Heavenly Father, as we meet now in your presence, we ask that you would open our ears to hear your voice, to open our hearts to love you more and more, to open our souls to receive your word in all of its fullness, that your Son Jesus, who is the word made flesh, that he would be glorified and he would be honored in our lives. For it is in his name that we do pray. Amen. Amen. Beginning in verse 1.
Then I saw a new heaven and a new earth, for the first heaven and the first earth passed away, and the sea was no more. And I saw the holy city, New Jerusalem, coming down out of heaven from God, prepared as a bride adorned for her husband. And I heard a loud voice from the throne saying, “Behold, the dwelling place of God is with man. He will dwell with them, and they will be his people, and God himself will be with them as their God. He will wipe away every tear from their eyes, and death shall be no more, neither shall there be mourning, nor crying, nor pain anymore, for the former things have passed away.
And he who is seated on the throne said, Behold, I am making all things new. Also he said, Write this down, for these words are trustworthy and true. And 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 from the spring of the water of life without payment.
The one who conquers will have this heritage, and I will be his God and he will be my son. But as for the cowardly, the faithless, the detestable, as for murderers, the sexually immoral, sorcerers, idolaters, and all liars, their portion will be in the lake that burns with fire and sulfur, which is the second death. Verse 22, and I saw no temple in the city, for its temple is the Lord God the Almighty and the Lamb. And the city has no need of sun or moon to shine on it, for the glory of God gives it light, and its lamp is the Lamb. But it’s— by its light will the nations walk, and the kings of the earth will bring their glory into it.
And its gates will never be shut by day, and there will be no night there. They will bring into it the glory and the honor of the nations. But nothing unclean will enter it, nor anyone who does what is detestable or false, but only those who are written in the Lamb’s Book of Life. The word of the Lord. Thanks be to God.
A few years back, an entire genre of literature developed, and it’s referred to as heaven tourism. And it’s the memoirs of those who have claimed to have gone to heaven and back, and a few even made it into films. And they capture our imaginations because we know so little about what is to come. And everyone seemingly is able to give us a little inside scoop. We want to hear it, we want to find out about it, no matter how far-fetched or completely unprovable their story is.
We also like to sing about heaven. We have it in lots of songs. There’s “A Stairway to Heaven,” there are “Tears in Heaven,” there’s “Say Yes to Heaven,” “Heaven, Sweet Home,” and maybe the one that gets it the most right on accident, “Heaven Is a Place on Earth.” Mm-hmm. But why is all this? Why are we so captivated and concerned?
It’s because we all experience these fleeting moments of joy and beauty that elevate our desires and tells us that we were made for these better moments. C.S. Lewis has said it well. He said, “If I find in myself a desire which no experience in this world can satisfy,” The most probable explanation is that I was made for another world. That reflects the idea that we see in Ecclesiastes 3.
God has set eternity in our hearts. The difficulty though is trusting the Lord’s promises are hard in the here and now while we wait. And because Jesus has promised to restore all things, we are called to trust him even while— we wait for that great day. One author has put it well. He said, “Our hope is not to be in the story of a minister or a toddler or a doctor or anyone else who insists that they have been to heaven.
Our hope is to be in Jesus Christ as God has revealed him to us in the Bible.” And what we see as God’s revelation to us in his word is a picture of his glorious presence with his beautiful faithful bride redeemed. Well, looking at this faithful bride, in verse 1, John said, I saw a new heaven and a new earth, for the first heaven and the first earth passed away, and the sea was no more. You recall, of course, Genesis opens up with the very creation of heaven and earth, and Revelation closes out with the recreation of heaven and earth. Now, some wonder, is this newness a total recreation, or is it a transformation of the old? Not really sure.
And in the end, it really doesn’t matter either way. And scripture, the language how it uses, can be taken with either one of these. But we see there’s a complete renewal. And in both Hebrew and Greek, the word sky and heaven, it’s the same word. So when we say the sky, we usually think of what’s visible, what we look up to.
And the heavens, we usually mean that invisible realm of God. And both of those are included in— here in the same. And so we’re not necessarily sure exactly what John is speaking to. If he’s just— what he sees, heaven coming down, possibly an entire cosmos being reformed, we don’t know. But it is a beautiful picture filled with these wonderful symbols.
You will miss the point if you try and figure out how all these things are literally true. They are symbols. They’re meant for us to take the meaning of those. Yes. The removal of the ocean would be a point to this.
