Blessed as God is Blessed: Isaac Watts on Heaven

By Andrew Metzger

A PAPER

Submitted to Dr. Scott Manetsch in partial fulfillment of the requirements

for the MA Chruch History

Deerfield, IllinoisMay 6, 2015

Introduction

Isaac Watts is mostly remembered for his hymns. There are few

in the English speaking world who would fail to recognize Joy to

the World, When I Survey the Wondrous Cross and O God Our Help in Ages Past.

Isaac Watts however was much more than a hymn writer. He spent

the majority of his life as a pastor and teacher in the early

eighteenth-century and the volumes of his written works amount to

six nine-hundred page volumes. Contained in these works is a good

amount of material describing and anticipating heaven. It is the

aim of this project to make this thought accessible. Many might

think of heaven as a particular place that particular people go

when they die. Isaac Watts however conceived of heaven not so

much as place as a state of being. Heaven for Watts is the

experience of an eternally growing participation in God’s own

original blessedness. As a result, heaven is the consequence and

final aim of the gospel experienced now in part and anticipated

later in sublime fullness. This thesis will be developed under

five main headings. After providing an overview of Watts’s life

and work we will secondly consider Watts’s understanding of joy

and happiness as something intrinsic to God’s being. We will then

see how God shares this joy with creation and then how humanity

is especially designed to intimately participate in God’s

blessedness. Human sin however and God’s response to that sin

effect this participation by either intensifying or permanently

removing it and thus this will be the fourth heading. The final

heading considers the future state of heaven for the redeemed and

their everlasting and dynamic expansion of indomitable joy.

Isaac Watts: His Life and Work

Isaac Watts, born July 17 1674, grew up at the tail end of decades

of political upheaval and religious persecution in Britain. Since

Henry VIII England experienced waves of persecution depending on which

monarch assumed the throne and which Christian denomination they

supported. Watts’s father, Isaac Watts Sr., was imprisoned in their

hometown of Southampton when Isaac Watts Jr. was an infant for his

Non-conformity. When Watts Jr. was eleven years old, in 1685, his

father left his family in Southampton and lived in London to escape

local persecution. Despite these absences Isaac Watts Sr. seems to

have deeply loved his children. While in London he wrote to his

family:

My dear children,

Though it has pleased the only wise God to suffer the malice of

ungodly men, the enemies of Jesus Christ (and my enemies for his

sake), to break out so far against me, as to remove me from you

in my personal habitation, thereby at once bereaving me of that

comfort, which I might have hoped for in the enjoyment of my

family in peace…I am not altogether without hopes of seeing you

again, yet I am nowise certain of it, all our time being in God’s

hands; but I would have you know that you yet have a father that

loves you.1

Watts Sr. continued in his letter to give lines of counsel to his

children. Each of these counsels appear carefully thought out and

steeped in a worldview that recognized the brevity of this life and

the enduring nature of God, his kingdom and life lived for him. He

charged his children to “read the holy scriptures…Above all books and

1 Watts Sr. To his Children, May 21, 1685, in The Life Times and Correspondenceof the Reverend Isaac Watts, D.D., by Thomas Milner (London: 1845), 36-44.

writings account the bible the best, read it most [in order] to be

holy here and happy hereafter.” He also counseled them to:

not entertain any hard thoughts of God, or of his ways, because

his people are persecuted for them; for Jesus Christ himself was

persecuted to death by wicked men, for preaching the truth and

doing good, and the holy apostles and prophets were cruelly used

for serving God in his own way. The wicked ones of the world are

the seed of the serpent; and they will always hate the people of

God, torment and seek to destroy them; and God suffers them to do

so, not for want of love to his people, but to purge their sins

by chastisement, to try their graces, and fir them for heaven.

Isaac Watts Sr. wanted his children, even eleven year old Isaac, to

live as pilgrims and sojourners who saw their earthly life as

temporary and the things and troubles of this life as small compared

to life with God.

Isaac Watts Jr. appears to have shared his father’s affection and

to have been profoundly shaped by his father’s words and example. It

is difficult to demonstrate precisely the impact this letter and

Watts’s father had on him. Nevertheless the themes and language in

this letter resonate with themes that the younger Watts would spend

his entire life preaching and teaching. Watts lived with an eye

towards Heaven. In 1734 he published a collection of short essays and

poems entitled Reliquiae Juveniles: Miscellaneous Thoughts in Prose and Verse. In one

of these essays he tells a story of an elder kinsmen giving advice to

a young man to about how to be “happy here, and hereafter.” The points

of advice contained in this essay coincide with the same kind of

advice Watts’s father gave him. The advice from this essay includes,

“Whatsoever your circumstances may be in this world, still value your

bible as your best treasure…your bible contains eternal life in it,

and all the riches of the upper world.” Perhaps the most telling piece

of advice given to the young man comes at the end of the essay, “live

as a stranger here on earth, but as a citizen of Heaven, if you will

maintain a soul at ease.”2

Isaac Watts tutored under two primary teachers. Until age sixteen

he studied theology and Greek and Latin classics under the direction

of John Pinhorne. When Watts turned twenty he turned down an

opportunity to study at Anglican Cambridge or Oxford. A local

physician offered to finance him. Watts, raised in a Congregationalist

family, is said to have replied “I will cast my lot with the

Dissenters.”3 This he did and moved to London to attend a Dissenting

academy under the direction of Thomas Rowe for four years. At twenty-

two Watts moved into the house of Sir John Hartopp (1637?-1722) as a

2 Watts, “Entrance Upon the World” in Works 4:549-551. 3 Gibbons, Memoirs of the Reverend, 20.

tutor to his son, the young John Hartopp. In 1701 Watts became pastor

to the congregation in Mark Lane. This was the same congregation which

John Owen had pastored almost a generation earlier. Watts spent his

life preaching and ministering to this congregation until his death in

1748.

