The Unqualified Joy of the God-Centered New Heaven and New Earth

In this sermon, D. A. Carson delves into the biblical prophecy of a new heaven and a new earth as depicted in Revelation 21 and 22. Carson discusses the total transformation and renewal of the world, emphasizing the absence of suffering, pain, and death, and the establishment of God’s eternal kingdom where His presence eradicates all darkness. This vision is presented as a source of profound joy and hope for believers.

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

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

One of the seven angels who had the seven bowls full of the seven last plagues came and said to me, ‘Come, I will show you the bride, the wife of the Lamb.’ And he carried me away in the Spirit to a mountain great and high, and showed me the Holy City, Jerusalem, coming down out of heaven from God. It shone with the glory of God, and its brilliance was like that of a very precious jewel, like a jasper, clear as crystal.

It had a great, high wall with twelve gates, and with twelve angels at the gates. On the gates were written the names of the twelve tribes of Israel. There were three gates on the east, three on the north, three on the south and three on the west. The wall of the city had twelve foundations, and on them were the names of the twelve apostles of the Lamb. The angel who talked with me had a measuring rod of gold to measure the city, its gates and its walls.

The city was laid out like a square, as long as it was wide. He measured the city with the rod and found it to be 12,000 stadia in length, and as wide and high as it is long. The angel measured the wall using human measurement, and it was 144 cubits thick. The wall was made of jasper, and the city of pure gold, as pure as glass. The foundations of the city walls were decorated with every kind of precious stone.

The first foundation was jasper, the second sapphire, the third agate, the fourth emerald, the fifth onyx, the sixth ruby, the seventh chrysolite, the eighth beryl, the ninth topaz, the tenth turquoise, the eleventh jacinth, and the twelfth amethyst. The twelve gates were twelve pearls, each gate made of a single pearl. The great street of the city was of gold, as pure as transparent glass. I did not see a temple in the city, because the Lord God Almighty and the Lamb are its temple.

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

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 down the middle of the great street of the city. 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.

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

This is the Word of the Lord.

Jesus once said, “Do not store up for yourselves treasures on earth, where moth and rust destroy, and where thieves dig through and steal. But store up for yourselves treasures in heaven, where moth and rust do not destroy, and where thieves do not dig through and steal.” Then he adds, “For where your treasure is, there your heart will be also.”

That last sentence is sometimes misunderstood. We read it quickly, and we think it means something like, “So watch your heart. Guard your heart.” Indeed, there are biblical passages that say that sort of thing. “Guard your heart,” we read elsewhere, “for out of it flow the wellsprings of life.” But it’s not what Jesus said. Jesus said, “Where your treasure is, there your heart will be also.”

He does not say in this passage, “Watch your heart.” What he says is, “Choose your treasure, because your heart will follow your treasure.” In the context, what he is saying is, “Make sure you choose the treasure of heaven itself, the treasure of the new heaven and the new earth, because your heart will follow your treasure.” Whatever you value the most, that’s where your heart runs.

If what you treasure the most is advancement at work, that’s where your imagination goes. That’s where your daydreaming goes. That’s where your energy goes. That’s where your creativity goes. If what you value the most is the progress of your children, that’s where your heart goes. If what you want the most is a really fat retirement package, then you start thinking money. That’s where your heart goes.

What Jesus says is, “Choose your treasure, and make sure it’s eternal treasure, because that’s where your heart will go.” I suspect that if you and I don’t very often feel homesick for heaven, if our hearts don’t start beating when we think of the prospects of a new heaven and a new earth, it’s primarily because that’s not where our treasure is. That’s not what we value the most. Choose your treasure.

One of the things this passage can do, like quite a number of other passages in the New Testament, is to begin to open up the eyes of our spiritual understanding so we will make the values and riches of the new heaven and the new earth our greatest treasure, and that’s where our heart will go. That’s what I want for you and me tonight.