The idea is like, well, God’s against the sea, doesn’t like sailing. No, uh, in the ancient world, the ocean symbolized disorder and chaos. And we’ve read already in Revelation, “Out of the sea comes the evil beast.” The sea emerges from it is everything that stands against the Lord. So everything, everything in opposition to God has been removed. Mm-hmm.
And then he goes on, he said, “I saw the holy city, New Jerusalem, coming down out of heaven from God, prepared as a bride adorned for her husband.” And the bride, which is surprising, is pictured as a vibrant city, the city of God. And the groom, of course, is the Lamb. If you compare chapter 17 and 18 with 21 and 22, there was the description of Babylon, the great harlot. Babylon, that horrible city. And almost point by point, you see this contrasting with the city the city of God.
How beautiful and how ornate and how holy God’s bride is to be. And then John said, “I heard a loud voice from the throne, ‘Behold, the dwelling place of God is with man. He will dwell with them, and they will be his people, and God himself will be with them as their God.'” [LAUGHTER] What an amazing promise. And he goes on, “He will wipe away every tear from their eyes. Death will be no more, neither will there be mourning, crying, or pain anymore, for the former things have passed away.” That’s the main point.
Heaven has come to earth. We pray, “Your kingdom come, your will be done on earth as it is in heaven.” And now these things have become a reality. We’re not whisked away to heaven. Sometimes that’s how we often think about it, like, “When I die, I’m going away to heaven.” Actually, heaven is coming to be on earth. That’s— We will be resurrected in new bodies in a renewed creation.
That’s the center of the Bible’s redemptive message. And this will be fulfilled in reality. The Lord God will dwell with his people. The suffering we experience so readily here will be gone, or maybe to think of it as, in a sense, transformed. We all know how God uses suffering in our life as a road to his transforming grace.
And we see how he has done that, how he’s taken the great pains of our life and has done redemptive work in them. A time is coming when we will live in the fruition of that. There will be no more an ongoing growing and transforming grace apart from suffering and pain. [SPEAKING GERMAN] When— this is Letters of C.S. Lewis.
When his wife Joy— C.S. Lewis was married late in life, and his wife Joy, they weren’t married very long, and she was diagnosed with cancer and she was dying from it. And he wrote this to a friend. He said, we are not necessarily doubting that God will do the best for us. We are wondering how painful the best will turn out to be.
We recognize that. We recognize in this life some of the great things that God does, just as some of the worst tragedies and suffering. And there, there is a sense of gratitude for that, but there is a longing when that will pass, when the transformation of that will take place. And for Lewis and his wife, they’re no longer wondering. Mm-hmm.
Their sufferings have been transformed into the beauty of Christ’s redemption. We sing, “From the depths of woe I raise my voice of lamentation.” And in that song we go on to say, “His promised mercy is my fort, my comfort, my sweet report. I will wait for it with patience.” And we are, we’re in that waiting moment when we long for the day when these things will be no more, even as we are grateful for the redemptive work that God does through them. John goes on. He said, He was seated on the throne and said, “Behold, I am making all things new.” Write these down, for this is trustworthy and true.
He said, “It is done. I am the Alpha and the Omega, the beginning and the end.” And this is the Lord God who’s speaking here. In the next chapter, The same words are gonna be spoken, but by Jesus. Jesus, who is God incarnate, the Word made flesh, is the center of everything. And he says, To the thirsty I will give from the spring of the water of life without payment.
And we recognize immediately we were made to thirst for God.
And God often will take us into very dry parts of the deserts in life. To teach us to thirst for him, to long for him. This free grace of the Lord is pictured as the refreshment of living water. Chapter— verse 7: The one who conquers will have this heritage, and I will be his God and he will be my son. Throughout Revelation, we’ve seen this theme of conquering that’s been used, and it’s not ever meant in a martial combat It’s meant in a faithful enduring and overcoming opposition and persecution through a faithful and consistent witness to Jesus.
Living this out is the conquering.
And there again is this great contrast. Verse 8. But as for the cowardly, the faithless, the detestable, murderers, sexually immoral, sorcerers, idolaters, all liars, their portion will be in the lake that burns with fire and sulfur, which is the second death. We saw that a chapter ago. It’s a reminder of where you stand apart from Christ.
What you are not cleansed from by the atoning work of Jesus, you will be marked with for eternity. We often hear, and rightly we understand, the phrase, “You are what you eat.” We know what that means. But the reality is, is that you are what you do. Mm-hmm.
