Revelation 22:16-21 – Marana tha, Come, Lord Jesus!

We come to the final verses of this magisterial work, not only of the book of Revelation, but of the entire corpus of God’s special revelation of himself to his people. I’ll have some final thoughts on that in another post, but Revelation itself is maybe the most influential of all the books of the Bible in Western Civilization. I am sure books could be written on that topic (a search in Amazon shows there are some). The end to which we come is a fitting climax to all that came before because it is filled with hope for the faithful followers of the Lamb, and is an evangelistic call to “Come!” for whoever is thirsty. Isn’t that what it always comes down to, people realizing a thirst and hunger that absolutely nothing in this world can fill, until they find that filling from God in Christ. Jesus takes up the microphone again, if you will, after his declaration in verse 7 that he is coming soon:

¹⁶ “I, Jesus, have sent my angel to give you this testimony for the churches. I am the Root and the Offspring of David, and the bright Morning Star.”

The you is plural, so this testimony is given, as we saw in the beginning of the book, to the seven churches, but the messenger (the angel) is also giving it to us, and to whoever would heed these words. Testimony, martureó-μαρτυρέω, from which we get our English martyr, is a hugely important concept in Revelation, as we’ve seen. The word testimony is used ten times, and witness, coming from the same Greek root word, four times. Christianity is not a religion of ideas or mere experiences, but of events in history that happened, and which many people saw, so witnessed. They also testify, or speak out, because those events have real, substantive consequences for their lives, and as we’ve seen throughout these 2,000 years, all of existence. Christianity is rooted in objective reality, not in people’s heads. As hard as Revelation is to understand at times, and as much disagreement about it as there as been over all those years, it is written for us! For our encouragement, to teach us to live by faith, and not by sight. No matter how horrific this world is, or difficult our lives get, Jesus says our destiny is incomprehensibly wonderous, paradise in every sense of the word. And Jesus is saying that he is the actual author of the book of Revelation.

He is also declaring his Messianic bona fides, if you will. In Luke 20, Jesus stumps the religious professionals by asking them how the Messiah can be both David’s Lord and his son. The answer is easy, on this side of the question: Jesus is both God and man! A concept inconceivable, insane, and offensive to religious Jews in the first century, until Jesus rose from the dead to prove it. Jews knew of the Messianic line of David from Isaiah 11, which starts:

A shoot will come up from the stump of Jesse;
    from his roots a Branch will bear fruit.
² The Spirit of the Lord will rest on him—
    the Spirit of wisdom and of understanding,
    the Spirit of counsel and of might,
    the Spirit of the knowledge and fear of the Lord—
³ and he will delight in the fear of the Lord.

And it only gets more amazing from there. The hints of that shoot’s divinity are all over that chapter, and back in Rev. 5:5, Jesus is called the Rood of David. The morning star reference is found in chapter 2, and related to Jesus giving his authority to those who overcome. The Old Testament reference is found in Numbers 24 and Balaam’s prophecy:

¹⁷ “I see him, but not now;
    I behold him, but not near.
A star will come out of Jacob;
    a scepter will rise out of Israel.

This star will be a ruler, thus the scepter, and Jesus is that ruler, but now of all reality! Then the evangelistic nature of Revelation is affirmed in no uncertain terms:

¹⁷ The Spirit and the bride say, “Come!” And let the one who hears say, “Come!” Let the one who is thirsty come; and let the one who wishes take the free gift of the water of life.

This is the message both of God, the Spirit, and his church, the bride, us. We declare with God that when anyone drinks of this water, as Jesus says in John 4, he will never thirst again. It is the only thing, God’s Spirit, that can truly satiate us, and it will be “a spring of water welling up to eternal life.” And it is free! It doesn’t have to be earned, and there is nothing anyone can do to earn it. Unlike every other religion in the world, it is all mercy and grace. If anyone expresses any dissatisfaction and disappointment with life, we have the answer! We ought to tell more people about it. And that answer is not perfect circumstances, but a person! God himself in the person of Christ, the way, the truth, and the life.

The next two verses are a warning about the seriousness of this message:

¹⁸ I warn everyone who hears the words of the prophecy of this scroll: If anyone adds anything to them, God will add to that person the plagues described in this scroll. ¹⁹ And if anyone takes words away from this scroll of prophecy, God will take away from that person any share in the tree of life and in the Holy City, which are described in this scroll.

It’s not clear who this warning comes from, but it is only God who can back it up. There are consequences for rejecting the message, not just of this book, but of all Scripture. We not only see that all over this life, but Revelation affirms in no uncertain terms that there are eternal consequences as well. And the next verse says it is Jesus “who testifies to these things.” He wants everyone to know the immediacy of the message, that he is coming soon: don’t put it off! Make a decision to follow Jesus, and drink! Jesus says he is coming soon, and that is the church’s prayer:

Amen. Come, Lord Jesus.

The early Jewish Christians following Paul, prayed this in a phrase from I Cor. 16:22 with a word we might be familiar with, Marana tha. The Greek for Come, Lord reproduces that Aramaic expression and was used by early Christians. The answer to the Jewish lament, How long O Lord? is soon! The book, and the Bible, ends where it all started, with grace, the unmerited favor of God to the saints, to his people. God took the initiative to save his rebellious creatures in Genesis 3, and fulfills that promise in the glorious vision of Revelation to dwell with them forever. Amen and Amen!

Revelation 22:7-15 – Blessed are Those Allowed In This Eternal, Holy City

We’ve just seen that the angel was sent to show us “the things that must soon take place,” and now Jesus himself reiterates the point:

⁷ “Look, I am coming soon! Blessed is the one who keeps the words of the prophecy written in this scroll.”

