John Owen once wrote the following. (As Packer recommends, Owen is often best understood by being read aloud.)
To have the eternal glory of God in Christ, with all the fruits of his wisdom and love while we ourselves are under the full participation of the effects of them, immediately, directly revealed, proposed, made known unto us, in a divine and glorious light, our souls being furnished with a capacity to behold and perfectly comprehend them,—this is the heaven which, according to God’s promise, we look for. (Works VII.338f)
Packer, in his essay “The Spirituality of John Owen” (which we will soon be posting onto JohnOwen.org), writes:
Sustained by such a hope, the believer can and should face the last enemy squarely and get ready to take death in stride when it comes; and such preparation of heart and mind for passage out of this world into the immediate presence of God was, in fact, a major theme of all Puritan spirituality.
How Owen had prepared himself appears from his deathbed reply on the morning of 24 August 1683 to the news which a fellow minister, William Payne, had brought him that his last work, entitled appropriately enough Meditations and Discourses of the Glory of Christ, was now in the press. ‘I am glad to hear it,’ said Owen, ‘but O brother Payne! The long wished for day is come at last, in which I shall see that glory in another manner than I have ever done, or was capable of doing, in this world.’ He knew that he was dying, and before the day ended he was gone. Right to the end Owen’s lumbering Latinised linguistic precision stayed with him, so that what was almost his last utterance was phrased like a public address, and that was, to say the least, quaint—but I ask you, leaving the stylistic question aside, was there ever a lovelier or sweeter or indeed nobler exit line?