Watts lived a relatively quiet, ordinary life. He never married

and never traveled. He was however subject to frequent seasons of

illness. One of these seasons was so bad that it forced him to

retire from pastoral ministry for four years between 1712-1716.

Watts later wrote a poem reflecting on these years of sickness.

In one part he describes experiencing fevers and hallucinations:

If I but close my eyes, strange images

In thousand forms and thousand colours rise,

Stars, rainbows, moons, green dragons, bears and ghosts,

An endless Medley rush upon the stage,

And dance and riot wild in reason’s court

Above control. I’m in a raging storm,

Where seas and skies are blended, while my soul

Like some light worthless chip of floating cork

Is tost from wave to wave: Now overwhelm’d

With breaking floods, I drown, and seem to lose

All being.4

In addition to the physical pain Watts mentions the psychological

and emotional pain of feeling entirely useless during these times

of sickness. Still, his confidence in Christ’s goodness and hold

on him sustained Watts through his sickness:

Weak as my zeal is, yet my zeal is true;

It bears the trying furnace. Love divine

Constrains me; I am thine. Incarnate love

Has seiz’d and holds me in almighty arms:

Here’s my salvation, my eternal hope,

Amidst the wreck of worlds and dying nature,

“I am the Lord’s, and he for ever mine.”5

Despite his besetting sickness Isaac Watts lived to be seventy-

four years old. He died surrounded by friends on November 25,

1748. One of Watts’s biographer’s captured snippets of his final

conversations, including:

4 Watts, “Thoughts and Meditations in a long Sickness, 1712 and 1713” inWorks 4:524.

5Ibid., 525-6.

“It is a great mercy to me that I have no more manner of

fear or dread of death. I could, if God please, lay my head

back and die without terror this afternoon or night. My

chief supports are from my view of eternal things and the

interest I have in them. I trust all my sins are pardoned

through the blood of Christ. I have no fear of dying; it

would be my greatest comfort to lie down and sleep and wake

no more.”6

Isaac Watts lived as a sojourner, even eager and ready to depart

to be with his Lord.

Watts’s major works on hymns were completed by 1718. The

first volume Horae Lyricae (1705) is mostly a collection of poems

and early musings. Most of the hymns we recognize come from his

work Hymns and Spiritual Songs, in Three Books (1707) and The Psalms of David

Imitated in the Language of the New Testament (1718). The Psalms of David is

Watts’s attempt to rewrite the book of psalms in a way that would

both make them easy to sing and that would make plain the way in

which they speak about Christ. Prior to Watts Britain operated

under the regulative principle which limited corporate worship

6 Milner, Life, Times and Correspondence, 698.

strictly to scripture. Watts’s work on hymnody went a long way in

reforming that practice by providing both good hymns and a

theology for singing hymns.7 Watts’s hymns contain the theology

which he spent the rest of his life working out and applying.

They are excellent resources for understanding the man and his

thought.

In addition to the hymns there are several other works that

have a significant bearing on this project and so deserve

mentioning. In 1721 Watts published the first of what would be

three volumes of sermons containing a number of messages on

closeness to God. Two of these sermons Nearness to God, the felicity of

creatures and The Scale of Blessedness are the primary works from which

the main argument of this paper is grounded. One year later, in

1722, Isaac Watts published a set of discourses on death and

heaven. These were originally parts of funeral orations that

Watts gave at the deaths of both Sir John and Lady Hartopp. These

discourses seem to have been fairly popular and made their way to

the European continent where they were translated into German.

These discourses provide the clearest portal into how Watts

7 Harry Escott’s Isaac Watts Hymnographer is an excellent resource in understanding the impact Watts had on hymnody.

thought about the future state and the activity of the saints in

Heaven.

The Blessed God. How God is Heaven for Himself.

In his sermons on Nearness to God and the Scale of Blessedness Watts

argues that “Nearness to God is the foundation of a creature’s

happiness.”8 By implication of this definition human beings

contain no original joy in themselves. We do not generate joy,

but discover it. To be happy for Watts means, in some sense, to

be inside of or covered by happiness. Humans, along with all

other creatures, are derivative beings. Every joy we have must

necessarily come to us from without. Human joy derives from a

shared experience of God’s own original joy. In other words, to

be blessed one must be near the most blessed being, namely God.

Watts writes, all the “streams of happiness that flow amongst the

creatures in endless variety, [lead] to their original and

eternal fountain, God himself: He is the all-sufficient spring of

blessedness, as well as of being, to all the intellectual worlds;

and he is everlastingly self-sufficient for his own being and

8 Watts, “Nearness to God,” in Works 1:122

blessedness.”9 Unlike creatures, God is not derivative, but

original. He exists eternally as the one being in whom all other

things find their essence of being

To understand Watts’s vision of heaven therefore one must

know Isaac Watts’s God. A godless heaven would have sounded

entirely absurd to Watts because for him, God is heaven.

