Fly to Heaven with Thomas Cook
| In these days, almost anything is believable! In the realms of travel, we read from time to time of people who join a space team from NASA and travel to the moon or to some space station. And now, we are sharing the news of Thomas Cook making the offer for us to travel even to heaven!! Well, I must quickly confess that the Thomas Cook I am referring to was not a Travel Agency. The Thomas Cook to whom I refer was a great Methodist evangelist and became the first Principal of Cliff College in Calver near Sheffield . Cook was followed as Principal by the equally great Samuel Chadwick, and both of these men joyfully poured out their lives for the glory of God and for the sake of a vast multitude of grateful people. Both these men wrote a number of books to assist people in the greatest journey of all in life: to prepare to meet God, and make it safely on the shores of eternity in the “land” some writers called “ Beulah Land ,” after the | |
| word’s use in the Bible in Isaiah 62:4 where “Beulah” means “Married.” It is in this chapter in verse 12 that God’s people are called “The holy people.” This is significant, for John Wesley, the founder of the Methodists in this country back in the 18th century said that he felt “God had raised up the Methodists to spread Scriptural Holiness across these lands.” Thomas Cook and Samuel Chadwick were Methodist men who carried the flame and baton of holiness into the 20th century. Isaiah 62 is also the chapter from which The London Christian Standard paper obtained its Bible verse motto on the front page: “Lift up a standard for the people.” Cook wrote a small book of only 98 pages called Soul-Saving Preaching which is full of good spiritual instruction and challenge for those who would sense the call of God to preach, as St. Paul says, “I am not ashamed of the gospel of Chris t: for it is the power of God unto salvation to every one who believes” (Romans 1:16). Below is one chapter from Thomas Cook’s most well-known book, New Testament Holiness . Cook and Chadwick were “holiness men.” I have chosen to share the chapter called Beulah Land because it is keeping with the idea of travelling somewhere… even though it is not with the Thomas Cook Travel Agency! Another point of interest connecting Thomas Cook Travel with Heaven is the fact that one of their locations is just steps from where I stand while distributing our paper…in Angel! So, I am reminded often of Thomas Cook…the Methodist evangelist! In the chapter below, he invites us all to journey in a heavenly life in Christ.
NEW TESTAMENT HOLINESS CONTENTS Preface Chapters: 1) Blameless, Not Faultless, 2) Holiness and Temptation, 3) Sin Not A Necessity 4) The Double Need and The Double Cure, 5) The New Birth and Entire Sanctification, Chapter 14 BEULAH LAND Those who have read Bunyan’s immortal allegory will remember how he brings his pilgrims, before they crossed the river of death, into the land of Beulah . In that region they were “clear out of sight of Doubting Castle;” the gates of the Celestial City were full in view, the sun shone by night as well as by day. They heard continually the singing of birds, and in their walks they encountered several groups of the shining ones. As they walked to and fro in this goodly land they found it to be “a most pleasant, mountainous country, beautiful with woods, vineyards, fruits of all sorts, flowers also, with springs and fountains, very delectable to behold.” It may seem at first sadly at variance with facts to describe Chris tian experience on earth in such glowing colours, but there is a high and serene inheritance “common to and for all pilgrims,” a promised land, towards which we are beckoned, where, as Dean Alford would say, “Materially we are yet in the body, but in the spirit we are already in heaven — only waiting for the redemption of the body to be entirely and literally there.” This experience so closely resembles heaven, that St. Paul took the term heaven and transformed it into an adjective-noun— “the heavenlies” —and used that term five times in the Epistle to the Ephesians to describe the region called by Bunyan the Land of Beulah . “Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Chris t, who hath blessed us with all spiritual blessings in heavenly places in Chris t.” See also Ephesians 1:20, 2:6, 3:10, 4:12. When he uses the phrase “heavenly places,” the apostle cannot be referring to heaven itself, because in chapter 4:12 he speaks of our wrestling with “principalities and powers” and “wicked spirits” in the heavenly places, which must mean that it is an earthly experience, because there are no wicked spirits in heaven. There can be no doubt but that St. Paul had in view a sublime altitude of Chris tian experience in which the heavenly state is in us and we in it, so that literally in this present life we may live in a world of the unseen. There is a story told by naturalists of a little insect that lives beneath the slimy pools, and makes for itself a house in the dark waters. In the centre of a bubble of air, which it inflates above the water and then takes down with it and moors to a little plant at the bottom of the pool, it lives. There, in its little world of light and air, it breathes, and builds its nest, and rears its young; dwelling below, and yet living above, and breathing the air of the upper world, while all around it are dark waters and slimy depths, and the creatures that come and go around its floating houses of air. This illustrates in some measure what we mean by living in the “heavenly places” in Chris t Jesus. As we walk through this dark world of sin and sorrow we have another world about us—a higher, sweeter, purer world; and while our feet tread the earth below, our hearts and heads are in the heavens, shut in with Chris t. We are encompassed with a little world of light and glory which has descended from the skies—a kind of heavenly cloud in which we live and work like the little insect in its ethereal sphere Was this not what the apostle meant when he wrote, “Our conversation is in heaven”? Chris tians need not die to know what heaven is— The men of grace have found We need not anxiously inquire where the “heavenly places” are. It is enough to know they are where Jesus is. The expression refers more to the spiritual atmosphere than to locality. Heaven is a state as well as a place; and just in proportion as we abide in Chris t, and live in communion with Him, do we have the earnest and first-fruits of the heavenly glory. The more God enters into our life, the smaller, the less startling will be the change at death. “Weep not for me,” said a dying saint