As I explained, it is very apparent that God’s idea of “soon” and ours are two very different things, as we observe all throughout Scripture. The Greek is quickly, or swift, without necessary delay, but to us, 2,000 years sure seems a bit delayed. However, when we take into account forever, life eternal, what’s a couple thousand years. A drop in the bucket. Our lives, no matter how many years God grants us, are but a nanosecond in the cosmic scheme of things. And Jesus declared that he is the resurrection and the life, and the one who believes in him will live, even though he die; and whoever lives and believes in him will never die. We are with him, and more importantly he with us, now, and when we graduate to the next life, forever. And if this were not enough, he gives us his words to make us blessed, literally happy and to be envied.

I argued from verse six about the words that are “trustworthy and true” coming from “the spirits of the prophets” of the Lord and God, that they speak to the entirety of God’s special revelation in Scripture. Here, however, the soon Jesus speaks of, and what John is writing to his immediate first century audience, is specifically about Revelation. It applies every bit as much to us, as we’ve seen, but John wanted his audience to know he was talking about now, and their current lives in the Roman Empire. We’ve seen how much John repeats words and phrases, and these point us back to the first few verses of chapter 1. We were told this book is “a revelation of Jesus Christ” about “what must soon take place,” and blessed are those who read, hear, “and take to heart what is written in it, because the time is near.” These words for them and no less us, are relevant to now! There is an immediacy to the message because every day is a choice to follow the beast, to embrace the values of the whore of Babylon, the world system as John describes it in his first epistle, “the lust of the flesh, the lust of the eyes, and the pride of life,” have 666 written on our forehead, or the seal of the Lamb and the Father.

Then John affirms that he is “the one who heard and saw these things.” This is no scam, no grandiose made-up story out of his imagination, as the critics would contend. And it was so real to him, as he had done previously, he “fell down to worship at the feet of the angel who had been showing them to me,” and he gets rebuked again. This scene has about it what I call verisimilitude, or a realness that John doesn’t just throw in there in his made-up story. It was all overwhelming to him, and he’s just like the rest of us when he encounters a spiritual reality beyond human comprehension. John proclaimed the same factuality about Jesus in the first verses of his first epistle, who they heard, saw, looked at, and touched. And the angel said he is just a servant like John and and his “fellow prophets,” and all of us who “keep the words of this scroll,” so he abjures him, “Worship God!” And next:

¹⁰ Then he told me, “Do not seal up the words of the prophecy of this scroll, because the time is near.

This is exactly the opposite of what Daniel was told by an angel (12:4 and 12:9,), “Go your way, Daniel, because the words are rolled up and sealed until the time of the end.” Those words were about events that would happen hundreds of years into the future, while the words John was given were about now, and the whole scope of “the end times,” which started when Jesus rose from the dead, and the Holy Spirit was given to the saints. Then the angel tells him to let the people who do wrong and are vile, continue to do that, but for those who do right and are holy, continue to do that. In other words to God’s people, stay faithful; it is worth it. Don’t let the world system suck you into its lies. We see what the result is of that, not only in this life, but as these words tell us, in the eternal existence to come. Then Jesus reiterates the immediacy of the message:

¹² “Look, I am coming soon! My reward is with me, and I will give to each according to what he has done.

Many sincere Christian when they read this exclaim, Oh crap! I’m screwed. We all know we don’t even live up to our own limited standards, let alone those of our holy God. Now what? That depends if we are immersed in the gospel, or still stuck in the law. First, Jesus affirms again who he is, “I am the Alpha and the Omega, the First and the Last, the Beginning and the End,” the third time he has declared this. He is God! Then he allows those who live in the fear of the law, and their own imperfection and sinfulness, to see the power of the gospel:

¹⁴ “Blessed are those who wash their robes, that they may have the right to the tree of life and may go through the gates into the city. 

The only ones allowed in this city, as we’ll remember, are those whose names are written in the Book of Life. This is such and important part of the story of Revelation that it is repeated four times (Rev. 3:5, 17:8, 20:15, and 21:7). It is those whose names are written in this book before the world was even created who have washed their robes, as we learned in chapter 7, “and made them white (pure) in the blood of the Lamb.” We learned earlier, in chapter 1, that his blood “has freed us from our sins,” and in chapter 5, that because he was slain, he purchased for God people “from every tribe and language and people and nation.” And notice, when Jesus returns for us, it is with his reward. He will give us “according to what we have done,” not to judge and condemn us (that is impossible because he was condemned for us), but to reward us! And notice we will have “the right” to the tree of life which Adam and Eve forfeited. This is significant because this access is not based on a whim of God. Unlike the pagan gods or the God is Islam, there is nothing arbitrary about it because it is based on God’s justice. The death and resurrection of Christ fully satisfied his wrath, and the robes we will wear have been legally given to us. As John says in his first epistle, God is faithful and just to forgive us our sins. That is why we can take this to the eternal bank!

Lastly of our eternal home, he says that outside of it “are the dogs, those who practice magic arts, the sexually immoral, the murderers, the idolaters and everyone who loves and practices falsehood.” It is these whose names are not written in the Book of Life that were thrown into the lake of fire. I’m not sure how this works, but these people practice and exist at the same time in a metaphorical lake of fire, which speaks to the eternality of people who reject Christ. The point for God’s people is that nothing, no sin, the sin that ruins everything, the sin we see and experience causing all the pain, misery, sorrow, and death in this fallen world, will be allowed into this eternal city. No wonder we will be blessed!

