Part VII of “The End of the World as We Know It: The Book of Revelation”
Revelation 21-22
As most of you know, I served a wonderful seven years at Park City Community United Methodist Church in the ski resort town of Park City, Utah, before coming to Tri-Lakes. Park City is a place where many people aspire to live, evidenced by the high median housing price of $1.3 million. We lived in a church-owned parsonage
It’s a beautiful place and when we were sent there I was more than willing to go and suffer for Jesus if it meant being able to get on a mountain bike trail without needing to get in my truck first. The church was wonderful and we still have a lot of friends there.
If you live in Park City, however, there is a sense that you’ve kind of “made it” in the world. This is where everyone wants to be, even if it costs a lot to live there. The church windows looked up at the mountains, moose were frequent visitors, the snow was epic for skiing, the summers glorious. It’s no wonder that many residents and visitors to Park City look at it as a little heaven on earth.
Indeed, that’s what one lady used to say to me just about every Sunday after worship. We had a breezeway connected the sanctuary and the fellowship hall and I would stand out there to greet people after each service when the weather was nice, which it often was. She was a church member but not a frequent attender, and she would come out after each service she attended, look around with wonder and say breathlessly when she shook my hand, “Isn’t this just heaven?” This was like a little ritual. I would simply smile most of the time, not wanting to be a buzzkill. For her, I’m sure it felt that way. It was clear that she had everything she could possibly need and a lot more. She was tanned, her body appropriately nipped and tucked, her blond hair pulled back in a pony tail under a baseball cap, which was like a uniform there (my PC friends who hear this sermon online will know exactly what I’m talking about). She was living her version of heaven right there in the mountains of Utah.
But I pastored there for seven years and had seen the other side. I did a dozen or so funerals during my tenure, which is not very many. For most of the years I was there the town had no hospital, nursing home, or funeral home, which might have led one to believe that no one gets sick, no one gets old, and no one dies—again, a version of heaven. But of the dozen funerals I did, half of them were for successful people who committed suicide. They had reached the top of the ladder, only to find that it was propped against the wrong building. I saw multiple marriages end in divorce, both inside and outside my congregation. The Hispanic population, which actually kept the whole place running, didn’t live in the expensive parts of town but instead crammed 4 or 5 families in a two bedroom apartment somewhere on the outskirts. Alcoholism and addiction was a problem. People put themselves deep in debt to afford the lifestyle. Despite appearances to the contrary and the veneer of utopia, Park City was like most places on earth—a place in need of a change.
The expectant lady shaking my hand looked at me expecting to agree—yes, this is heaven. I think she was stunned and not a little disappointed when I said one Sunday, “Not yet.”
It’s amazing what we’ll settle for and call it heaven. Our desires become our only lens and our vision can be so narrow that we miss the bigger picture of what God wants to do and is doing in the world. During my devotions on Tuesday morning I read a quote by C.S. Lewis which has been rattling around in my mind all week. Lewis says, “If we consider the unblushing promises of reward and the staggering nature of the rewards promised in the Gospels, it would seem that our Lord finds our desires, not too strong, but too weak. We are half-hearted creatures, fooling about with drink and sex and ambition when infinite joy is offered us, like an ignorant child who wants to go on making mud pies in a slum because he cannot imagine what is meant by the offer of a holiday at sea. We are far too easily pleased.”
Infinite joy. That’s the pearl of great price that people are looking for, but we settle for cheap imitations of money, material things, and self-gratification. Our culture wants us to think we’re living in heaven already, like my friend outside the door of the church. Merely scratch the surface, however, and you know it’s not here yet. I think that’s why so much of the Bible is calling us to turn our attention to the real thing—real, infinite, unspeakable joy—and adjust our gaze accordingly. That’s what we’ve been doing in our study of Revelation—discerning the authentic future God has for his people and how that might affect how we live in the present.
Scripture has a breathless anticipation of heaven come on earth for real. Jesus taught us to pray for it—that God’s will would come on earth as in heaven. It’s what Jesus talked about when he preached about the kingdom of God coming near. It’s what prophets like Isaiah looked for, as we read earlier—a peaceable kingdom where people dwell in peace and security. The biblical writers knew that the present world isn’t what it’s supposed to be.
Which leads us to the ultimate vision John gives us at the end of Revelation, the end of the Bible—a glimpse of the kind of future God has for those who have endured and been faithful to the end. But for John, as for Jesus, it’s not just a vision for the future but rather a prototype of the kind of new creation we ought to be working on in the present.