Certainly, Watts anticipated a particular time and place which

could be referred to as Heaven. What makes it Heaven however is

that in this time and place redeemed human beings will have

unhindered access to God. Watts describes God’s very being as

blessedness because he is eternally happy in himself. In The Scale

of Blessedness Watts defines happiness as “the contemplation of the

most excellent object; the love of the chiefest good; and a

delightful sense of being beloved by an all-sufficient power, or

an almighty friend.”10 This definition, central to understanding

Watts’s theology of heaven because constitutes divine happiness

as well as human happiness. There are two essential ingredients

here: knowledge and love. Happiness therefore is a communal

affair. According to Isaac Watts isolated individuals cannot

9 Watts, “The Scale of Blessedness” in Works 1:140. 10 Watts, “Nearness to God” in Works 1:123

really be happy. Watts knows God however not as an isolated

individual being, but as a dynamic community of persons. His joy

comes from his own contemplation of himself and his own infinite

propensity towards himself in The Father, Son and Holy Spirit.

Watts says that for the members of the Trinity, “all their

infinite and unknown pleasures are derived from their ineffable

union and communion in one godhead, their unconceivable nearness

to each other in the very center and spring of all felicity. They

are inseparably and intimately one with God; they are eternally

one God, and therefore eternally blessed.”11 Each member of the

Godhead knows God with perfect knowledge and responds to that

knowledge with perfect love.

Watts adds that for the members of the Trinity, their

blessedness and nearness is not “a dull unactive state: Knowledge

and mutual love make up their heaven…An eternal blissful

contemplation of all the infinite beauties, powers, and

properties of godhead, and of all the-operations of these powers

in an unconceivable variety among creatures, is the glorious

employment of God.”12 God does not exist as a static being,

11 Watts, “The Scale of Blessedness” in Works, 137. 12 Ibid.

rather he is actively employed. God, the eternal, infinite being

knows himself eternally and infinitely. “Besides the general

glories of the divine nature,” continues Watts:

we may suppose, that a full and comprehensive knowledge of

the sameness, the difference, the special properties and the

mutual relations of the three divine persons, which are

utterly incomprehensible to mortals, and perhaps far above

the reach of all created minds, is the incommunicable

entertainment of the holy trinity, and makes a part of their

blessedness…As the Father knoweth me, so know I the Father, saith Jesus

the eternal Son, John x.15. And as the spirit of a man knoweth

the things of man, so the things of God are known to his own

Spirit, for he searcheth the depths of God, I Corl ii. 10, 11. as

it is expressed in the original.13

This perfect knowledge within the Trinity functions as the basis

or foundation for God’s passion.

Watts goes on to explain that God’s “contemplation of

himself, is not his only pleasure, for God is love, 1 John iv. 8.”

God’s perfect understanding of his goodness conditions a

13 Ibid., 138.

passionate inclination towards himself which is equal to his

goodness. Since by nature God is infinite so also is his love.

Watts declares:

He has an infinite propensity toward himself, and an

unconceivable complacence in his own powers and perfections,

as well as in all the outgoings of them toward created

natures. His love being most wise and perfect, must exert

itself toward the most perfect object, and the chiefest

good; and that in a degree answerable to its goodness too:

Therefore he can love nothing in the same degree with

himself, because he can find no equal good…. May I call it

perpetual delightful tendency, and active propensity toward

each other? An eternal approach to each other with infinite

complacency? An eternal embrace of each other with arms of

inimitable love, and with sensations of unmeasurable joy?”14

God never gets bored. His joy never pauses, but pulses through

eternity. God is heaven for himself and from his profound eternal

delight flow everything we have ever sensed as good, beautiful

14 Ibid., 137-8.

and true. The experience of heaven for Watts, is nothing less

than intimate participation in this same love.

How Nature and Humanity Share in God’s Blessedness

Isaac Watts recognized a particularly privileged place for

humanity in communion with God. In addition, he also recognized a

place of the natural material world in relationship with God. In

order to understand humanity’s privilege it is helpful to first

understand the kind of relationship the rest of creation has with

its creator. Since God is the original being, heaven for the

creature means nearness to him. Heaven is tasting God’s own

blessedness. In Watts’s theology God created the natural world to

participate in his joy by passively displaying his most excellent

character and actively echoing harmonies of his divine love.

Isaac Watts observed an indomitable gushing joy in the created

world. Even in a sinfully fallen state he recognized deep

reflections of God’s goodness imbedded into the very ontology of

created things. None can equal God or rival him since he is the

source from which all true things flow. Watts writes, “He

eminently contains in himself all the amazing scenes of nature,

and the more transporting wonders of the world of grace.”15

Creation derives its identity in relationship to God. Nature has

substance as it embodies and reflects the character of God.

Nature does this passively in the sense that to be, to merely

exist as a creature, means to be a physical demonstration of

God’s being. In a short meditation titled Searching After God Watts

includes this poem:

The starry arch proclaims thy power,

Thy pencil glows in every flower:

In thousand shapes and colours rise

Thy painted wonders to our eyes;

While beasts and birds with lab’ring throats.

Teach us a God in thousand notes.