Now I really should say at least a little something about the symbolism of this book. Let’s be quite frank. Most of us do not sit around daydreaming about city gates made of topaz or something. The symbolism from our perspective is sometimes bizarre. I wish I could talk to you for an hour or so about the nature of this kind of writing. It’s called apocalyptic writing. It’s a genre of literature, a form of writing that was common amongst Jewish circles from about 300 BC to about AD 300, and nobody writes it anymore.

There are a lot of things that could be said about it, but I want to point out one of its strengths by an analogy. I have an older sister. When I was a young man, she and her husband became missionaries in an astonishingly primitive tribe, technologically speaking, in Papua New Guinea. This tribe was pre-Stone Age in its technology. Its arrowheads, for example, didn’t even use stone. They used hard wood like teak on bamboo shafts, and then they tipped those with poison made out of various organic compounds.

Now suppose one of those tribals came here to Northern Ireland and lived in your home for five years, and you yourself were trained in linguistics so you were capable of picking up the different tones and sounds, the phonics of a language, and you were trained to break it down, and you learned the language pretty well. This tribal doesn’t know any English, Irish accent or not. Because this tribal stays in your house and you are determined to break into that language, after five years you speak that language, one of the Melanesian dialects, really fluently.

Now your job is to go back into that tribal village.… Nowadays, a lot of them have some sort of dish that’s bringing porn into their grass huts. I’ve been there more recently, and it’s not the same as it was 40 years ago when my sister started out, but we’ll go back to my sister’s time. Now that you know the language, your job is to go to them and explain to them what electricity is, and you’re not allowed to bring any aids or illustrations or anything.

Just with the words of their language, your job now is to explain what electricity is. What will you say? You get in there by canoe or hiking in, some way or other, and they look at you a bit strangely. They haven’t seen a lot of white people. In fact, half a generation back they were headhunters. You say, “I have come to explain to you.… You don’t have a word for it. We’ll call it electricity.

Electricity is … well, it’s like a powerful spirit that runs along hard things like vines. Sometimes we loop these from tree to tree, and sometimes we bury them underground. Well, actually we don’t loop them from tree to tree. We cut down the trees and then put them back into the ground, and we call those poles. We just loop these vines from tree to tree.

Then we pump this something like a spirit into one end, and at the other end it comes into the grass roof of our mud huts, and it goes into little round things that we make that are stuck up in the mud of our roof. The electricity in there goes lickety-split,” however you say lickety-split in neo-Melanesian. “It goes lickety-split around in there until it shines like a little sun so you can stay up late at night. What for I have no idea. No TV and you can’t read, but nevertheless, you have a little sun in your thatched roof.

Or we loop these vines into other square things that we make with round things on top. We make these in really, really, really big mud huts that we call factories, and in this square thing with these round things on top, there the electricity goes lickety-split again, and it gets so hot you can boil water in your clay pots without any smoke going out the hole in the middle of your roof.”

How am I doing as I explain electricity? What’s the matter with these people? Are they stupid or something? No. If some of them are transported to the West, some of their children will beat some of our children at school, because sometimes immigrant children actually try harder. What’s the problem?

The problem is they have no categories for understanding this. They don’t have the vocabulary. They don’t have the categories. They don’t have the experience. I haven’t even begun to get at the atomic world or to give units of thought, watts and ohms and volts and amperes. I haven’t started talking about alternating current and direct current or generating stations, storage, the digital world, Boolean algebra, and then computers and cell phones.

What’s the matter with these people? What’s the matter with them is they haven’t experienced any of it, and therefore, all of my explanations are necessarily by analogy. Electricity is like a power. It runs along hard things like vines. It comes into round things in our thatched roofs. It’s all by way of analogy.

So my dear brother and sister in Christ, how will you talk about the throne room of God? How will John talk about the throne room of God? Our experience of God is so wretchedly tiny, so minute, that the best the biblical writers can do under inspiration of the Holy Spirit is argue by simple analogy, and that’s why apocalyptic literature is so powerful when it’s talking about transcendent things.

Paul understood that when he spoke of having been caught up to the third heaven, where he saw things, which (the expression is ambiguous) are not lawful to talk about. It means simultaneously which he’s not supposed to talk about, he’s forbidden to talk about, but at the same time, he can’t really talk about it because they haven’t been there, so they have no idea what he’s talking about.

