pestilence in Amsterdam. People were dying. Anabaptist leader Menno Simons wrote a “short letter of consolation” to the church there, urging them not to stop visiting and serving one another in need, and, if spiritually prepared, to be unafraid. In this excerpt, he describes what awaits them beyond death.

“. . . Therefore we ought not to dread death so. It is but to cease from sin and to enter into a better life. . . . We should rather joyfully lift our head, gird our loins with the girdle of truth, and be taken up to the heavenly Canaan. And so with our only and eternal Joshua, Jesus Christ, take the awarded inheritance, and so be delivered from the laborious way of our hard pilgrimage, so full of trouble, which we must lead through the trackless, cruel waste, so long as we are in this life. And after that we shall rest in peace.

O elect brethren and sisters, how greatly and gloriously are they gifted of God who, in grace, delivered from the body of sin, and from the emptiness of all transitory things, are taken up into the holy tabernacles of peace, summoned to the eternal, holy Sabbath.

The old, crooked serpent shall no longer bite them in their heels. No ache nor ill shall touch them more. Death, the last enemy, is overcome. Their tears are washed away, and their souls are in lasting rest and peace in the Paradise of grace, Abraham’s bosom, under the altar of God. They are come from their great tribulation to Mount Zion, in robes of purest white, worshipping before the throne of God and the Lamb, waiting . . . to shine forth as the sun. . . .

Reflect on this and be consoled in these times.”

—from “Pastoral Letter to the Amsterdam Church,” 1558, in The Complete Writings of Menno Simons