Revelation 22:5, 6 – These Words are Trustworthy and True!

My last post got away from me, so I had to cut it off in the middle of John’s continuing description of the New Jerusalem. I left off at:

⁵ There will be no more night. They will not need the light of a lamp or the light of the sun, for the Lord God will give them light. And they will reign for ever and ever.

We saw in chapter 21 that the city didn’t need a sun or moon because of the glory of God and the Lamb, so it follows that there will be no more night. As I pointed out, John doesn’t say there is no sun or moon, only that they are not needed, and that his symbolic meaning is the safety of God’s people from all that is harmful because of the effects of sin. He reiterates that here, not that these things won’t exist, only that they are not necessary. The symbolic nature of Revelation might apply here as well. In the ancient world night was especially dangerous because bad guys had carte blanche to do their thing given law enforcement was not common. And the safety that is our eternally is the reason the gates are open all the time, unlike the fallen world where they had to be closed every night. That can certainly be some of John’s meaning here, but it can also be a contrast to the theme of John in his gospels of darkness and light. The former is man spiritually benighted, whose deeds are done in darkness because he doesn’t want them seen, while light where we do that which we are not ashamed to do. There will be no deeds of darkness in this new city come down from heaven.

This idea of the saints reigning or ruling with Christ in this new, reconstructed universe is a theme of Revelation, being declared four times. Rule implies authority, and different levels of it, and we see in this fallen world how authority if a feature of existence that makes peace and productivity possible. Without proper authority and the willingness of people to obey it, you have anarchy and thus misery and suffering. Differing levels of authority are also necessary for civilization to exist, so it seems will be in the new earth, the new Jerusalem, as well. The difference between authority in this fallen world and that, is there God’s people will gladly obey, and there will be no rebellion to mess everything up.

Now the descriptions are over, and the affirmation of the truth of John’s visions is declared. This is another binary of the Christian faith, it is either true, or it is not, and there is no in between. If all of what John saw is not true, including all of Scripture from Genesis 1 to this final chapter, then it is all a lie and a hoax, for which the followers of Jesus gave their lives. As my new book argues, no way they just made it all up. The angel affirms this:

⁶ And he said to me, “These words are trustworthy and true. And the Lord, the God of the spirits of the prophets, has sent his angel to show his servants what must soon take place.”

The Greek word for trustworthy, pistos- πιστός, is the word for faith or belief, or in other words, we can take “these words” to the eternal bank. And all of it is trustworthy, we can trust it, specifically because it is true, aléthinos-ἀληθινός, literally made of truth, real or genuine. We may doubt it, which I do daily, because for me it’s all hard to believe. I can’t see it! I can’t see this spiritual reality; I have to trust that it is really there. For me, the most surefire recipe for doubt (and psychologically and emotionally healthy people doubt; I don’t trust those who don’t, or who claim absolute certainty is possible) is what’s become my favorite apologetic tactic: the consideration of the alternative. If the Bible and all it declares is not true, then something else has to be. And nothing else, no other worldview, be it informed by atheistic materialism, or pantheism, comes close to being more plausible than Christianity. The reason is that if we put up the evidence side by side for the fundamental assertions of each worldview, or the religions they inspire, next to Christianity, it’s a joke. It’s like comparing a tsunami to a rain drop, I mean not even close to close.

This isn’t the first reference to these words being trustworthy and true. In 19:9, the angel speaking of the wedding supper of the Lamb says, “These are the true words of God.” And in 21:5, he who is seated on the throne speaking of making everything new says, “Write this down, for these words are trustworthy and true.” It is the very words of God, written down, which we can trust as true. We can take these and the the angel’s reference here to “these words,” to mean the words of these specific chapters about the New Jerusalem, or all the words in Revelation, or what I take to be more likely, the entirety of Scripture. God’s words were written down from the very beginning, from Moses to the entire history of redemption, which is why Jews and Christians are “people of the book.” In Christianity’s battle with pagan heathenism to create Western civilization, words were as fundamental to that victory as swords. All were written with the conviction that they were tied back to the the true words in the Bible. This conviction of the absolute truth of the Christian worldview, and the words that inform it, was unique in the entirety of the ancient world. Every peoples on earth in some sense thought their view of reality was “true,” and they still do, but it’s the exclusivity of the truth claims of Christianity that make it True! I think it is “the spirits of the prophets” who spoke from the Lord God and his Spirit that expands the meaning of “these words” to all of God’s special revelation.

Finally, I have to laugh at the angel’s declaration that he showed John and us “what must soon take place.” God’s meaning of soon and ours are two very different things! As I’ve said and say over and over, God is never in a hurry. Everyone in Scripture, waits and waits and waits, as do we. All of God’s saints, his holy set apart people wait. From Noah (how many years must he have been building his ark with people mocking him), to Abraham and Sarah (the promised child is coming, and 20 years later, nothing), to his descendants (400 years of bondage in Egypt!), to the people of Israel wandering in the wilderness outside of the promised land for 40 years, to the people in the land waiting 400(!) years for their first king, then David waiting his entire reign to build a temple, which is then given his son to build, then waiting 200 plus years for a divided kingdom to come together, only to watch one part destroyed, then another 150 years for the other part to be taken into exile for 70 years, then after the last prophet Malachi speaks, waiting another 400(!) years for the Messiah. That’s a lot of waiting! We can relate to the biblical lament, “How long O Lord!” So we are best advised to take God’s promise of soon in God’s timing, where in Peter’s words, “With the Lord a day is like a thousand years, and a thousand years are like a day.” The point is that our hope is sure, and we can stake our lives, and deaths, on it.