Yet God in his mercy has given us these depictions of the final state, the new heaven and the new earth, the home of righteousness, to give us some sort of picture by analogy, symbol-laden, evocative, image-generating vision, so we start thinking about God and heaven a little more, because where your treasure is, there your heart will be also.

I don’t have time tonight to go through these sections line by line, but let me pick up the flow and stop here and there to show you what’s going on. In apocalyptic language, this chapter focuses on the end of history, on the dawning of the new heaven and the new earth, and it tells us what is new (verses 1–8), what is intrinsically symbolic (verses 9–21), what is missing (verses 22–27), and what is central (the beginning of chapter 22).

1. What is new

Verses 1–8. It is nothing less than a new heaven and a new earth. “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.” The point is that these two chapters are full of allusions to the rest of the Bible. When students enter the MDiv program at Trinity, where I teach, in the first two semesters all of them have to take an introductory course in biblical theology, the theology that runs through the Bible’s storyline.

One of the first essays we require these first-year students to write is under the caption, “Study chapters 21–22 using whatever aids you can and isolate every single theme in these two chapters that refers back to anything else in the Bible.” They never get them all, but they are inevitably absolutely amazed by how many biblical themes running through all of Scripture funnel down into these two explosive chapters. You really can’t understand these chapters very well unless you’ve read the whole Bible quite a lot of times.

The point is that this side of the fall, this side of the curse, we learn in the Bible that it’s not just human beings who are under sentence of death, but the entire created order is under sentence of death. The universe itself is a dying place. The universe itself is, in some sense, in alienation against God. It’s not the way it’s supposed to be. It’s not the way originally it should have been. That is why Paul can say in slightly different terms in Romans 8, “The entire creation groans, waiting for the ultimate adoption of sons.”

Now we read of a new order. That expression is picked up in verse 5. The old order of things has passed away. “Then I saw a new heaven and a new earth, for the first heaven and the first earth had passed away.” That language is already found in the Old Testament. More than 700 years before Jesus Christ, we read in Isaiah 65, “See, I will create new heavens and a new earth. The former things will not be remembered, nor will they come to mind.” A vision of such a transformation of reality that it stretches us to the farthest limits of our imagination.

Exactly what this will entail is doubtless beyond our capacity to imagine. Exactly what the relationship is between the new heaven and the new earth and our old dying universe lies at the very periphery of our vision, but John dares give us one detail. There is no more sea. You have to understand all of this is symbol-laden.

John is not really interested in the hydrology of the new heaven and the new earth. In apocalyptic literature, the sea regularly stands for chaos, for all that belongs to death and destruction. It emerges, in part, out of the fact that ancient Israel was not a seafaring people. People born in Ireland and the mainland, the whole UK heritage.… Adventure is in the sea. Even I, in Canada, brought up on English literature, memorized John Masefield.

I must go down to the seas again, to the lonely sea and the sky,

And all I ask is a tall ship and a star to steer her by.

Not the Israelites. In the Old Testament, when they finally did build a navy, they didn’t have any sailors, so they went and paid some from up north in Tyre and Sidon. They never were sailors. As a result, in the Old Testament the sea is quite regularly bound up not with romance or travel or excitement. It’s bound up instead with danger. Thus, the same prophet Isaiah in Isaiah 57 writes, “The wicked are like the tossing sea, which cannot rest, whose waves cast up mire and mud.”

Already in chapters 4–5 in this book we’ve been introduced to the sea. The sea is part of the fallen created order that stands between John, who’s trying to see God, and God himself. But now there’s no more sea. In chapters 12–14, the Devil is introduced in chapter 12, and a beast comes out of the sea in chapter 13 and then out of the land. But now there’s no more sea. There’s no more chaos. There’s no more destruction. There’s no more death.

This is not talking about the ultimate structure of the place of the water molecule in the new heaven and the new earth. About that I know absolutely nothing. John couldn’t care less. He is saying in symbol-laden language, “Chaos is gone.” Then the symbolism changes. “I saw the Holy City, the new Jerusalem, coming down out of heaven from God …” Then it changes again. “… prepared as a bride beautifully dressed for her husband.”