The meanest pin in nature’s frame,

Marks our some letter of thy name.16

Nature is God’s own self portrait. All of the natural world finds

its existence in the way it puts God on display. The birds and

the beasts sing about their maker. Plants and flowers mark out

letters of his name. In another meditation Watts prays, “Let me

15 Watts, “Nearness to God,” in Works 1:12316 Watts, “Searching After God” in Works 4:462

see thee in every thing: let me read thy name every where;

sounds, shapes, colours, motions, and all visible things, let

them all teach me an invisible God. Let creatures be nothing to

me, but as the books which thou has lent me to instruct me the

lessons of thy power, wisdom, and love.”17 The created order is

good because God is good, it has substance because God’s

character has substance, beauty because God is beautiful. Nature

reads like a book, and its content is God. He is the end of all

created things.

This is also the idea Watts conveys in his hymn that we know

as I Sing the Mighty Power of God. Originally part of a collection of

songs for children, Watts titled this hymn Praise for Creation and

Providence. Verses five and six:

V.

There’s not a plant, or flower below,

but makes thy glories known;

And clouds arise, and tempests blow,

By order from thy throne

VI.

17 Watts “Absence from God” in Works 4:520

Creatures (as num’rous as they be)

Are subject to thy care;

There’s not a place where we can flee,

But God is present there.18

While this hymn reinforces creation’s reflective character it

also emphasizes God’s nearness to creation. Unlike many popular

deists of his day, Watts insisted that God commanded and upheld

the natural world. The clouds and winds come and go by his

ordering, all creatures depend on his sustaining care.

Lest we think that Watts is merely being poetic in this

hymn, Watts writes in his essay Of Plants and Animals, “God himself

is the supreme agent and mover, in all the fermenting materials

that teem with plants and animals, and he acts still according to

the original and uniform laws of motion which his wisdom first

dictated, and his power imposed on the parts of matter.”19 Along

with passively reflecting God’s character, nature actively

resonates with God’s activity. There is a harmony within the

created order. God does not miraculously recreate the world with

18 Watts “Divine Songs for Children “ in Works 4:29719 Watts, “Of the Production, Nourishment, and Operations of Plants and

Animals.” in Works 5:588.

every new generation of plant and animal. Neither, however, does

God sit back and watch the world spin. There is a process, a set

standard of laws to which creation adheres by which God engages

the world.

God’s own character constrains and commands the planets to

spin in orbit, makes the grass to grow, and creatures to populate

the earth. Watts’s God is not static or passive. He does not just

exist. He exists in a dynamic relationship in which he infinitely

knows himself and eternally gives himself in love and receives

love within the godhead. Creation therefore moves as God moves.

Nature harmonizes to heaven. Watts of course acknowledges current

dissonance due to the fall. The world now is not as it should be.

Human sin, as we will see, created a rift not only in human

relationship with God but all of creation and God. Watts

nonetheless anticipated complete restoration of nature’s

relationship to God. In one of his most famous hymns Watts tells

us that on the day the Messiah sets all things right heaven and

nature will sing. We mistakenly sing this hymn as a Christmas

song. Though it shares themes with Christ’s birth Watts meant it

to anticipate Christ’s second coming:

I.

Joy to the world; the Lord is come;

Let earth receive her king;

Let ev’ry heart prepare him room,

And heav’n and nature sing.

II.

Joy to the earth, the Saviour reigns;

Let men their songs employ;

While fields and floods, rocks, hills, and plains

Repeat the sounding joy.

III.

No more let sins and sorrows grow,

Nor thorns infest the ground:

He comes to make his blessings flow

Far as the curse is found.20

In creation Isaac Watts heard echoes of an everlasting music, an

eternal sounding joy. The blessings mentioned in verse three are

not mere niceties. This is the same kind of blessing Watts writes

about in his sermons On The Nearness of God and The Scale of Blessedness.

20 Watts, “The Messiah’s Coming and Kingdom.” In Works 4:92

The hope of the gospel is the hope of heaven. It is the hope of

being blessed as God is blessed, of being so near him as to

resonate with his joy. Though now in part, for Watts, creation

will one day be thoroughly blessed as it reflects God completely

in its being and actively harmonizes to the love and joy of the

blessed three in one.

While heaven for the natural world consists in reflecting

God’s joy, humanity has the particular privilege of knowing and

loving God in the same kind of way he knows and loves himself.

This is because human beings are persons. According to Watts we

have the capacity of giving and receiving love in a way similar

to God, though on a much smaller scale. Heaven therefore is the

experience of perfect communion with God, of being blessed as God

is blessed by sharing in his love. Isaac Watts wrote a poem

entitled An Enquiry after Happiness which captures something of the

personal aspect between God and man. The last three verses say:

VI

Of all enjoyments here below

‘Tis Heav’n the Saviour’s love to know;

As in the sacred word reveal’d

And by the holy spirit seal’d

VII

From this internal evidence

Flow joys beyond the reach of sense:

Of blessedness he cannot miss,

Whose God the God of Jacob is.

VIII

Tis graces fullness, glory’s crown,

To see and know as we are known.

Jesus let me thy love possess,

And I’m secured of happiness.21

Experiencing the savior’s love constitutes Isaac Watts’s heaven.