Revelation 22:1-4 – No Longer Will There Be Any Curse!

So, after eight years and one month, and a very leisurely walk, I come to the last chapter in the Bible. It’s impossible for us to imagine now, but in the ancient world before the Hebrews, ancient people themselves couldn’t imagine that history was going somewhere, to some end or conclusion, to some purpose for which it existed. Life was to them cyclical, an endless array of events happening over and over going nowhere. But while the Hebrews introduced teleology in history, they couldn’t finish it. That would be left to Jesus of Nazareth who told them, and us, that the whole story of history is His Story. And here in the last chapter of Revelation and last chapter of the Bible, God’s revelation of his purposes for humanity, we see where it is going. All of the ideas and images adumbrated in the Old Testament are symbolized in fulfillment in Revelation, and in chapter 22 we see the fulfillment of all that came before. First, John tells us of a river:

Then the angel showed me the river of the water of life, as clear as crystal, flowing from the throne of God and of the Lamb ² down the middle of the great street of the city. 

The direct biblical antecedent for this vision comes from Ezekiel 47 and his vision of a last day’s temple out of which flows life-giving water. The water flows into a river that gets ever deeper until it flows into the Dead Sea making it alive with an abundance of fish. In addition, fruit trees grow along its banks and bear fruit as will happen along the banks of this river. Jesus promised in us “a spring of water welling up to eternal life,” and here is the eternal fulfillment of that promise. The water is as clean and pure as our experience can imagine, and it flows from the authority and power of God, symbolized by his (the two are one divine essence) throne, something we’ve seen throughout Revelation. God is directing all to his appointed salvific end. Then we see that we are back to the restored garden:

On each side of the river stood the tree of life, bearing twelve crops of fruit, yielding its fruit every month. And the leaves of the tree are for the healing of the nations. ³ No longer will there be any curse. The throne of God and of the Lamb will be in the city, and his servants will serve him.

In the garden the tree of life was in the middle of the garden, while here it extends to both sides of the river. We’re not to think of one literal tree somehow on two sides of a river, but that this tree abounds with the fruit of life flowing from the throne of God and the Lamb. In Ezekiel’s vision there are “a great number of trees on each side of the river,” and they grow all kinds of fruit for food and their leaves are for healing. Here John numbers the crops at twelve pointing us back to the fullness of God’s people in the twelve tribes (Chap. 7) and 144,000 which are in fact “a great multitude no one could count.” Before the days of modern worldwide agriculture, having fruit every month was an impossibility, but here in the restored garden nothing is impossible.

The leaves for healing do not imply there will be sickness, but point again to the fulfillment of the promise we read in 21:4: “He will wipe every tear from their eyes. There will be no more death or mourning or crying or pain, for the old order of things has passed away.” All of that is possible because the curse of sin is no more. As we know, this curse entered the world when Adam and Eve decided to listen to the lies of the serpent, and ate the fruit of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, the one tree in the garden from which they were told not to eat. It is fascinating that at the heart of sin was epistemology, or a kind of knowing that man was not allowed to have, or everything would go to hell, which it promptly did. The curse entered man into a spiritual war he could not win, and marred creation so it would work against everything he (and she) would try to do. From that moment, we would all be born into the gravitational pull of sin that is always weighing us down, and making all things difficult. Most importantly it alienated man from God, thus Adam and Eve hid from him, like all sinners do by nature. God, however, had a plan to address this curse, and that plan was him! In the person of the Lamb:

Christ redeemed us from the curse of the law by becoming a curse for us—for it is written, “Cursed is everyone who is hanged on a tree

The curse has finally been wiped out from all of creation, and God can dwell with man, male and female he created them, and now they are recreated. We no longer hide or run away because we are reconciled to him, and we can serve him perfectly as we tried to do on this fallen world in our fallen bodies, very imperfectly. The extent of this reconciliation is shown by what we could never do on this side of eternity, or we would die:

⁴ They will see his face, and his name will be on their foreheads. 

We’ll remember in Exodus 33 that when Moses asked God to show him his glory, God replied: “you cannot see my face, for man shall not see me and live.” There seems to have been a couple exceptions to this rule, though. Jacob in Gen. 32:30 says he saw God face to face, but if you read the passage, it says Jacob wrestled “with a man” (a theophany). In Exodus 24 Moses and the elders “saw the God of Israel,” but what exactly that looked like, we’re not told. Likely this was another theophany, just as the Lord appeared to Abraham in Genesis 18 in the form of “three men.” Jesus told us, though, that God is spirit, so he certainly doesn’t have a “face,” and we can’t “see” him. He is also omnipresent, so how can we “see” an omnipresent being. But in one sense we can “see” God. When Philip asked Jesus to show them the Father, he replied that if they’ve seen him they have “seen” the Father. The point is God’s presence, who he is, and he can only be “seen” in Christ.

For the rest of Israelite history, however, all 1,500 years, seeing “God’s face,” i.e., living in intimate communion with him, was an eschatological hope. He was wholly other and unlike the pagan so-called gods. They knew his presence would mean death for sinful human beings without a mediator, and the temple was a literal picture of that. Only one man, and that one time a year, could enter his presence in the Holy of Holies. Now, not only can we see his face, but his name, who he is, will be implanted upon us, on our being. He purchased us, and we are now fully and completely his.

We’ve seen the contrast throughout Revelation, that we are either for the world, or for the Lamb. It is a binary choice, one or the other, the mark of the beast, or the mark of the Lamb, the world and its deceitful pleasures, or God and eternal fellowship with the author of life. We saw throughout the book that marks on foreheads are an important indicator of who belongs to whom. Jesus told the church in Philadelphia (Rev. 3:13) those who overcome will have written on them the name of his God and the name of the city of his God, as well as his new name. The symbolic picture is of complete possession and blessing, and of rescue from all the horrors of the curse of sin, forever. We’ll have to continue to see what’s in store for us in the next post.