One of the things apocalyptic literature does is mix its metaphors. If we do that in most kinds of literature it just sounds bizarre, but apocalyptic is doing it all the time. Here the city is a bride. Listen, guys. If you’re about to get married and you get to the place in the service where the minister says, “You may kiss the bride,” my strong advice to you is not to turn to her, smile sweetly, and say, “You remind me of a city.” That rather misses the point. It’s the mixed metaphor symbolism, with each bit contributing something.

The best example of this shows up in Revelation 4 and 5. Revelation 4 and 5 constitute one big vision. In chapter 4, you have a dramatic, symbol-laden setting. In chapter 5, you have the drama itself. In chapter 4, you have the setting of the throne room of God in which God is presented as spectacularly transcendent, such that even the highest order of angels cover their faces before him and cry, “Holy, holy, holy is the Lord God Almighty!”

All of the universe sings in praise, because the universe itself exists because of God’s creative power. Once the dramatic setting has been put before us, in chapter 5, the story itself begins. In the right hand of him who sits on the throne is a scroll, and it turns out that this scroll has all of God’s purposes for redemption and judgment. This scroll is sealed with seven seals.

In the symbolism of the day, what must take place for all of God’s purposes in judgment and blessing to take place is that someone must come to the right hand of God and take the scroll and slit the seals. Not so that you can be a nosey parker and peek inside and figure out your eschatology, but precisely so that God’s purposes in judgment and blessing might be un-scrolled and all things order in terms of God’s will.

So an angel stands up, an angel with a very loud voice. The reason he has a loud voice is because they didn’t have PA systems in those days, and he has to make a challenge to the whole universe. Nowadays, if I want to speak a little louder I just get a little closer to the microphone or else somebody back there ratchets up the amp, but the angel didn’t have those advantages.

So he speaks in a very loud voice, and he challenges the entire universe, “Who is worthy to approach this transcendent God and take the scroll and slit the seals and thus be God’s agent to bring all of God’s purposes to pass?” No one is found. Not that high order of angels, not the elders, no one on earth, no one under the earth. That means in the abodes of the dead. No one who has died. No one.

John weeps. He weeps not because he’s frustrated since he can’t see into the future. He weeps because in the symbolism of that drama, what it means is God’s purposes won’t be brought to pass. So the suffering Christians are suffering for nothing. Will justice be done? No guarantee. Is death the last word? Apparently. Is there forgiveness of sin? Probably not. God’s purposes are just frustrated.

Then the interpreting elder taps him on the shoulder and says, “John, stop your weeping. Look! The lion of the tribe of Judah, the promised king of Israel. He has prevailed in a vast struggle, and he is opening the scroll.” “So I looked,” John says, “and I saw a lamb.” You don’t have two animals parked side by side, a lion and a lamb. The whole point is the lion is the lamb.

Then to jumble up the symbolism even more, the lion is the king of the beasts. The lamb is a slaughtered lamb, sacrificial, but has seven horns on its head. Horns in apocalyptic regularly symbolize kingly authority. This slaughtered lamb has all kingly authority. He doesn’t come from outside to approach this God. He actually comes from the very center of the throne. He’s one with God himself.

The whole book of Revelation is full of these mixed metaphors. In this instance, we are not to think in Revelation 21 of an established new heaven and new earth into which the New Jerusalem comes as part of the same vision. It’s a separate vision. It’s a separate symbolism. One way of looking at the new heaven and the new earth is a new universe, which has some connections with the heaven and the earth but is transformed.

It’s part of the vision of resurrection existence on the last day. It is not merely spiritual and ethereal and non-corporeal. It is a new heaven and a new earth, touchable, in resurrection existence, and it will be ours. But then look at the future another way. It’s Jerusalem, a new Jerusalem. The old Jerusalem was the place of the great king.