to his friends who stood weeping round his bed; “I go to change my place but not my company. I have walked with God on earth, and He is calling me now to walk with Him in heaven.” Though heaven’s above and earth’s below, Faber Canaan was to the Jewish people what the “heavenly places” are to us. The writer of the Epistle to the Hebrews warns the Jews, from the failure of their fathers, not to fail to enter the true rest which was typified by their fathers entering Canaan . Some assume that Canaan is always a type of heaven, and that the rest spoken of eleven times in the chapters of the Epistle to the Hebrews refers to the perfect rest of the heavenly world; but the writer of the Epistle speaks of it as a present state— “We which have believed do enter into rest” — from which it is obvious that some other rest than that of the perfect rest of heaven is referred to. The Jews had supposed that Canaan was the true rest, but the writer of the Epistle shows that there was a higher rest, of which the temporal rest of Canaan was only a type. “If Joshua had given them rest, he would not have spoken of another day,” yet another day is spoken of. Eight hundred years after enjoying Canaan, David urged the people, “Today, if ye will hear His voice, harden not your hearts;” from which it is evident that entering Canaan did not exhaust the meaning of the words, “They shall enter into My rest.” That land was a type, but only a type, of the rest which God has provided for His people. Joshua gave the physical, but he could not give the spiritual rest. Only in Jesus, the greater Joshua, can the true, real rest be found. It is only when He Himself, who is exulted into heaven, comes by His Spirit, so fully to possess our hearts, as that He is in us, and we in Him, that we of a truth reach the Beulah Land — Where dwells the Lord, our Righteousness, “The river of the water of life, clear as crystal, proceeding out of the throne of God and of the Lamb,” is only a poetical description of the indwelling Comforter whom the Lord Jesus promised to send to His disciples, and through whom the Son of God would manifest Himself unto them, and the Father and the Son make their permanent abode with them. The bliss of heaven is of the same kind as the joy of Divine love shed abroad in the believer’s heart, only it is more abundant. The Holy Spirit brings the joy of heaven with Him, and thus the saints above and the saints below drink from the same stream. Beulah Land is not heaven, but it has been well described as “the suburbs of heaven.” Another writer speaks of it as “a little heaven to go to heaven in.” Mr. Wesley says, “When the Holy Spirit fills the heart of a believer, He feasts the soul with such peace and joy in God as to blot out the remembrance of everything that we called peace and joy before.” This may seem strong language, but those who have felt the throb of love and gladness which accompanies the abiding fullness of the Holy Ghost can testify to its correctness. Speaking of the time when she entered this goodly land, Miss Havergal says, “My whole life was lifted into the sunshine, of which all I had previously experienced was but as pale and passing April gleams compared with the fullness of summer glory”— I’ve reached the land of corn and wine, How meagre words are to describe the glory of this inheritance. To dwell where the beloved of the Lord dwell in safety by Him; where the sun shineth night and day; where the atmosphere is too transparent for doubt to live; where duty is transformed into delight; where the mouth is filled with laughter and the tongue with praise; where the soul finds rest from unsatisfied cravings; where triumph over temptation is complete and habitual; where, with joy unspeakable, we see the face of God in open enraptured vision, and are made glad by the assurance, deeply buried in the soul, that we do the things that please Him. “To portray the blessedness of those who have reached these ‘heavenly places’ is like representing the rainbow by a charcoal sketch.” Oh, the sweetness of this inward spiritual kingdom! Oh, the depths of solid peace, the untroubled repose in God! What liberty is there possessed! What high, sacred, and pure enjoyment reigns! What fragrant breezes from the heavenly climes fill the air! What glorious unveilings of God to the soul! “The light of the moon has become as the light of the sun, and the light of the sun shall be sevenfold.” The intense sweetness, the superior excellence, and the Divine glory of the perfect love of Jesus can never be exaggerated, nor indeed this promised land testify that even the glowing descriptions of Charles Wesley fall infinitely short of the reality— Rivers of milk and honey rise, Does the country we have been describing seem to any of our readers like some far-off “Eldorado,” instead of a country nigh at hand? There is no need to regard it as a far-off land. No greater mistake could be made than to locate it as lying on the verge of the river, never to be reached until the close of our earthly career. It is nigh unto us. The unbelieving Israelites remained forty years in the wilderness, when they might have entered their long-promised Canaan in less than a month. After they left Horeb, on the shores of the Red Sea, they consumed only eleven days before the vine-clad hills of Canaan were in full view, but “they could not enter in because of unbelief.” “Let us also fear lest, a promise being left us of entering into His rest, any of you should seem to come short of it.” We should say to those who, in God’s mercy, have been led through the wilderness, and who are now on the borderland of the Canaan of God’s perfect love, so that only the Jordan rolls between, “Let us go up at once and possess it.” If faith is the condition, and the only condition, we may enter Beulah Land today. Hence the exhortation, “Let us labour, therefore, to enter into that rest.” The original word for “labour” is not a word signifying long and wearying toil; it is radically the same as that found in the Septuagint version of Joshua 4:10, “and the people hasted and passed over.” The same idea is expressed in the hymn— O that I might at once go up |
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Thomas Cook at 53 (Died, September 1912) On Thomas Cook’s last birthday, another great man of Methodist background died: General William Booth, Founder of the Salvation Army. “And I heard a voice from heaven saying unto me, Write, Blessed are the dead which die in the Lord from henceforth: Yes, says the Spirit, that they may rest from their labours; and their works follow them” |
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