Revelation 21:22-27 – The Light of The Presence of God and the Lamb are Sun and Moon

Having finished attempting to describe the indescribable beauty of the city, John now comes to what makes the city that beautiful: God! This new Jerusalem, though, will have the presence of God in a far different way than the earthly city:

²² I did not see a temple in the city, because the Lord God Almighty and the Lamb are its temple.

Because in English word order determines meaning, we can’t see in these first words the emphasis John is making as if it’s almost shocking that there would be no temple. So, in Greek John says, “And temple not I saw in it.” The temple, and before it the tabernacle, was the characteristic feature that defined God’s people. That there could be a people of God without one was astonishing, but the point of the temple was to both bring and shield the people from his presence. If you look at that process of building the tabernacle in Exodus you see both. They were to make a sanctuary for God so he could dwell among them (Ex. 25:8), but as he gives them instructions on how to build it, it becomes clear he is also separating himself from them. They needed to learn that their God was not like any of the gods of the pagans, but a holy deity, and wholly other. At the same time they were being taught of their sinfulness, and their need for a mediator, and eventually a Savior.

This is the perfectly biblical seventh and final time that John has used the phrase “Lord God Almighty” to refer to God. Again, English word order doesn’t do justice to John’s emphasis in the sentence. He is in effect drawing a parallel between the Lord God and the Lamb, so he says, “for the Lord God Almighty temple of it is and the Lamb.” If you look at all the references to the Lamb (31 in all), it is abundantly clear the Lamb is God every bit as much as the Lord God Almighty, and he is now the eternal mediator between God and man. Paul tells us, “there is one mediator between God and men, the man Christ Jesus,” and his mediatorial role as our Savior that allows us to experience the presence of Almighty God forever is eternal. Jesus is God and the eternal high priest who allows us to live in harmony with our Creator forever, thus they are the city’s temple. But that is not all:

 ²³ The city does not need the sun or the moon to shine on it, for the glory of God gives it light, and the Lamb is its lamp.

John does not directly say here that there is no sun or moon in this new redeemed cosmos, only that they are not needed for their light. Think of it as God’s glory as the electricity, and the Lamb is the lightbulb through which that flows into and over the city. Lights and lamps (and lame analogies to electricity) are the best John can do to try to capture something on this earth we only glimpse partially (Rom. 1:20). As with the rest of Revelation, this is the fulfillment of Old Testament visions, this most directly from Isaiah 60:

“Arise, shine, for your light has come,
    and the glory of the Lord rises upon you.
² See, darkness covers the earth
    and thick darkness is over the peoples,
but the Lord rises upon you
    and his glory appears over you.
³ Nations will come to your light,
    and kings to the brightness of your dawn.

¹⁹ The sun will no more be your light by day,
    nor will the brightness of the moon shine on you,
for the Lord will be your everlasting light,
    and your God will be your glory.
²⁰ Your sun will never set again,
    and your moon will wane no more;
the Lord will be your everlasting light,
    and your days of sorrow will end.

Read the entire chapter, and you will see the direct connection to these verses in this chapter. Then we learn there will be a worldwide significance to this city:

²⁴ The nations will walk by its light, and the kings of the earth will bring their splendor into it. ²⁵ On no day will its gates ever be shut, for there will be no night there. ²⁶ The glory and honor of the nations will be brought into it. 

As we’ve seen throughout Revelation, the salvation of the Lamb is universal, and for the people he has purchased “from every nation, tribe, people and language.” This new earth is going to be a very different place from the one we currently inhabit, as will be the people because only the redeemed of the Lamb will be there. I imagine the reference to nations and kings means there will be rulers and ruled, that authority and human experience with rulers and ruled on this fallen world will be something we also experience in the new heavens and earth. Jesus in the gospels implies as much.

In the ancient world shut gates and night went hand and hand. Night was a dangerous time, and travelers would try to make it to the walled cities by night so they could experience the safety of life inside the gates. This city, however, is perpetually illumined by the glory of God and the Lamb and their holiness, so there is no need for shut gates; the redeemed can come and go as they please in perfect safety. The reason is because

²⁷ Nothing impure will ever enter it, nor will anyone who does what is shameful or deceitful, but only those whose names are written in the Lamb’s book of life.

Using the word enter is a metaphorical necessity for John because he uses the city of Jerusalem as the picture of God’s holiness and presence, but the city is the bride of the Lamb, his people, so people don’t enter and leave this city. In this new redeemed and restored cosmos, “the earth will be filled with the knowledge of the glory of the LORD as the waters cover the sea” (Hab. 2:14). The city is in effect now the entire saved cosmos (For God so loved the cosmos . . . .). As Paul says in Romans 8:21, “that the creation itself will be liberated from its bondage to decay and brought into the freedom of the glory of the children of God.” It is impossible for us to imagine, but we will inhabit a sinless creation forever. Life will be what it was intended to be from the beginning. All that is contrary to life and God’s holiness will be gone. Even though that is literally inconceivable, I am grateful that is our destiny, and Jesus came back from the dead to guarantee it.

Revelation 21:9-21 – The Unimaginable Beauty of the Bride of the Lamb

We’ve just seen the horrific eternal fate of those who are not God’s people, something no Christian should celebrate because, literally, there but for the grace of God . . . . Now, though, we get to see the contrast to the eternal destiny of God’s people. The real contrast, however, is with the worldly kingdom that promised everything, and delivered nothing but misery.