The old Jerusalem was the place where God met with his people in the sacrificial system of the temple. The old Jerusalem was the place where God’s covenant community met with their God. This is Zion. This is Jerusalem. Already on several occasions in the New Testament, as early as Galatians.… In the book of Galatians we’re told that we have come to the New Jerusalem.

The vision of a city is important. In this book, there are two cities and two women. There’s Babylon, symbol-laden for all that is wicked and cursed, and there’s the New Jerusalem, the very abode of the people of God. There are the two women, the whore, the harlot in chapter 17, and here the bride. Someone has said this whole book could be called, A Tale of Two Cities, subtitled, The Harlot and the Bride.

A city symbolizes, from the Old Testament, not only the center of God’s reign, the place where God meets with his people, but it’s a social vision. Some of us who like the country and the free air around the coast think of downtown built-up cities as cesspools of iniquity. More people, more sinners. But cities are also centers of culture and opera and reading and learning. Cities provide the best and the worst. Because we have a lot of people, you get the best and the worst.

Thus, there is a vision of the final state being a city in perfect harmony, the New Jerusalem, the abode of God. No longer any sea. This city is prepared as a bride, beautifully dressed for her husband. Isn’t Christ pictured as the bridegroom in the writings of Paul? He says to the church in Corinth, “I have betrothed you as a pure virgin to Christ.” So the final state can be seen as the marriage supper of the Lamb. The spectacular marriage, the union of Christ and his people.

Do you realize what this means? I suspect that in this fallen order, human beings know no moments of greater transcendent joy than in the sexual union of a man and a woman in a good marriage, and God dares picture the ultimate union of Christ and his people as the marriage supper of the Lamb. Talk about mixing your metaphors to get across the joy of the Lord. In case we don’t understand what this means with the symbolism, verse 3 begins to unpack it a bit.

“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.’ ” Those of you who read your Bibles often know that that sort of expression shows up again and again in the Bible. Leviticus 26: “I will put my dwelling place among you. I will not abhor you. I will walk among you and be your God, and you will be my people.”

What is meant there is that God will manifest himself as the God of the Israelites by appearing in glory in the tabernacle and then later in the temple. That’s how God will be their God and manifest himself to them. Then a little farther on, by the time you get to Jeremiah, the same language is used in the prospect of the intimacy bound up with the new covenant. Jeremiah 31: “I will put my law in their minds and write it on their hearts. I will be their God; they will be my people.”

Or again in Ezekiel 37: “My dwelling place will be with them. I will be their God; they will be my people.” That’s ours now under the terms of the new covenant. But just as at the time of the tabernacle there was all kinds of prevailing sin, so also today, in another degree, there is all kinds of prevailing sin. Now God says, “I will be their God, and they will be my people” in so perfect a dwelling that there is no place for sin or its effects anymore.

So perfect is this dwelling of God with his people, so consummate this relationship, no sin or evil, nor any result of sin or evil can possibly tarnish it. So we read, “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.”

My mother died after nine years of Alzheimer’s. She went through all the predictable stages. Perhaps four years into it, taking marmalade and tossing it into her tea. We’d say, “No, Mom. The sugar is here.” “I know what I’m doing. Don’t tell me what I’m doing.” This gentle soul. “Okay, Mom, put the marmalade in your tea.” A year before she died, just blank, until you held up pictures of her grandchildren and you’d get a little flicker of recognition.

You’d hold her hand. Nothing. Then you’d start singing, “Blessed assurance, Jesus is mine,” and you’d get a squeeze, and then nothing. Nothing at all. But on the last day, the voice of the eternal Son of God will be heard. “Elizabeth Margaret Maybury, come forth!” and my mother will come forth in resurrection splendor, and there will be no more death, no more mourning, and no more crying, for the old order of things will have passed away.

That same voice will cry, “Adolf Hitler, come forth!” and Adolf Hitler will come forth, for there is a resurrection to righteousness and a resurrection to curse. Reread John 5 and 6. Here in verse 4, eternal blessedness is still couched in negation, what it’s not like. There’s no death. There’s no pain. There’s no crying. There’s no mourning. This is still negation. What will it be like? It’s precisely at that point that our words fail us.