Notice that John begins chapter 21 with a vision of a new heaven and a new earth. The present heaven and earth will “pass away,” transformed from death and decay into life. In Romans 8, Paul tells us that just like our bodies pass away and yet will be resurrected, so the creation, too, will be resurrected from its current bondage to sin and death. That’s the sense that John gives us here. We ought not read it, as some have, to mean that the present world is simply destroyed and done away with, rather the creation passes from death to life—not the end of the world, but the end of the world as we know it. What God intended with his creation in the beginning will become its reality in the end.
In fact, we see glimpses here in Revelation 21, at the end of the Bible, of images that were present at its beginning. A new creation is brought forth by God. The sea, the symbol of watery chaos in the ancient world, was present at the very beginning of the book of Genesis, but is no more here in Revelation. In Genesis 1, God brings order out of chaos by separating the waters. Here in Revelation 21, God doesn’t merely hold back the chaos, he eliminates it (a side note, whenever I have preached this passage I always have people who love the sea who are troubled by its disappearance in the end—fear not, John is using a symbol here. Surely God’s new creation will offer smooth sailing of one sort or another!).
But most importantly, where the Bible begins in a Garden, it ends in a city. That seems odd—the Garden, we know, is much more beautiful, like the mountains of a ski resort town. Few people would stand in the middle of a city, with its grit and dirt and crime, and say “Isn’t this just heaven?” Indeed, Genesis is a bit skeptical of cities. The first person to build one, after all, was Cain—a murderer. In Genesis 11, we read that the people of the earth decided to build their own city—one city called Babel to demonstrate their glory. But like many things in Revelation, John reminds us of that parody while giving us the reality—a city built not by human hands, but a city that glorifies God in every way. It’s the kind of city, says the writer of Hebrews, that the patriarchs of Genesis were looking for—“a city that has foundations, whose architect and builder is God” (Hebrews 11:10)
And rather than this city being a monument that people build to attempt to reach up to God, as in Babel, this city “comes down” from the new heaven to the new earth. This is the new Jerusalem, and as John’s readers would have implicitly understood, Jerusalem was historically considered to be the place where heaven and earth met. It was the place of the temple, God’s dwelling place on earth. Rather than heaven and earth being separate realities (one up and one down), the Jews believed that they are quite close and that, indeed, God’s ultimate desire is to make them one and the same. Here at the end of Revelation, we see this happening—heaven and earth are joined together like a shiny new bride and her husband, like they are made for each other. This is the Lord’s Prayer answered; Jesus’ preaching on the kingdom of God fulfilled.
I know that I confused some of you a couple of weeks ago when I said that heaven is not our permanent home. We’ve been taught that over and over again so often that it has become almost a de facto doctrine of Christianity. Yes, those who are in Christ go to be with God when they die, but like those saints who wait under the altar in Revelation 6, heaven is not our final destination. Instead, we will see a new heaven and earth come together, radically changing both. Unlike the Holy of Holies in the temple, where a curtain symbolically separated heaven from earth and only the priests could enter and commune with God, now the veil has been lifted. “See, the home of God is among mortals,” says the voice from heaven. “He will dwell with them as their God, they will be his peoples, and God himself will dwell with them” (Rev. 21:3). And God’s dwelling will no longer require a temple. Verse 22 – John says, “I saw no temple in the city, for its temple is the Lord God the Almighty and the Lamb.” This is God dwelling with his people face to face. In John’s Gospel, he tells us that this is what Jesus did—he was the Word that became flesh and dwelt among us. Now, he will dwell with us forever. We will be resurrected, renewed people in a resurrected, renewed creation where there is no veil between heaven and earth.
In 15-21 we see that the city, the New Jerusalem, is enormous in both height, width, and breadth—a perfect cube that stretches 1500 miles in every direction. Interestingly, that’s about the same size as the Roman empire. Rome called itself “the eternal city” with an empire that spanned much of the known world. The new Jerusalem exposes Rome and other human empires as a parody. It actually encompasses the whole world and all nations. The shape of the cube is reminiscent of the Holy of Holies, the place where God’s presence dwelt in the tabernacle and the temple, but now God’s presence isn’t confined to one place but to the whole city. In fact, the city doesn’t anything else. No sun or moon is needed for its light (v. 23), and its gates that are always open because all God’s enemies have been defeated (v. 25). It’s the city that gathers people together, who bring “the glory and honor of the nations” to the worship at the feet of the one who is Lord of all.