You are who you’re becoming. The character that we make, the things that we do. And either you will be marked by the newness of what Jesus has done for you, or you will carry with you what you have made yourself to be through your sins for eternity. It’s a terrifying thought. Mm-hmm.
That’s the wonder of the grace of God, that we are identified not as these former things, but we are identified with what Jesus has done.
The bride takes on the characteristics of the groom.
A beautiful picture of his grace and his mercy that we are no longer identified by those things, but we are identified— [FOREIGN LANGUAGE] by the Lamb. And this next section, it vividly reminds us that this, of course, is a symbolic vision. In verse 9, it says he’s— the 7 angels have been the 7 bowls of the 7 last plagues. He spoke to John. He said, Come, I will show you the bride, the wife of the Lamb.
And again, the bride is pictured as a city. It’s somewhat surprising to us. It’s the city. And he carried me away by the Spirit, meaning there was a vision. A high mountain.
He showed me the holy city Jerusalem coming down out of heaven from God, having the glory of God, its radiance like the most rare jewel, like jasper, clear as crystal. He then described the city as an enormous cube. You think, well, where else in Scripture do we see a cube? Well, we do in the temple. The temple is described in the Holy of Holies as the cube, perfect shape.
The holy place now has become the dwelling place of the bride. The place where the high priest could only go into one time a year, the Day of Atonement, now has become the dwelling place of the bride of Christ. And the numbers here given are highly symbolic, as we expect. 12,000 stadia in length, 144 cubits high in the wall, 12 angels, 12 apostles, 12 tribes, the number of the 12, the number of perfection. You see everything about this is perfect, holy, righteous, and enduring.
And again, it’s meant to be understood as a symbol that if you take this in terms of our measurement, the city would be a 1,500-mile cube, which is like 3/4 of the entire United States. Space starts at 50 to 60 miles up, and the International Space Station’s at 250 miles up, so 1,500 miles up is almost hard to imagine. And then it’s— 3,000 miles. Said that this wall is around it with 12 gates would be every 500 miles. And the wall is, they’re actually really tiny compared to the whole city.
It’s the numbers that we’re supposed to see. We’re supposed to understand the significance of what is coming down. The Holy of Holies, God’s dwelling place with us as the bride. We are included in that. And these precious stones we see, it’s adorned with every kind of jewel.
Jasper and sapphire and agate and so forth. And it gives us a picture of the great breastplate of the high priest that he wore. And on his beautiful stone breastplate was written the names of the tribes of Israel.
The beauty of everything that God has.
Perfect. These beautiful radiant stones and colors. John is just trying to use all the words at his disposal to speak of the amazing bride of Christ, the city of God being made ready for her groom. And then we see in this then the glorious presence of God. Verse 22, he says, I saw no temple in the city, for its temple is the Lord God Almighty, the Lamb.
The Lord God Almighty. And some wonder, of course, this is because Ezekiel’s vision, if you may recall, at the very end of Ezekiel, he has this picture of the new temple being built and almost the same way it being measured in its size and its dimension. And here there’s no temple. What Ezekiel gave us a picture of in the old covenant as God’s presence in the temple, the new covenant shows us is the person and work of Jesus. It’s what Jesus has done.
He is the temple. He is God’s presence with us. As I mentioned last week, the book of Revelation is not Israel-centric, it’s Christocentric. The Lamb is at the center of all of God’s doings. It says, The city has no need of a sun or a moon to shine, for the glory of God gives it light, and its lamp is the Lamb.
Very similar language to Isaiah 60. There the prophet said, “The sun shall no longer be your light by day, nor the brightness shall be the moon at night, but the Lord will be your everlasting light, and your God will be your glory.” Now that’s the idea, is God’s glory, it’s radiant, it’s so much so that his light is shining out to us. And we see John in 1 John 1, “God is light, in him there is no darkness.” That’s the idea, it’s like there’s no shadows anywhere because God is present. And we hear too the echoes of Jesus in John 8 who said, “I am the light of the world.” And how that picture beautifully comes together in this summarizing picture. By its light will the nations walk, and the kings of the earth will bring their glory into it, meaning their worship.
And its gates will never be shut, and there will be no night there. They will bring into it glory and the honor of the nations. And this is the language that’s flowing out of the prophets, particularly Isaiah. God’s salvation is for every tribe, tongue, and nation. All of us are coming.