We know about crying and death. We know about pain and mourning, so you can explain what that doesn’t look like by saying there won’t be any more of it, but positively what will there be? Consummation, life, the fullness of joy in the presence of God, utter holiness without tarnishing, love for one another without any self-justification or one-upmanship, happy service, industry and creativity, jobs to do, and the energy and strength to do them, with a God-centeredness that is full of vitality and resurrection existence.

Almost as if God wants to assure us of how important this is, we read, “It is done. I am Alpha and Omega. To the thirsty I will give water without cost from the spring of the water of life. Those who are victorious …” In this book, that simply means those who have persevered to the end. “… will inherit all this, and I will be their God and they will be my people. But the cowardly, the unbelieving, the vile, the murderers, the sexually immoral, those who practice magic arts, the idolaters and all liars …” It’s not an exhaustive list. It’s only a sampling. “… they will be consigned to the fiery lake of burning sulfur.”

Read sometimes and weep over the closing verses of Revelation 14 or Revelation 6, where the mighty of the earth on the last day cry for the rocks and the mountains to hide them from the wrath of the Lamb. There is a divide. A hundred years ago, Bertram Shadduck wrote a piece, which in some ways is doggerel and in other ways gets to the heart of issues.

I dreamed that the great judgment morning

Had dawned, and the trumpet had blown;

I dreamed that the nations had gathered

To judgment before the white throne;

From the throne came a bright, shining angel,

Who stood on the land and the sea

And swore with his hand raised to heaven

That time was no longer to be.

And, oh, what a weeping and wailing,

As the lost were told of their fate;

They cried for the rocks and the mountains,

They prayed, but their prayer was too late.

The rich man was there, but his money

Had melted and vanished away;

A pauper he stood in the judgment,

His debts were too heavy to pay;

The great man was there, but his greatness,

When death came, was left far behind!

The angel that opened the records,

Not a trace of his greatness could find.

The moral man came to the judgment,

But his self-righteous rags would not do;

The men who had crucified Jesus

Had passed off, as mortal men do

The soul that had put off salvation

“Not tonight; I’ll get saved by and by,

No time now to think of religion!”

At last he had found time to die.

And, oh, what a weeping and wailing,

As the lost were told of their fate;

They cried for the rocks and the mountains,

They prayed, but their prayer was too late.

Over against all of that, a new heaven and a new earth, the home of righteousness, a New Jerusalem, the city of the great King, consummation with Christ, the beloved husband of the church, a new order where there is neither death nor dying nor mourning, for the old order of things has passed away.

2. What is intrinsically symbolic

In what follows in verses 9–21, the interpreting angel goes to great lengths to make John reflect on particular elements of the symbolism and pushes them a little bit farther. For example, in verses 9–10, there is identification of the bride’s husband.

We read, “One of the seven angels who had the seven bowls full of the seven last plagues came and said to me, ‘Come, I will show you the bride, the wife of the Lamb.’ And he carried me away in the Spirit to a mountain great and high, and showed me the Holy City, Jerusalem …” You start getting the mixed metaphors again. “… coming down out of heaven from God.” Let me pick up just a couple of the bits of symbolism.

Have you noticed all of the instances of 12? In most parts of the Bible, 12 is not deeply symbolic, but 12 here is explicitly attached to the 12 tribes of the Old Testament and the 12 apostles of the New. It’s a way of saying all of the people of God from the old and the new covenant are now bound together in this city with 12 gates and 12 foundations. Then 12 times 12 gives you 144, so the wall of the city is 144 cubits thick. Or 12 times 10 times 10 times 10 gives you an idea of bigness, hugeness.

Do you know that this city is something like 1,400 miles on edge? That’s a big city. You can’t plunk that down in the Near East. This is not a literal city. It’s a way of saying this is a vast city, but it’s built like a cube. Have you ever seen a city built like a cube? Even the cities with our tallest skyscrapers aren’t built like cubes, but this city is 1,400 miles on edge. What does that mean? Nothing is accidental here.