And what of the people in the city? “He will wipe every tear from their eyes. Death will be no more. Mourning and crying and pain will be no more, for the first things—the sin that causes death, crying, and pain—have passed away (v. 4). All hospitals will go out of business, all nursing homes will be empty, and all funerals will be canceled. The people of the new Jerusalem live in full community with God and each other, reversing the brokenness of the relationship between humans and between humans and God in Genesis and the rest of human history.
Oh, and there’s still a garden, too. Chapter 22, the last chapter of Revelation, opens with a vision of a river flowing from the throne of God and the Lamb through the city. “On either side of the river is the tree of life” (remember that from Genesis 3?) with its twelve kinds of fruit—a tree whose leaves are for the healing of the nations. The garden and the city, heaven and earth, God and humanity—all together forever.
When given this sort of vision, of heaven and earth together, we see that everything else pales in comparison. My church member was settling for what she could see and experience through her own senses. John invites us to see deep, to know deep in our souls that God will set the world, and us, right.
But I think John also wants us to know that this isn’t just something that’s going to happen in the future. Indeed, God is already at work. That work of new creation began when Jesus rose from the dead, which the early church saw as the sign of the beginning of God’s new creation. Therefore, as Paul says in 2 Corinthians 5:17,
“If anyone is in Christ, there is a new creation: everything old has passed away; see, everything has become new!” We become part of God’s new creation when we repent and believe the good news about Jesus.
Becoming part of the new creation, however, means that we also enter into the mission of God who is bringing it about. In 21:5, the one who is seated on the throne says, “See, I am making all things new!” It’s interesting that that particular verb is in the present tense, not the future tense. God isn’t saying, “I will make everything new someday,” nor is he saying, “I am making all new things,” as though he was scrapping the creation project and starting over. No, he is right now making all things new in the present in anticipation of their completion in the future.
That means we look at our community and see those places where it is not yet complete. We see where death is still at work in those who are sick and aged, and those who are slowly killing themselves through addiction to substances, to sex, to excess, or even to success. We look for the places where people are mourning over the loss of loved ones, over the loss of health, or job, or family. We must see the tears of people who are hungry and hurting, and we hear the cries of pain from those who are broken in body, mind, or spirit.
In short, we can’t simply walk outside this church, look up at the beautiful scenes of Pike’s Peak and the rolling hills and say, “Isn’t this heaven?” It isn’t yet, and that means we have work to do. Indeed, holy work, as well as repentance and faith, is the response to the coming of Christ. “See, I am coming soon; my reward is with me to repay according to everyone’s work” (22:12). Just as Jesus warned the first of the seven churches, the church at Ephesus, to “do the works you did at first,” he tells us to continue doing the work of the kingdom of God until it comes in fullness. When we do that work in the present creation, it carries over to the new one. In Revelation 19:8 we see again see the image of the bride, but her white gown is “the righteous deeds of the saints” which make an eternal difference.
Heaven and earth are coming together. What can we do to make that more and more a reality on earth as it is in heaven? That’s the ultimate mission of God and it’s our mission as well.
This is the reason why we do things like a Bible translation for people in Kenya. It’s the reason we care for our neighbors through donating food and through the disaster relief work of our Emergency Preparedness Group. It’s the reason why people here spend hours in prayer. It’s why the ladies make quilts out of old blue jeans for homeless veterans, why so many of our people put in service hours at Tri-Lakes Cares. It’s reason why we swing hammers at a Habitat for Humanity project or serve soup at Marion House, or do a thousand other things to make our community look more like God’s coming kingdom. It’s the reason why we have a task force looking at a satellite ministry location to be more present in our local neighborhood. It’s the reason why we share Christ with our neighbors and tell them the story of how Christ has changed us and can change their lives as well. It’s the reason why the church exists in the first place. We are working for the end of the world as we know it in anticipation of God’s new world.
The message of Revelation for each of us is that Jesus is coming soon. C.S. Lewis’ words still captivate me—will we be halfhearted creatures who settle for visions of nice cars, healthy bank accounts, ski chalets, and ambitious titles, or will we do everything we can to pursue the infinite joy God promises to his creation? Are we far too easily pleased, or are we driven by a holy discontent to stay at work until its done?
“See, I am making all things new,” says the Lord. It’s not heaven yet, but it’s coming!
