Behold, I Make All Things New
Richard Baxter was a very effective pastor in England in the 1600s. His whole adult life was spent battling one sickness after the other. He was harassed by a constant cough, frequent nosebleeds, migraine headaches, digestive ailments, kidney stones, and gallstones. He believed in supernatural healing and said several times he was restored to fruitful labor because of God’s direct intervention. He said once a cancerous looking tumor in his throat vanished while he was in the pulpit testifying to God’s mercies in his own life. Yet bodily suffering was with him to the end, and he once said that from the age of 21 he was “seldom an hour free from pain.”
Richard Baxter’s Regular Meditation on Heaven
One of the effects of this suffering was to make him intensely conscious of how temporary his life is and how inevitable death is. Once, when he was 35, he was bed-bound by one of his diseases and thought he would probably not recover. He began to meditate on the joys of heaven and the age to come in preparation for leaving this world. He focused especially on “the hope of glory” and began to write his thoughts.
To his surprise he recovered and his thoughts became a book entitled The Saints’ Everlasting Rest. He took up the practice of meditating on heaven a half hour each day because of the powerful impact it had on his life. He commended the same thing to his readers. He said,
If you would have light and heat, why are you not more in the sunshine? For want of this recourse to heaven, your soul is as a lamp not lighted, and your duty as a sacrifice without fire. Fetch one coal daily from this altar, and see if your offering will not burn … Keep close to this reviving fire, and see if your affections will not be warm.
We Are Citizens of Another Age
This is good advice. Paul told us to do this in Colossians 3:1–4.
1 If then you have been raised with Christ, seek the things that are above, where Christ is, seated at the right hand of God. 2 Set your minds on things that are above, not on things that are on earth. 3 For you have died, and your life is hid with Christ in God. 4 When Christ who is our life appears, then you also will appear with him in glory.
1. Spiritually and Morally New
God is going to make us spiritually and morally new and glorious.
The Greatest Frustration of This Age
The greatest frustration of this age is that we still sin. I believe Romans 7 describes this painful truth. For example verses 23–24: “I delight in the law of God in my inmost self, but I see in my members another law at war with the law of my mind.” This war is the most frustrating thing about life in this age—at least it is for the children of God. We want to be holy and we fall short of the holiness we long for. We want to love and we say hurtful things. We want to worship and we feel cold. We want to walk in peace and we feel anxiety. We want to be pure in thought and impurity bombards our minds.
There is some progress as the Spirit helps us in our weakness. But what we long for is deliverance from this bent to sinning.
John’s Vision of the Beautified Bride
That is what God promises when he makes all things new. We will be made spiritually and morally new—not just partially as now, but wholly. Look at verse 2: “And I saw the holy city, new Jerusalem, coming down out of heaven, prepared as a bride adorned for her husband.”
This is a picture of the church prepared and beautified for her husband, Jesus Christ. When God makes all things new, he makes the church—the people of God—spiritually and morally beautiful for his Son. Look at the way this is described in verses 9–11:
9 Then came one of the seven angels who had the seven bowls full of the seven last plagues, and spoke to me, saying, “Come, I will show you the Bride, the wife of the Lamb.” 10And in the Spirit he carried me away to a great, high mountain, and showed me the holy city Jerusalem coming down out of heaven from God [the same image as in verse 2, 11 having the glory of God, its radiance like a most rare jewel, like a jasper, clear as crystal.
When God makes the bride ready for the Son, the way he does it is by giving us his glory—verse 11: “having the glory of God.” And this glory will purify us so deeply and so thoroughly that we will be like a rare jewel, clear as crystal. Don’t you long for the day when you will be so good and so right and so pure that you will be like a translucent jewel that people will look at and see straight through without seeing any impurity at all? Nothing hidden and nothing shameful.
That’s the first way the newness is coming. God will make us spiritually and morally beautiful for our final marriage with his Son.
2. Physically and Bodily New
Second, God is going to make us physically and bodily new and glorious.
Our Final Hope Is Not Disembodied Spirits
The Bible does not teach that the final state of glory is one of disembodied spirits. Plato and his kin wanted it that way because they thought the body was a drag on the freedom of the spirit. But the Bible teaches a very different destiny for God’s people. God will make all things new—including our bodies.
Verse 4 points in this direction: “He will wipe away every tear from their eyes, and death shall be no more, neither shall there be mourning nor crying nor pain any more, for the former things have passed away.”
No more death. No more pain. No more tears. What that means is that the body we know now will be changed. Because it dies. And it hurts. And it cries. If death is gone and pain is gone and tears are gone, then the body as we know it here is gone. That may sound like Plato—good riddance to the body of pain. Revelation is plain that the point is not good riddance to the body but that God will make all things new.
A Glorified Body Like Christ’s
Paul put it like this in Philippians 3:20–21,
Our commonwealth is in heaven, and from it we await a Savior, the Lord Jesus Christ, who will change the body of our lowliness to be like the body of his glory, according to the working by which he is able to subdue all things to himself.
That’s what he meant last week in Romans 6: “We shall certainly be united to him in a resurrection like his.” It is a new body: it will never die again, it will never hurt again, it will never cry again—except perhaps for joy.
There are a lot of people who feel that they didn’t get a fair shake when the bodies were passed out. Some people have dramatic deformities, some have lost limbs, some are paralyzed, some can’t hear, some can’t see, some have extensive skin blemishes, some have freakish distortions. But God has no intention of leaving anybody in that condition if they will trust him. He has his purposes in letting a man be born blind and leaving him blind for much of his adult life (John 9:1ff.). But he has no intention of leaving anyone with pain and disability who trusts him.
When God makes all things new, he makes our bodies new.
John tells us about this in verse 4: “I heard a loud voice from the throne saying, ‘Behold, the dwelling of God is with men. He will dwell with them, and they shall be his people, and God himself will be with them.”
It’s true that God is with us now. His Spirit dwells in us (1 Corinthians 6:19). Jesus promised never to leave us to the end of the age (Matthew 28:20). But in 2 Corinthians 5:6–7 Paul said, “While we are at home in the body, we are away from the Lord, here we walk by faith and not by sight.”
So there is a deep and painful sense in which we are “away from the Lord”—we do not see as we will one day see. “Blessed are the pure in heart,” Jesus said, “for they shall see God.” It’s a promise. Something greater is coming for all of us in our relation with God.
How many times will a little child say what we all feel, “But daddy, I can’t see him”? That is a real heart cry that we should never lose. Revelation 22:4 gives the answer to it: “They shall see his face and his name shall be on their foreheads.”
When God makes all things new, he will make us spiritually and morally as pure as flawless crystal, he will give us a body like the body of his glory, he will renovate all creation to take all futility and evil and pain out of it, and finally he himself will come to us and let us see his face. And so forever and ever we will live with pure hearts and glorious bodies on a new earth in the presence and the glory of our heavenly Father.