This love however is not a one way street. What makes it so

profoundly heavenly is the revelation it makes of God such that

those who receive this love might know God even as they

themselves are known by him. The word “knowledge” here exceeds

intellect. The relationship Watts describes between God and a

redeemed humanity is that of mutual lovers.

21 Watts, “An Enquiry after Happiness.” in Works 1:92

Watts points to the ability to reason as the major

distinguishing factor between mankind and the rest of creation.

In his work The Ruin and Recovery of Mankind (1740) Watts states that

“man is a creature made up of two distinct ingredients, an animal

body and a rational mind, so united as to act in a mutual

correspondence according to certain laws and conditions appointed

by his Creator.”22 Our minds set us apart from all other

creatures. Unlike the rest of blind nature humans can think and

perceive. We have the capacity to know. “Reason,” writes Watts,

“is the glory of human nature, and one of the chief eminences

whereby we are raised above our fellow-creatures the brutes in

this lower world.”23 The significance of human reason for Watts

is that it enables us to be receivers of truth. Truth is the

mind’s “proper food, and truth, in all the boundless varieties

and beauties of it, is the object of its pursuit, when it is

refined from sensualities.”24 In the ability to understand, to

know and perceive, human beings share traits which characterize

22 Watts, “Ruin and Recovery of Mankind” in Works, 6:5723 Watts, “Logic” in Works, 5:524 Watts, “Nearness to God,” in Works 1:123

God. Humanity can know just like God can know, albeit as finite

creatures with limited minds.

Humanity does not consist of mere mind however. Watts says we

are compound creatures. Humans were made with emotional capacity,

just like God. In Nearness To God Watts writes, “contemplation

alone cannot make a creature happy: this only entertains the

understanding, which is but one faculty of our natures: the will

and affections must have their proper entertainment too. Their

beatific exercise may be comprised in the word love, either in

the out-goings, or the returns of it.”25 The mind for Watts was

never meant to operate independent from all the other faculties.

Rather, the mind functions as a necessary servant to enable our

full ontological status as lovers. The Passions, writes Watts,

are of admirable and most important Use in the Life of Man,

and a Christian: For though they were not give to tell us what

is good, and what is evil, yet when our Reason, upon a calm

survey, has passed a just Judgement concerning Things, whether

they are good or evil, the Passions, (as I before mentioned)

are those lively, warm, and vigorous Principles and Powers in

25 Watts, “Nearness to God,” in Works 1:123.

our Nature, which animate us to pursue the Good, and avoid the

Evil; and that with vastly greater Speed and Diligence than

the more calm and indolent Dictates of Reason would ever do.26

There is a kind of ontological harmony in human nature. The mind

exists to direct the passions. The passions exist to command the

body. When the mind, passions and body, properly work together

the result is a creature capable of giving and receiving love.

This ability may also be described as entering and sharing God’s

own love and joy.

The entire point of human existence for Watts is deep

communion with God. As humanity communes with him they image him.

God knows himself and gives himself in love so we are to know God

and give ourselves to him in love. God delights in himself so we

delight in him. Watts writes:

Communion with God, which has been impiously ridiculed by the

profane wits of the last and the present age, is no such

visionary and fantastic notion as they imagine…That it is

founded in scripture, appears sufficiently in several verses

of the xvii. Chapter of St. Johns gospel, where the divine union

26 Watts, “Doctrine of the Passions” in Works 2:584

and blessedness of the Father and the Son, are made a pattern

of our union to God, and our blessedness; John xvii. 21, 22, 23, 26.

That they all may be one, as thou Father, art in me, and I in thee; that they may be

one in us: And in this sense, but in a lower degree, even here on

earth, our communion, or fellowship, is with the Father, and

with his son Jesus Christ, I John i. 3…It is our happiness to know

God, to contemplate his glories, so far as they are revealed;

to love him and his goodness; to trust his wisdom, and lean

securely on his strength; to feel the workings of divine

powers and graces in and upon us, and to make acknowledgment

of them all to God. Thus the image of God is restored to us in

holiness and in happiness: Thus we are said to be holy as God

is holy; and thus also we are blessed as God is blessed.27

Watts believed that human ontology was designed to keep in step

with God’s ontology. There is a pattern in the way we were meant

to relate to God. This pattern begins with God sharing revelation

of himself to human beings. As he reveals himself and as we take

in his revelation our appropriate response is a joyous refraction

of his revelation back to him. Just as God matches his knowledge

27 Watts, “The Scale of Blessedness” in Works 1:141-142

of himself with an equal love so also humanity’s love was meant

to match their understanding. The implication of this is that

holiness is active communion with God. The pursuit of holiness

therefore is equal to the pursuit of heaven.

Sharing in God’s Blessedness Amidst a Fallen World

While Watts wrote about the grandeur of God’s perfect joy and

the glory of mankind and creation as a reflections and fellow

participants of that joy, Watts knew that the world was not as it

should be. Through Adam’s disobedience we all fell from communion

with God and thus from heaven. Watts recognized in himself a

strong inclination to find happiness in everything but God. Watts

calls God, “my all satisfying portion, and my eternal good.”

