Real Rest and Joy

In the new heavens and the new earth, the human faculty of willing “will… be all the more truly free, because set free from delight in sinning to take unfailing delight in not sinning…, inasmuch as it shall not be able to sin.”

“The soul ... shall have an intellectual knowledge of its past ills, but, so far as regard sensible experience, they shall be quite forgotten.”

“We shall ourselves be the seventh day, when we shall be filled and replenished with God’s blessing and sanctification. There shall we be still, and know that He is God; that He is that which we ourselves aspired to be when we fell away from Him… But when we are restored by Him, and perfected with greater grace, we shall have eternal leisure to see that He is God, for we shall be full of Him when he shall be all in all.”

“There we shall rest and see, see and love, love and praise. This is what shall be in the end without end. For what other end do we propose to ourselves than to attain to the kingdom of which there is no end?”

Augustine of Hippo, The City of God, Book XXII, chapter 30.