John, using the exact wording from 17:1, says an angel who had one of the seven bowls is going to show him “the bride, the wife of the Lamb,” while in 17 it was “the punishment of the great prostitute, who sits by many waters.” This is more encouragement for John’s readers to remain faithful to the Lamb who purchased them with his blood. Also in the exact same wording, the angel carries him “away in the Spirit,” but whereas previously “into a wilderness,” here it’s “to a mountain great and high.” Previously it was Babylon the Great who had been destroyed in judgment, now “it’s the Holy City, Jerusalem, coming down out of heaven from God.” Having drawn much from Ezekiel throughout Revelation, John continues that (chapter 8) when the Spirit lifts him up where in a vision he sees Jerusalem as well, but now it is the heavenly Jerusalem:

¹¹ It shone with the glory of God, and its brilliance was like that of a very precious jewel, like a jasper, clear as crystal.

Then for the next ten verses he tries to describe the brilliance, and mere words cannot do it justice, although he tries. First, the size of the city is massive, bigger than any city on earth could ever be. In Greek John says “12,000 stadia,” which would be 1,400 miles, and it’s a perfect square. That would be the equivalent of Philadelphia to the middle of Nebraska, squared. North and south would be like northern North Dakota to southern Louisiana. That’s a big city! The point, of course, isn’t the physical size, but that it is big enough for the multitudes purchased with the Lamb’s blood “from every tribe and language and people and nation,” and “a great multitude that no one could count.” God is not stingy with his saving grace! Some Christians because of their ostensible “theological purity” (and this inflicts Christian from every imaginable tradition) think relatively few are to be saved (wide is the gate and narrow the road, that kind of thing), but that is not at all the biblical witness. And this capaciousness of God’s mercy and grace isn’t just here at the end of the story, but from the very beginning with God’s promises to Abram (Gen. 12, 15, and 17), respectively “a great nation,” offspring as numerous as the stars in the sky, and “the father of many nations.”

In addition to the hugeness of the city, will be the security of it. John says it is surrounded by a mega high wall, and it is impossibly thick, humanly speaking, 200 feet. To get some sense of how thick that is, a hockey rink is 200 feet long, and a 20 story building is 200 feet high. That is a seriously thick wall! Of course, no wall could or needed to be that thick in the ancient world. The reason it is so secure is not just because it is huge and massively fortified, but because of its foundations and gates; they make it eternally secure. The wall is mega high, and has 12 gates on four sides (3 each) that are guarded by angels, and “On the gates were written the names of the twelve tribes of Israel,” which mirrors Ezekiel’s vision (chapter 48), which points forward to this one. There, the name of the city from that time on will be, “The Lord is there.” The foundations speak to what allows this great city to exist:

¹⁴ The wall of the city had twelve foundations, and on them were the names of the twelve apostles of the Lamb.

The names of the apostles isn’t the point, but the message of the Lamb they carried that makes the city possible, from chapter 1:

To him who loves us and has freed us from our sins by his blood, ⁶ and has made us to be a kingdom and priests to serve his God and Father—to him be glory and power for ever and ever!

The names are further symbolic of the fullness of God’s covenant people won through the death and exaltation of the Lamb of God. Then in verses 18-21, John tries to describe the magnificence of the city:

¹⁸ The wall was made of jasper, and the city of pure gold, as pure as glass. ¹⁹ The foundations of the city walls were decorated with every kind of precious stone. 

As in most of the rest of Revelation, the description is symbolic as John is trying to describe a beauty beyond anything that can be imagined in our current fallen world in our current fallen state, but he’s trying. Back in chapter four, the one who sat on the throne, “had the appearance of jasper and ruby,” and “A rainbow that shone like an emerald encircled the throne.” Now, the breathtaking beauty of the presence of God himself that emanates from his throne is going to permeate the entire city, who is the bride of the Lamb, who is the people of God! That would be us, you and me! John is trying to describe us in our to be glorified eternal state as God’s redeemed people. The contrast is infinite, and impossible for John to capture in mere words. Our experience has nothing to compare it to, but as I said John tries.

While the wall is made of jasper, a dark red, the city itself is made of gold and compares it to pure glass. He’ll say in the last verse, “The great street of the city was of gold, as pure as transparent glass.” Gold is not at all transparent, but again John is struggling against the limits of our experience of beauty to describe something that is in essence indescribable. And one of the most valuable commodities, gold, is so common in this city it is used to pave a street! We also learn that the foundations of the city’s walls are “decorated with every kind of precious stone,” and there symbolically a perfect biblical twelve. First, we are to think of the gems that adorned the high priest’s breastplate at the building of the tabernacle in Exodus 28. There they represented the twelve tribes of Israel, thus the entire people of God; those the high priest represented when he went into the Holy of Holies one day a year on the Day of Atonement. This entire city represents the people of God living in the Holy of Holies in the presence of Almighty God forever!

The other piece of symbolism takes us back to the garden, the beginning of God’s relationship to man in Edenic perfection before his fall into sin and death. In Ezekiel 28 (verses 11-19), “we read a lament  concerning the king of Tyre,” and that it was “in Eden, the garden of God; every precious stone adorned.” it. That prefigures the great harlot Babylon’s adornment in gold, precious stones, and pearls (Rev. 17:4; 18:12, 16), and arrogance of all the world’s systems that set themselves up against God. They are brought down, and paradise is here restored, specifically for the people of God in unimaginable beauty. And this city is entered through “the pearly gates,” because they are actual pearl: “The twelve gates were twelve pearls, each gate made of a single pearl.” This completes the contrast with Babylon the Great, who was “glittering with gold, precious stones and pearls.” She is no more, and we are forever!