All creatures, he says, are:

Mere shadows of being, and faint reflections of thy light

and beauty! And yet (stupid as I am,) I soon lose my sight

of God, and stand gazing upon thy creatures all the day….Our

real and eternal interest depends more on thy single favour,

than on the united friendship of the whole creation; and

yet, foolish wanderers that we are! We absent ourselves from

our God, and rove far and wide to seek interests and

friendships among creatures.…If I happen to find any thing

here below made a channel to convey some blessings to me

from thy hand, how prone am I to make an idol of it, and

place it in the room of my God?28

For Watts, the core of all misery is idolatry. All of the vice

and sorrows of the world originate in human choices to substitute

God for other things. To look for heaven without God. Sin takes

what would otherwise be a morally good desire or object and

corrupts it by repurposing it to function as ends in themselves.

The effect of this idolatry separated mankind from God in two

primary ways: it corrupted human nature so that mankind could not

participate in God’s joy and it incurred legal guilt so that God

could not freely share his joy.

In the gospel, however, God meets these points of

separation. Furthermore, through the atonement of Christ, human

beings not only have the potential to return to their original

state, but also have their ability to know God and therefore to

love him. Through Christ, God’s joy doesn’t merely get back what

28 Watts, “Absence from God,” in Works 4:518

it lost, it expands to human depths which would otherwise be

unknown. In 1721 Watts published a series of three sermons

specifically on the doctrine of Atonement and he focused on a

single phrase from Romans: “Whom God hath set forth to be a

propitiation.”29 Watts worked to impress on his congregation and

readers that every person bears legal guilt and Christ’s chief

work as redeemer appeased God’s just wrath. Watts wrote this

sermon aware of a “Lockean” concept of Atonement current among

his audience. He made clear at the very beginning of the sermon

that Christ did not come merely “to be a teacher of grace and

duty, to be an example of piety and virtue, to plead with God for

sinners, and in short to do little more than any other divine

prophet might have been employed in, if the wisdom of God had so

appointed it.”30 Christ came to take the punishment earned by

wicked creatures and not reconcile God to man only through an

enlightened awareness of God’s existence and our duty to Him.

“This blessed gospel” Watts writes, “is shamefully curtailed, and

deprived of some of its most important designs and honours, if a

proper atonement for sin by the blood of Christ be left out of

29 Romans 3:25 KJV 30 Watts, “The Atonement” in Works 1:379

it.”31 Christ had to bleed in order to satisfy the legal demands

of God’s law. Through the Atonement human beings could find

justification and reconciliation with God.

Because of Christ’s propitiatory death God was then able to

extend pardon to faith filled followers of him. The effect of

this pardon meant that God could share joy in the revelation of

himself once more to humanity. God’s self-revelation for Watts

was always a gift. He gives to all things their being and so we

know God insofar as he lends himself to us. In the atonement,

this act of self-revelation is an even greater gift in that it is

given to undeserving creatures and begins reforming their warped

natures. In his sermon The Inward Witness to Christianity Isaac Watts

says:

The image of our Lord Jesus Christ, who is eternal life,

appears fairly written on your souls: Ye are the epistle of

Christ, and eternal life is begun in you, and thus the gospel

witnesses its own truth and divinity by an internal

evidence. The gospel of Christ is like a seal or signet, of

such inimitable and divine graving, that no created power

31 Ibid.

can counterfeit it; and when the Spirit of God has stamped

this gospel on the soul, there are so many holy and happy

lines drawn or impressed thereby; so many sacred signatures

and divine features stamped on the mind, that give certain

evidence both of a heavenly signet, and a heavenly

operator.32

For the Christian, God himself reopens the lines of heaven by

communicating, the Spirit, the character of Christ onto their

heart. “The spiritual life of a christian” writes Watts, “runs

into eternity; it is the same divine temper, the same peaceful

and holy qualities of mind communicated to the believer in the

days of grace, which shall be fulfilled and perfected in the

world of glory.”33 The Spirit impresses himself first upon our

hearts and affections. This then allows our minds to recognize

the truth, beauty and goodness of God. The sight of God resonates

deeply within our hearts and then motivates us to live for God.

In this life Christians experience an ever increasing restoration

of their true nature as they grow in knowing and loving Christ.

32 Watts, “The Inward Witness” in Works 1:21.33 Ibid., 20.

Communion with God, because of Christ’s redemptive work,

does not merely restore what was lost, but enhances, enriches and

deepens human ability to know and love God. This is because

Christ, as the incarnate word of God is an immensely deeper and

richer revelation of God to man than any previous revelations.

Watts often affirmed that God gave us two great revelations:

nature and grace. He states that while God’s revelation of

himself in nature has uses, it is not strong enough to reform

broken, idolatrous human nature. Watts writes:

Lord, while the Frame of Nature stands,

Thy Praise shall fill my Tongue:

But the new World of Grace demands

A more exalted Song.34

Watts states “All the knowledge of God which [the nations]

arrived at, by the light of nature, had actually but little

influence to reform the hearts, or the lives of mankind.”35 God’s

revelation of himself in the work of redemption however, as Watts

understands it, has the power to change a sinner into a saint.

