Revelation 21:1-8

May 23, 2021

Lord’s Day Worship

Sean Higgins

The sermon starts around 18:55 in the audio file.

Series: Just Conquer #59

Introduction

What is your greatest longing? What comes to your mind when you imagine the best future you can? For most of us I’m assuming that the Bible animates most of that picture, as it should. We have a “scent of a flower we have not found, the echo of a tune we have not heard, news from a country we have never yet visited” (Lewis, “The Weight of Glory”). The future will also only be better for a certain sort of person.

The future includes a great reckoning. All those who have done wrong—by perfect God’s standards and according to His omniscient records—will be judged by their works. All those who’ve done wrong and have not been redeemed by the Lamb will stand before the great white throne and be sentenced to the second death, to eternity in the lake of fire. This is the final state for every conscious being in the universe who will not love and be loyal to Jesus Christ.

All those who do trust and serve Jesus anticipate (and hasten 2 Peter 3:12) that day of judgment because then Jesus’ name will be exalted above all, and also our testimony for Jesus’ name and whatever suffering we endured will be finished and rewarded. The righteous look forward to the reign of righteousness that Jesus will establish. But our desire that every wrong will be acknowledged and punished is not the ultimate point. There is more longing than for justice, even more than longing for the end of our troubles. Our longing is to be home with God.

Revelation 21 begins to describe what that will be like. From Revelation 21:1 through 22:5 John gives perhaps the most detailed vision of “heaven,” of eternal life, found anywhere in Scripture. Our experiences now make it difficult to conceive of the positives (Peter has a similar list of what our inheritance is not in 1 Peter 1:4). But while all things will be new, they will not be entirely disconnected from now.

Before we get to seeing these glories, I admit I was surprised to learn that the general agreement among Bible readers about the final judgment does not carry over into chapter 21. I thought we were mostly back on the same page, with judgment and followed by the new heaven and new earth still in the future. It turns out that some believe that chapter 21 takes us back to the first century and that the new is actually coming now. Here is just one example (from someone I have otherwise learned a lot):

“I take the first heavens and earth as the Judaic aeon and the new heavens and earth as the Christian aeon, and these two aeons overlapped—the latter beginning at Pentecost, and the former ending with the destruction of the Temple in AD 70…. Church history is the time it takes for this bride to walk down the aisle.” (Douglas Wilson, When the Man Comes Around)

So,

“The process of world evangelization is the process by which God is making all things new, which is the declaration He makes in this passage.” (ibid.)

This is not how I believe the new is connected to the now; the new is not now but still then.

The language in these verses, even as the images connect with other prophetic visions from the OT and earlier in the NT, reveals a climactic and cataclysmic remaking, not a gradual and generational remodel. This is even quicker than the original six-day creation, and certainly not thousands of years of gospelistic-evolutionary development on earth.

There are two key points in these two paragraphs, the Then (verses 1-4) and the Now (verses 5-8).

The Then (verses 1-4)

In the previous paragraph John saw “earth and sky” flee away from God’s presence as men were called to the judgment seat. Now John describes the replacement. And I saw heaven-a new kind, and earth-a new one. For the first heaven and the first earth went away and the sea is not any longer (verse 1).

The Bible opens with, “In the beginning God c[...]