What you’re supposed to ask yourself is, “Where are there cubes in the Bible?” In all of the Old Testament there’s only one cube. It’s the Most Holy Place in the temple and in the tabernacle. This is a way of saying that all of God’s people are now in the Most Holy Place, the place which under the old covenant you could not get into. Only the high priest could once a year, and then only with the prescribed blood of bull and goat, but now we have access to the very presence of God for all eternity.

There are a lot of other bits of symbolism. For example, the list of jewels that are mentioned. It has been pointed out that when you list those stones and place them around a square in the order given in verse 13, east, north, south, west.… Nobody in the ancient world said that. Just as we today say “north, south, east, west,” so they did in the ancient world, yet here we have “east, north, south, west.”

If you place these jewels around a square in the same order as verse 13, what you have is the exact reverse of the signs of the zodiac as the sun goes through the 12 signs. In the ancient world there were many, many people into astrology. This is a way of saying, “This is the reverse of astrology. This is not magic. This is the throne, the sign of God himself. Don’t play around with such silly games.”

3. What is missing

Verses 22–27. First, there’s no temple. “I did not see a temple in the city, because the Lord God Almighty and the Lamb are its temple.” Do you realize how much biblical theology is loaded into that sentence? In the Old Testament, before the exodus, people offer their sacrifices here and there, and then from the exodus on, God has ordained a tabernacle with a prescribed symbolism, the blood of bull and goats, the Most Holy Place, and then eventually a temple.

Then because of the horrendous sin of the people, the temple is destroyed. In a great vision in Ezekiel 8–11, Ezekiel sees that God himself abandons the temple. It’s not that Nebuchadnezzar and the Babylonians are so powerful they can beat up on God and take away the temple. It’s that God in judicial sentence abandons the temple. His glory abandons the temple, and as a result, the Babylonian hordes can come in and shove it down to the ground. In due course it’s rebuilt, a small thing. It is rebuilt. There’s no mention of the glory returning.

Then one day on the streets of Jerusalem a voice was heard saying, “Destroy this temple, and in three days I will raise it again.” Jesus’ disciples didn’t have a clue what he meant. “Deep, deep. One more enigmatic saying. We get a lot of those. We’ll understand someday. Deep, deep.” When John records it decades later, he says, “The disciples didn’t understand it then, but after Jesus had risen from the dead, then they remembered his words, and they believed the Scriptures, and they knew he was talking about his own body.”

The temple was the great meeting place between God and sinful human beings. That’s what the temple was about, but Jesus says, “Destroy this temple, and in three days I will raise it again.” By the destruction of Jesus’ own body, by the destruction of this ultimate temple, Jesus rises from the dead, having borne our sins in the ultimate sacrifice, so that he himself becomes the great meeting place between sinful people and the holy God.

So we come to this vision of the Most Holy Place. If the New Jerusalem is the Most Holy Place, how can there be a temple within the Most Holy Place? In the old temple, the Most Holy Place was in the temple. Now the whole city is the Most Holy Place. You don’t need a temple within that. No, the place that marks out how God’s people come together with this Holy God is Jesus himself. “For the Lord God Almighty and the Lamb are its temple.” There will be no place anymore for mediation, because we’ll always have the Mediator with us, and he himself is one with God.

Then there’s no sun and moon. This is not talking about the astronomical realities of the new heaven and the new earth, any more than the absence of water was talking about the hydrological realities. What it’s saying is that in the old order you have sun and moon and day and night. In the ancient world, where they didn’t have a lot of electric lights, night was the time of danger, and you shut the city gates, but now God himself is the constant light, and there’s no more night. There’s no shutting of city gates. There is only revelation.

Here there’s a lot of light as I stand here. Because the light is coming down from different angles, I have the shadow of this microphone, which is turned off, running across my Bible, and although there are spots coming in from different directions, I see some shadows coming from here and some shadows coming from there, because all of our light is finite, so our light casts up shadows in some other direction if there’s anything else in the way.

James reminds us his light is so transcendent and pervasive that in him is no shadow at all. There’s no dark side. If you go to Star Wars you have the Force, and there’s a light side and a dark side, a good side and a bad side, but God is good, good, good. He’s only good. He’s never anything but good.