Revelation 21:5-8 – Our God Makes Everything New!

John has seen a new heaven and a new earth because the old has passed away, and he saw a new Jerusalem come down out of heaven. Then he hears God say:

⁵ He who was seated on the throne said, “I am making everything new!” Then he said, “Write this down, for these words are trustworthy and true.”

I love that! That is our God, who makes all things new. I’ve been thinking a lot about the kingdom of God, and how our tendency is not to see it in the midst of this dark and fallen world. We think of salvation as somehow “going to heaven,” and escaping this world, but that is not the Christian conception of “being saved” at all. Look at how many times the word kingdom is used in the gospels, and you’ll see the centrality of the kingdom to the purpose and work of Christ. The kingdom is here and now, it is breaking into the darkness though God’s people to transform (all things new) chaos and disorder, discord and hate, into, well, the opposite. Thus, thy kingdom come . . . . It is why we fight against the gravitational pull of sin, which is more than mere morality. It is first and foremost love, but it is far more than interpersonal relationships, because it is first loving God, which means through Christ to rightly treasure all his blessings. Thus we fight against the fall; we dust, pick weeds in the garden, build things, make a living, plan, organize, learn and grow in our knowledge, or in other words create civilization. God through his people transformed the ancient world into the modern world, and there isn’t one of us who would prefer to live in the former. That is all part of thy kingdom come . . . . Christians always tend to over spiritualize their faith as if how it affects everything in this life is an afterthought; it is not! And we know it is “trustworthy and true” not just because God says it, but because he transforms people and things! Then he adds:

⁶ He said to me: “It is done. I am the Alpha and the Omega, the Beginning and the End. To the thirsty I will give water without cost from the spring of the water of life. 

God spoke these same words in 16:17 when the seventh angel poured out his bowl and final judgment was accomplished. These are the first and last letters of the Greek alphabet, denoting that God in Christ is all in all. The water reminds us of Jesus’ encounter with the Samaritan woman at the well in John 4, when he said, “whoever drinks the water I give them will never thirst. Indeed, the water I give them will become in them a spring of water welling up to eternal life.” Or in John 7 when Jesus said, “Let anyone who is thirsty come to me and drink. Whoever believes in me, as Scripture has said, rivers of living water will flow out of him.” To those who feel and understand their thirst, who see their need and want more than merely this life can offer, he offers eternal satiety, hope, meaning, purpose, fulfillment, love, or in other words transformation! Then he brings us back to something he said in each of the seven letters:

 ⁷ Those who are victorious will inherit all this, and I will be their God and they will be my children. 

We’ll remember again that John was writing this to Christians in the first century whose loyalty to Christ, sometimes on the pain of death, was a daily challenge. It is in our day too, but mostly in much more subtle ways. What john is saying is that what this world offers is nothing in comparison to the eternal riches that await us, which is God himself! We have a choice, which is who or what will be our God. Then he contrasts these that overcome with those who do not:

 ⁸ But the cowardly, the unbelieving, the vile, the murderers, the sexually immoral, those who practice magic arts, the idolaters and all liars—they will be consigned to the fiery lake of burning sulfur. This is the second death.”

If we go back to God giving eternal water to the thirsty, we’ll understand that the type of life people live, faithful followers of God, or not, will well up out of them; they won’t be able to help it. As Jesus said, evil and goodness reside in the heart, and out of its overflow the mouth speaks. Jesus also said that good and bad trees only bear fruit consistent with their nature. Paul warns that those who live according to the flesh (sarx) and not the spirit “will not inherit the kingdom of God.” The biblical point, though, isn’t that we have to live a certain way in order to earn this inheritance. Rather, those who are redeemed are given the Holy Spirit of God at regeneration which will become a well of life-giving water. When the Creator of the universe decides to take up residence in our being, it will make a difference!

Those who are not, well, they will sadly remain bad trees. Keep in mind that John (and Paul for that matter) are writing in specific historical contexts (number one rule of hermeneutics is to know what that is) addressing specific issues to those they are writing to (rule number two is what the audience would be expected to understand). Keep in mind that the contrast between the pagans and Christians was much bigger in ancient Greco-Roman culture than in our day with people affected, knowingly or not, by 2,000 years of Christian influence. John wants to paint a stark picture because the temptation, pagan or Christian, the choice between the two was so incredibly stark. That simply isn’t true in most instances in our day, at least in the West. Unfortunately, we’re often lazy Christians exactly because the choice isn’t back and white, either or. Thus, Moralistic Therapeutic Deism is the default religion of almost all westerners, and not exactly the temptation paganism was to the first generation of Christians.

So John has to paint a radically different picture, the one Jesus gave us, between the eternal destiny of God’s people and those seduced by the promises of Rome and paganism, which is why cowardly is first on the list. It took real courage to stand for Jesus. We learn that there is such a thing as an eternal hell from Jesus (it’s barely mentioned in the rest of the New Testament), and he says specifically the fire never goes out. He also says directly, and often implies, in his parables that the suffering for rejecting him is eternal. As I’ve said many times here, I do not like to think about hell. But given the biblical witness I could never go to where one of the author’s goes who I’m reading. He believes without the gift from God, such a verse implies life is extinguished. He states, “There is no sense here that human beings or their (‘souls’) are inherently immortal.” The only way to come to such a conclusion is wishful thinking, and I don’t blame him. For me, the biblical text will not allow it.