Watts writes:

34 Watts, “The Creation of the World” in Works 4:260. 35 Watts, “Natural Religion” in Works 1:761

O how should we value the bible as our highest treasure,

which gives us such blessed discoveries of God, and his

wisdom and power, and his mercy in Christ; which infinitely

exceeds all the doubtful twilight of nature, and our own

powers of reasoning. O may the blessed bible lie next to our

heart, and be the companion of our bosoms! It is this lays a

sure foundation for our recovery from all our guilt, and

ruin and wretchedness.”36

Scripture, for Watts, is so powerful because it is the greatest

and most complete revelation of God. In scripture we meet with

Christ, the incarnate word. We hear him speak, we watch him live

and die and then rise from the dead. In one of his hymns Watts

writes:

I.

Laden with guilt, and full of fears,

I fly to thee, my Lord,

And not a glimpse of hope appears,

But in thy written word.

II.

36 Ibid., 763.

The volumes of my Father’s grace

Does all my griefs assuage:

Here I behold my Saviour’s face

Almost in every page.

VI.

O! may thy counsels, mighty God,

My roving feet command;

Nor I forsake the happy road

That leads to thy right hand.37

Watts considered scripture to be the greatest self-portrait God

has yet given to us. By it we may be raised into fellowship with

him.

Isaac Watts regularly referred to public ordinances of

worship as places where we come the closest to heaven while on

earth. In the first of his sermons series Appearance Before God38

Watts uses Psalm 43:239 to argue for a “belief in the special

presence of God in his ordinances of public worship,” and

therefore “an earnest longing after them on that account.”40 In

37 Watts “The Holy Scripture” in Works 4:240 38 Watts, “Appearance Before God” in Works 1:14539 “When shall I come and appear before God?” 40 Watts, “Appearance Before God” in Works 1:145

the preface to his volume Hymns and Spiritual Songs in Three Books (1707)

Watts writes:

While we sing the praises of our God in his church, we are

employed in that part of worship which of all others is the

nearest akin to heaven; and it is pity that this, of all

others, should be perform’d the worst upon earth. The gospel

brings us nearer to the heavenly state than all the former

dispensations of God amongst man: And in these last days of

the gospel we are brought almost within sight of the kingdom

of our Lord; yet we are very much unacquainted with the

songs of the New Jerusalem.41

There is something special about public worship that provides

space for communion with God. When we hear corporately hear God’s

word preached and respond in prayer and song we participate in

the same kind of engagement that will occupy us for eternity.

Watts spends a number of his works addressing the various

dispensations God has made to us. First creation, than the Old

Testament Law and now the New Testament revelation. In each

instance God gradually reveals deeper aspects of his character.

41 Watts, “Hymns and Spiritual Songs,” in Works 4:147.

Each one of these revelations should be met with an equal

response. Therefore every age must have new songs:

Let us begin at the song of Moses, Exod. xv. and proceed to

David and Solomon, to the song of the Virgin Mary, of Zecharias,

Simeon, and the Angels, the Hosanna of the young children, the

praise paid to God by the disciples in the Acts, the

doxologies of Paul, and the songs of the christian church in

the book of the Revelation: Every beam of new light that broke

into the world gave occasion of fresh joy to the saints, and

they were taught to sing of salvation in all the degrees of

its advancing glory.”42

Watts can then speak of how with the completion of the New

Testament and in his day we have songs that bring us within grasp

of the New Jerusalem.

Worship, for Watts, is an act of reciprocal love. Because

God is the original being and because of our fallen state, it is

both fitting and necessary that God initiates love for us. This

initiation comes to us through Christ’s atoning death. We receive

this love primarily through scripture. “Here, in scripture,

42 Watts, “An Essay Towards the Improvement of the Psalmody” in Works, 4:281.

writes Watts, “I behold, my Saviour’s face in almost every page.”

Scripture meets us initially in our minds. We take in the truth

by reading or hearing without our mental faculties. However,

human being is not mere mind. If it were, our relationship with

God would be one sided, something God never intended. God made

man a lover. Worship therefore is both the reception of God’s

initiating love and the return of that love. The fundamental

principle behind Watts’s reform of singing in church captures

this concept of mutual love:

By reading we learn what God speaks to us in his word; but

when we sing, especially unto God, our chief design is, or

should be, to speak our own hearts and our words to God. By

reading we are instructed what have been the dealings of God

with men in all ages, and how their hearts have been

exercised in their wanderings from God, and temptations, or

in their returns and breathings towards God again; but songs

are generally expressions of our own experiences, or of his

glories; we acquaint him what sense we have of his greatness

and goodness, and that chiefly in those instances which have

some relation to us: we breathe out our souls towards him,

and make our addresses of praise and acknowledgment to

him.43

Consequently, the redeemed community experiences in this life the

inklings of what they will enjoy for all eternity. As we pursue

holiness here in the knowledge and love of God we pursue heaven.

How the Saints Love God in the New Jerusalem

Even though humanity can pursue and live in much of the good

of heaven now, Watts eagerly looked forward to the time when:

Jesus shall reign where-e’er the sun

Does his successive journey’s run;

His kingdom spread from shore to shore,

Till moons shall wax and wane no more.44

This life anticipates a greater one. There still exist the

markings of sin, in our natures, in creation. Jesus does not

reign now in the manner that he will one day. The future glory

Watts anticipates includes both the eradication of any lingering

43 Watts, “An Essay Towards the Improvement of the Psalmody” in Works, 4:277.

44 Watts, “Christ’s Kingdom Among the Gentiles” in Works 4:67.

effects of sin and eternal advancement in the knowledge and love

of God.