He can never be anything but good. He is good, good, good. He is light, and in him is no darkness at all, and there’s no more night. There’s no impurity. “Nothing impure will 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.”

4. What is central

Revelation 22:1–5: “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 down the middle of the great street of the city. On each side of the river stood the tree of life, bearing twelve crops of fruit, yielding its fruit every month. The leaves of the tree are for the healing of the nations. 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. They will see his face, and his name will be on their foreheads. There will be no more night.”

This is what Christians across the centuries have called the visio Dei, the vision of God, sometimes the beatific vision, the vision of ultimate blessing. In the Old Testament, God says, “No one can see my face and live,” and even in the New Testament, when Jesus says, “He who has seen me has seen the Father …” We have seen the Father in incarnate form, but not in the blaze of his unshielded glory. But now we have been so transformed and purified ourselves in resurrection existence that we see God face to face. There’s no night there.

My job takes me to a lot of different places to preach and teach. Usually, because America is such a big country, I end up flying, but sometimes it’s within driving distance, and I drive there. Then I bring along a stack of CDs. My musical tastes are embarrassingly eclectic. I won’t even tell you what some of them are.

Not too long ago, I was driving a few hours away to preach somewhere, and I put in a Roger Whittaker recording, a New Zealand balladeer who does stuff for many different countries. He’s passÈ now. But he was singing a song of Canada. He was singing a song of Cape Breton, which is on our East Coast. He says in one of the verses:

If my time could end perfectly

I know how I’d want it to be

God’s gift of heaven would be made up of three

My love, Cape Breton, and me

I confess I grinned to myself and thought, “My dear Roger, you’ve just defined hell.” I’m not taking a cheap shot at Cape Breton. I’m a Canadian. I’m not taking a shot at his love either. All I’m saying is if you still have an unredeemed, sin-tainted Roger Whittaker and his bride, even in an idyllic location like Cape Breton, they’re going to breed like rabbits and generate a whole lot of other sinners, and here we go again under the curse, damned finally.

Don’t you see what these two chapters are about? We sometimes spend so much time thinking of the new heaven and the new earth, where we walk on streets of gold and see all our friends. “I’m going to catch a glimpse of my mummy again.” There is truth in all of that, though sometimes we confuse the symbol-ladenness with the reality. I have no doubt that Christians will recognize one another again.

Death may be the last enemy; it does not have the last word. We sorrow, but not as those who have no hope. That’s all true. But you reread these chapters again and again, and do you know what strikes you? Filtering through all the symbol-laden language, the center of all of it is him who sits on the throne and the Lamb, consummation with him, seeing him as he is, millions around the throne, the city of the great King, a new creation, consummation. And where your treasure is, there your heart will be also.

It is not as if we are not to give thanks for the blessings we receive here. Even now, God in his great mercy gives us all things richly to enjoy. He has given us already the Holy Spirit as the down payment of the promised inheritance, full resurrection existence in the new heaven and the new earth.

But when we begin to grasp what is promised, what has been secured by Christ on the cross, then in the midst of violence, tears, loneliness, frustration, old age, decrepitude, senility, sin, decay, tragedy, and accidents on Northern Ireland roads, we join our voices to the church in every generation and say, “Yes. Even so, come, Lord Jesus,” and beg God for mercy to choose treasure in the new heaven and the new earth so our hearts will steer in the right direction, all secured on a little hill outside Jerusalem 2,000 years ago. Let us pray.

Have mercy on us, O Lord, in this generation that is so focused on the temporal and the physical and the temporary, on what is glitzy and self-promoting. Have mercy upon us, Lord God. By your power, the same power by which you raised Jesus from the dead, work in us so that with our whole beings we will hunger to be conformed to Christ.

Make us as holy as pardoned sinners can be this side of the consummation, and fasten our eyes upon Jesus, who for the joy that was set before him endured the cross and despised the shame. He has gone ahead, the pioneer of our faith. O Lord, we do join the church of every generation and cry, “Yes. Even so, come, Lord Jesus.” In whose name we pray, amen.