Revelation 21:1-4 – A New Heaven and a New Earth!

Finally, we come to the result of everything that came before, and I just don’t mean in Revelation. With John’s final “I saw,” we are shown the fulfillment of God’s promise to Adam and Eve in Genesis 3 that God would crush the serpent’s head. From there the long and torturous unfolding of redemptive history of God’s covenant promise of redemption is now accomplished:

Then I saw a new heaven and a new earth, for the first heaven and the first earth had passed away, and there was no longer any sea. 

We are now seeing the eschatological fulfillment of Isaiah 65:17-25 when God revealed that to get rid of this fallen mess of a world, he would have to “create new heavens and a new earth. The former things will not be remembered, nor will they come to mind.” John sees what happened in 20:11 just prior to the dead being judged, “The earth and the heavens fled from his presence, and there was no place for them.” The entirety of the fallen order could not withstand the holiness and power of Almighty God, and a resurrection of all creation is happening before his eyes. Jesus came not to just save individuals, his people, but to but to save the world, the cosmos, his created order. In that most famous of verses we’re told, “For God so loved the world . . .” Paul fills in the picture of what this means in Romans 8:

¹⁹ For the creation waits in eager expectation for the children of God to be revealed. ²⁰ For the creation was subjected to frustration, not by its own choice, but by the will of the one who subjected it, in hope ²¹ that the creation itself will be liberated from its bondage to decay and brought into the freedom and glory of the children of God.

In John 3:16, we read that because God so loved the world, “whoever believes in him shall not perish but have eternal life,” and think that means “going to heaven.” It means no such thing! It means heaven is coming down to us! In the form of a purified and and transformed holy material world in which we will get to live forever. Creation itself has been redeemed as well, and will be resurrected along with us. The sea John references symbolizes the realm from which chaos and rebellion emerged to devastate the first earth. We saw beasts coming out of the sea in Daniel 7 who would oppress God’s people, and the beast come out of the sea in 13:1. Now there will be no sea as there was on the fallen earth, so no place of threat out of which might come anything that can disturb the perfect peace Jesus purchased with his blood. Then John witnesses what must have been an amazing site:

² I saw the Holy City, the new Jerusalem, coming down out of heaven from God, prepared as a bride beautifully dressed for her husband.

We’ll get a detailed description of just how “beautifully dressed” this bride will be adorned a little later in the chapter, but the description like almost everything else in Revelation is symbolic for something else. We were told back in 19:8 that the wedding of the Lamb had come, and that the bride had made herself ready:

Fine linen, bright and clean, was given her to wear.” Fine linen stands for the righteous acts of the saints.

We see here an echo of I Corinthians 1:30 where Paul tells us that Christ is our righteousness; we are given this as we’re might be given linen to wear, but they are still our acts. I have no idea how that works either; I just know that I’m glad those works are from God granted in Christ. Then John moves from seeing to hearing:

³ And I heard a loud voice from the throne saying, “Look! God’s dwelling place is now among the people, and he will dwell with them. They will be his people, and God himself will be with them and be their God. 

Something amazing is going to happen when John hears a mega voice, and this voice tells him that he’s about to see something fulfilled, the ultimate telos (end or purpose) of redemptive history. Because of man’s sin, he was driven out of the garden, out from God’s presence, but God promised to rectify that. He took the initiative with Adam and Eve to seek them while they hid from his presence, as sinners always do unless God draws them to himself. He continued to take the initiative in creating for himself a people, eventually promising a sign, a virgin who would give birth to a son named Immanuel, which means God with us. He gave us a picture of this in the Exodus and the Israelites wandering in the wilderness of Sinai when he had them build a tabernacle for his presence. Then once in the land of promise, he had them build a temple so his dwelling place would be permanent. Both of these were limited because of the sin of man, and it would take the God-man to allow us to truly dwell in God’s presence and not be consumed. Thus, John tells us in the first chapter of his gospel that Jesus, the Word of God, tabernacled among us, made his dwelling with us. He would make the reconciliation between a holy God and sinful man complete. Then John tells us further what this will mean:

⁴ ‘He will wipe every tear from their eyes. There will be no more death’ or mourning or crying or pain, for the old order of things has passed away.”

John is witnessing the fulfillment of the eschatological banquet of Isaiah 25 when God will “swallow up death forever,” and “wipe away the tears from all faces.” Paul adds in I Corinthians 15:54 at the resurrection that death will be “swallowed up in victory.” This is to me, in the very overused word of Vizzini in The Princess Bride, inconceivable! I can’t imagine there being no more death or mourning or crying or pain because in this world misery is ubiquitous. And when we don’t experience these things directly, we fear them, we live in anxiety and worry, and some live in existential dread as if the eternal hammer might drop on them any time.

I’ll give you a brief apologetics point with a question? If I find this blissful life after death inconceivable, why do I believe it? There are two very substantial reasons. One is that if I do not believe it, what do I believe? I call this the consideration of the alternative. What alternative to God in Scripture in Christ makes more sense of reality, or is a more plausible belief system? If Christianity isn’t the truth about the nature of reality, something else has to be. So far, nothing else for me comes close to compelling belief like Christianity. Like ex-atheist C.S. Lewis said, I believe in Christianity like I believe the sun has risen, not because I saw it, but by it I saw everything else. The other reason is that a man claiming to be God came back from the dead after being tortured to death on a Roman cross and buried. We can have beyond-a-reasonable-doubt certainty this happened because the eyewitnesses to it proclaimed it even while they gave their lives for it. Not to mention, I cannot believe the entire story of redemption we find in our Bibles is made up, mere human invention: Book coming soon!