Where Souls Find Sweet Rest Forever

Psalm 23:2,

He makes me lie down in green pastures.
He leads me beside still waters.

Jonathan Edwards:

In Christ you shall have glorious objects for the eye of your soul to behold in which you shall find rest. You shall have glorious objects of your understanding and contemplation. The glory of God and beauty of Christ shall be the objects of your view.

The way of salvation by Christ will be like a green pasture for your soul to feed on, and the glorious gospel with its various excellent doctrines and divine truths shall be as a garden to your soul set with a variety of pleasant plants, flowers, and fruits that are ravishing to the eye. In the pleasure that you will have in beholding those lovely objects, your soul shall have sweet rest. Those objects are such as are suited to the faculty of human understanding and worthy that it should be employed about them. The beauty and glory that is to be seen is sweet enough, you will never desire to see any thing more beautiful.

Here is glory enough for you to employ your understanding about to all eternity, to see more and more, without ever your getting beyond it as to the limits of it. Here your eye may, as it were, rave. Here your understanding may expatiate as much as it will forever, and always find enough to fill it.

Adapted from Jonathan Edwards's unpublished sermon manuscript on Psalm 23:2, preached July 1738. See manuscript pages 28, 29, 30.