All of us are invited. It’s the wonder of this redemption of Jesus, how cosmic and global it is. And notice the final verse. Nothing unclean will ever enter it. That’s the finality of that.
Nor anyone who does what is detestable or false, but only those who are written in the Lamb’s Book of Life. It’s the Lamb’s Book of Life. Revelation has placed Jesus at the center of redemption, and the Book of Life is a figure, it’s a metaphor for God’s elect. Even as we hear Jesus in John 6, he said, then this is the will of him who sent me, that I should lose none of those that he has given to me, but raise them up on the last day. That’s the great promise of Jesus.
All of those whom the Father has given to the Son, he will not lose, but he will raise up on the last day. And that’s what we see John speaking of here. We’re gonna end our series next week in chapter 22, but what we’ve seen in this is an amazing picture of heaven. In fact, we have such a hard time speaking about heaven more so than we do hell. Villains are easy for us to come up with and to imagine.
Think of our movies, horror movies and the like. That’s so easy for us to see something that’s evil. Perfection of goodness is much harder. We struggle with that. Paul tells us in 1 Corinthians, quoting from Isaiah, What no eye has seen, what no ear has heard, what no human mind has conceived, the things that God prepared for those who love him.
And then a little later in 1 Corinthians, he said, for now we see in a mirror dimly, but then we will see face to face. Now I know in part, then I will know fully. The fully knowing, fully seeing is yet in front of us. And it’s hard for us to imagine. It’s hard for us to have this picture of perfection, of goodness.
C.S. Lewis again in The Way to Glory. He said that if we are already made for heaven, Then the desire for our proper place will already be in us, but not yet attached to its true object. You feel that, I know you do. There are times where you just know this desire is there, but it’s just not connected yet.
And Lewis goes on, he says, as we consider heaven over time, poetry replaces grammar, gospel replaces law, longing transforms obedience, As gradually a tide lifts a grounded ship. Yeah, we are grounded ships waiting for that tide to lift us up to what God has made us to be in his Son. It shouldn’t surprise us then that much of the biblical language of heaven is given in metaphors and images. I think this is why C.S. Lewis has done such an amazing job giving us this type of imagination in his writings, both in fiction as well as his nonfiction, he does such a wonderful job of showing us the longing of heaven.
Think about the Narnia series and the last battle.
Multiple writings, The Great Divorce, he does such a great job of capturing that. I tell you, it’s one of these things we struggle with. I have books, volumes of theology, on my shelf. And you can get a massive volume of theology, and I tell you, there’s only sometimes 2 or 3 pages on heaven in the whole book. We struggle with this.
We struggle to see. We struggle to imagine. Sort of a paraphrase of Lewis, if I find myself a desire which has no experience in this world that it can satisfy, The most probable explanation is that I was made for another world. Heaven is the healing of this world. It comes to us from God.
Heaven is the atmosphere of God’s glory. And living in light of heaven also means that our joys are, are not fixed on what happens here. When you and I look for happiness in this world, we will be searching often for better things. We want a new job. A new house, a new car, a new husband, a new wife, new something.
Because we’re trying to find that satisfaction. But only in Christ can we be attached to and unattached to the things of the world at the same time. Jesus prayed in his high priestly prayer in John 17, he said, I don’t ask you, Father, to take them out of the world, but to keep them from evil. For they are not of the world, just as I am not of the world. Sanctify them.
As you sent me into the world, I have sent them into the world. And that means for us that we live in a foot in both places. So it’s okay to care for your body, for your health, but not to the point of being consumed by it. It’s biblical wisdom to prepare and plan for retirement, but retirement is not a waiting room for heaven. You just give up until then.
We’re to be about God’s work. We’re to be about the things that he is doing. With and through his bride, the church. And for some, they imagine this life to come as being very boring. I’m sure you’ve seen this too.
There’s a cartoon of a man sitting on a cloud plucking a harp, and the caption read, “I wish I brought a magazine.” You know, and we think about that. We think about, oh, sitting there in a cloud on a harp, it just seems so dull. Yeah. Playwright George Bernard Shaw, he has this conversation between a statue and the devil. And the statue said, Heaven is the most angelically dull place.
The devil pipes up, the strain of living in heaven is intolerable. There’s a notion that I was turned out of it, but rather the matter of fact is that you could not have induced me to stay there. I simply left it and organized this place. So she says, “I don’t wonder it. Nobody could stand an eternity of heaven.” Think about that, how often we think that.