In his treatise The Happiness of Separate Spirits Made Perfect Isaac

Watts explains the sense in which he believed human beings will

experience perfection in heaven. He points to three particulars,

“1. A great increase of knowledge without the mixture of error.

2. A glorious degree of holiness without the mixture of the least

sin. 3. Constant peace and joy without the mixture of any sorrow

or uneasiness.”45 Watts says that while we know God in this life

we know him through glasses. Scripture is a beautiful glass, far

superior to nature, but “the knowledge which departed spirits

obtain of their creator and their redeemer in the light of glory,

is far superior to that of nature and grace.”46 Watts eagerly

waits for the day when he can see God face to face.

Interestingly though, Watts does not exclude all of the old

means or glasses by we now know heaven from this future state.

Watts writes:

I freely allow immediate divine worship to take up a good

part of their everlasting day, their sabbath; and therefore

45 Watts, “Happiness of Separate Spirits,” in Works 2:154. 46 Ibid., 155.

I suppose them to be often engaged, millions at once, in

social worship; and sometimes acting apart, and raised in

sublime meditation of God, or in a fixed vision of his

blissful face…But at other times they may be making a report

to him of their faithful execution of some divine commission

they received from him…There may be other seasons also when

they are not immediately addressing the throne, but are most

delightfully engaged in recounting to each other the

wondrous steps of providence, wisdom and mercy, that seized

them from the very borders of hell and despair, and brought

them through a thousand dangers and difficulties…In short,

there is nothing written in the books of nature, the records

of providence, or the sacred volumes of grace, but may

minister materials at special seasons for the holy

conference of the saints on high.47

Watts anticipates having a mind that does make mistakes but

understands and interprets truth as clearly as the shining sun.

The future world he envisions will be an educational smorgasbord.

There will be an incredible variety of cultures, peoples,

47 Ibid., 173.

animals, lands and histories. After spending the first part of

eternity entranced before the throne of God Watts

enthusiastically hopes for the opportunity to hold conversation

with the many saints who each has their own story of God’s

providence in their life. One will never be bored in heaven.

In addition to perfect knowledge Watts adds that “As our

love of God is imperfect here so is all our devotion and worship…

We come before God with our prayers and our songs, but our

thoughts wander from him in the midst of worship, and we are gone

on a sudden to the ends of the earth.”48 In the New Jerusalem,

our hearts will not drag behind our minds. Love will be perfect

there. Similarly just as we experience interruptions of joy we

have here we will have constant peace and joy there. “In that

world,” says Watts, “There is no sorrow, for there is no sin; the

inhabitants of that city of the heavenly Jerusalem, shall never

say I am sick; for the people that dwell there shall be forgiven

their iniquity.”49 The thought of no more sickness must have been

a wonderfully encouraging thought for Watts.

48 Ibid., 2:156.49 Ibid., 159.

Isaac Watts never had a concern that one day in the future

state everything that could be learned will have been learned. He

never expresses any fear of exhausting this world. The activity

of worship, of growing in holiness or love, increases for all

eternity in so far as we grow further in knowing God. Since God

is perfect original being, this dynamic activity will never

cease:

The holiness of an innocent creature consists in attaining

the knowledge of the nature and will of God, according to

the utmost of its own present capacity, and the means of

discovery which it enjoys, and in the various exercises of

love to God in an exact proportion to it’s knowledge: or to

express it briefly thus, an innocent creature is perfectly

holy, when it knows and loves God to the utmost reach of

it’s present powers. If this be done, there is no sinful

defect, no guilty imperfection; and yet there may be almost

an infinite difference in the various degrees of power and

capacity, of knowledge and love, amongst innocent spirits:

One spirit may be formed capable of knowing much more of his

maker than another, and may be favoured with richer

discoveries. Now if every new divine discover raise an equal

proportion of love in the soul, then it is possible that any

soul might be perfectly holy at it’s first entrance into

heaven, and yet may make sublime advances in holiness

hourly.50

The greatness of the future state of heaven is that every person

there will be completely without sin. Their entire beings will

engage in communion with the most excellent joyous God. The

reality however is that even in this perfection humanity will

never exhaust God. By nature of our finiteness we will never

fully image God completely as he is. In this sense human beings

can never be perfect as God is perfect. However, rather than

seeing this a something negative Watts revels in it as something

glorious. Heaven is the experience of always growing up but never

growing old. There will be no hindrance between God and man. God

will impress himself directly unto human beings and humanity will

respond in rising to that revelation. Heaven is an eternal

expansion of human being in an impossible effort to match the

beauty and character of the eternal God.

50 Ibid., 185.

Conclusion

Isaac Watts sought to live his life as a creature. This

meant that for him, all happiness comes not from him but from his

maker. God alone is the original being and originally blessed.

Through all eternity he has existed as a perfectly joyous being

in that he has known and loved himself perfectly with the

Trinity. From God’s inner Trinitarian life come all the rivers of

beauty, of truth and goodness, of excellence. We also find joy as

we participate in God’s joy. We can love as God loves and so we

can be blessed as God is blessed. Though sin disrupts union with

God, Christ’s propitiatory death provides redemption and an

exalted glorification. Watts eagerly looked toward eternity which

will spent knowing and loving and expanding in knowing and loving

this infinite joyous God. In that place “heaven and nature sing”

and the song never stops.

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