The God who made the wonders of this world, who’s given to us the ability to enjoy them, is incapable of keeping our attention with what’s to come? And we’ve seen already in Revelation, evil is only a parody, a counterfeit of what God has. Sin is— doesn’t create, it just parodies, it mocks. Sin will take a wheel from a wagon or a trike and some scrap metal from a few heaps and maybe a steering wheel from an old broken-down car, and then it’ll try to re-envision this and to convince us that this is a supercar. All the while, God has a Ferrari in the driveway.
Mm-hmm. They’re not comparable. The lie it takes for us to, to see the better and, and want the lesser. I appreciate Eugene Peterson talking about this. He, he said this picture of heaven, this is not a paradise for consumers.
John’s heaven is not an extension of human greed upward, but an invasion of God’s rule and presence downward. Mm-hmm. Heaven in the vision, remember, descends. The consequence is that the dwelling place of God is with men. If we don’t want God or don’t want him near, we can hardly be expected to be interested in heaven.
That’s really the point. That’s the rub. If you really don’t want God, you don’t want him near, heaven is not very interesting to you. Amen. But the Son of God comes from heaven to tabernacle with us.
The incarnation, the Word became flesh. And Jesus takes dead hearts, breathes life in them through the Holy Spirit. He invites us to join the heavenly triune relationship of love and self-giving. We were made to live the presence of Christ, to live with the people of God. Romans 8:4, in this hope we were saved.
Now hope that is seen is not hope, for who hopes for what he sees? But if we hope for what we do not see, we wait for it with patience. And this is where we are. We are waiting for this with patience. And we are called in the midst of it to conquer by enduring, to live sacrificially now for what is still to come.
That means we have a loose hand on the things of this world, that as God has blessed, we enjoy, and as they’re taken away or given off, We’re okay with that. ‘Cause we are made for a better place. If this is all that we have, and this is it, we are the most pitiful of all creatures. Because you and I were made to be seen, we were made to be fully known. And that’s exactly what God does.
In Jesus, we are fully known and we are fully seen. And we have been given not some pie in the sky, hope it works out. We’ve been given a sure and certain promise of what is to come. And in light of that, we live in this world. Yes.
So if we sacrifice for the kingdom of God, it’s a small matter. If we have things and they’re taken away, it’s a small matter for what is yet to come. [FOREIGN LANGUAGE] We live in that reality now of the fullness of the joy that awaits us, an anticipation that carries us through moments of hardship and suffering and pain and difficulties. It doesn’t minimize them or take them away. Like a woman in childbirth, The pain of that labor is quickly forgotten when the cry of that baby is, is there in her arms.
The things that we are enduring now are going to give way to the fullness of redemption, the restoration of our bodies. And this is not just simply something that we wait for as we get older and things break down. This is something, especially as adults, we forget. We forget life is little children too. This longing is in all of our hearts.
This longing for something more has always been present. And the brokenness of the world around us is there just as readily for a 5-year-old as someone who’s 85. It’s seen, it’s felt, it’s experienced, ’cause it’s real. But even greater, It’s what the Lord has promised for his people, the city of God, the glory of his presence, the redemption of all things. A moment will be when there’s not a sinful thought in your head.
Can you imagine that? Not a sinful remark coming out of your mouth.
That an entire myriads and myriads of people working together in a beautiful harmony, promoting the good of somebody else rather than their own. That’s why we’re really good at villains in movies, we’re not really good at heaven.
It’s time, I think, as God’s people to have a renewed sense of that vision. [FOREIGN LANGUAGE] to allow the word of God to transform us. Because there’s so much of this life that’s so broken that God is going to redeem, that he is going to fulfill. And we wait for it with patience. Pray with me.
Father, indeed, we say thank you. Lord, we ask that you would continue to show us, uh, Lord, a vision that’s just hard for us to hold on to.
Lord, we, we want to be near you. We want to know your presence. And Lord, I would ask if there’s any here who, Father, they don’t wanna be near you. They, they don’t want to be close to you. Father, I pray that you change that.
You would capture their heart, Father, that you would open their eyes to the beauty of your son Jesus. Father, that you would grant them saving faith. Amen. For all of us, Father, as we await that day, we pray that you would continue to empower us to be about your business now. We ask this all through Jesus our Lord.
Amen. Amen.
Discaimer: This sermon text was generated by an automated transcription service.