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Introduction
Christmas is the day in which we remember the coming of God the Son.
As John would say,
But Matthew, quoting Isaiah puts it like this:
What makes Christmas Christmas is Immanuel—God with us.
If God did not come down to dwell with humanity in the flesh—to be with us—then Christmas isn’t Christmas.
It’s simply winter solstice or, in reality, nothing at all.
In the Old Testament, God gave Israel holy days in which they were to celebrate and they were for specific reasons.
One in particular was the Feast of Booths.
It was to remind the people of their journey in the wilderness.
By the time we get to the New Testament a new holiday has come that even Jesus celebrated.
It was the feast of dedication or Hanukkah; it was to remember the time when Israel threw off the oppressive rule of Antiochus IV and gained independence for the first time in hundreds of years.
Though it is not biblically mandated, today we celebrate one of the greatest holy days ever.
It reminds us of the coming of God in the flesh.
And it points to a future reality.
It points us to a time when it will be forever Christmas—when God will be with us forever.
And when that day comes, we will see and experience, among other things, these three realities:
God’s Sanctuary
God’s Splendor
God’s Security
like never before.
God’s Sanctuary
The first reality that we are looking at this morning that will be in our forever Christmas, is God’s Sanctuary.
To fully understand what John saw and we will experience, we need to go back to the Old Testament.
When God gave Moses instructions for the tabernacle, he gave exact dimensions of its size.
And what we find, if we were to go through the entire set of instructions is that there was the courtyard for the average Jewish man.
It was about 75 feet wide and 150 feet long, but there was no ceiling.
It was completely open.
The Holy Place, which was for the priests of Israel, was 15 feet high, 15 feet wide, and 30 feet long.
Then there was the Holy of Holies or the Most Holy Place.
This part housed the Ark of the Covenant and the Mercy Seat of God.
This was where the glory of God would dwell.
It was 15 feet high, 15 feet wide, and 15 feet long.
In other words, it was a perfect cube.
When the temple was built, the size of the Holy of Holies was 30 feet-cubed.
A perfect cube for the perfect God.
The further out from the sanctuary of Yahweh one got, the more imperfect the dimensions.
Hence, the Holy Place of the priests was twice as long as it was wide and high.
The courtyard was twice as long as wide and there were no dimensions for a ceiling.
Then there was the nation of Israel which had borders and finally the world, which has no borders.
In the Old Testament, there was a word for the temple; it was beth, which simply means house as in Beth-lehem (House of Bread) or Beth-el (House of God).
In the New Testament, however, there were two words.
One was hieron which was the temple complex with all the courtyards (Courtyard of women, Gentiles, etc.) and the Holy Place of the priests, but then there was the Naos which was the sanctuary—the Holy of Holies.
Generally, the temple was called hieron and only occasionally was it called Naos.
That word was generally reserved for the Sanctuary.
What does all this have to do with our text this morning?
Everything!
Let’s look back at
The New Jerusalem is a perfect cube.
But rather than being 15 feet cubed like the tabernacle or 30 feet cubed like the temple, its 7,282,000 feet cubed—12,000 stadia.
We aren’t supposed to get hung up on the size though actually because each the idea is based on the number 12 for the twelve tribes of Israel and 1,000 which is the number of completeness in a perfect cube: perfection!
In other words, the New Jerusalem is all Israel, both the Old and New Testament saints, come together forever.
And then we see that there is no temple in their midst.
The word is Naos—there is no sanctuary.
There is no Holy of Holies like one would expect to see.
Why?
Because God and the Lamb is its temple.
Finally!
A perfect city for the perfect God.
God will dwell with his people forever; we will experience God’s presence as never before!
God’s Splendor
But we are not just in God’s sanctuary, we see God’s splendor.
When we met last week, I talked about the glory of God and how it directed and defended Israel through the wilderness.
We saw how it filled the temple and yet deserted it later.
We saw that Israel had waited 600 years for that glory to return and it finally came in wrapped in human flesh.
But the glory that the Shepherds saw and that Simeon saw, and Peter, James, and John saw on the mount of transfiguration, ascended into heaven nearly 2,000 years ago.
And believers have been longing ever since to see that glory revealed.
Here we are told that God’s glory will be among the New Jerusalem, among all the believers of all time, just as it was in the Holy of Holies.
His glory will fill that place!
And I am amazed at how beautiful this place will be.
John described the walls of Jerusalem being made of jasper with the foundation being various precious stones.
There will be reds and blues and greens and yellows.
And by themselves it would be beautiful, but imagine the radiance of God’s glory bursting through them!
You know, there are two kinds of people in the world: those who like white lights on their Christmas tree and those who like colored lights on it.
I’m a colored lights kind of guy.
I love its warmth and beauty, but all the color-lighted trees in the world put together would not compare to the beauty of the New Jerusalem.
But we are not there yet.
Christ has yet to return to us.
And until he does, we are called to display God’s splendor in this world.
As Paul to the Philippians
Brothers and sisters, we are here to shine a glorious light to a darkened world.
That is not simply by being nice and kind to people.
It is not simply done in temporal ways, but must be done in eternal ways.
We must reflect the light of the gospel.
We have been given this light and so we give this light.
But not only are we to proclaim it, not only are we to display it, but we are to sing the wondrous glory of God, reminding each other through song of the glory that awaits us.
God’s Security
But it is not only God’s sanctuary that makes us our forever Christmas.
It is not only God’s splendor that makes it forever Christmas.
But there is also God’s security.
We live in a world full of light-pollution.
It’s nearly impossible to find a place in the U.S. where light does not affect how we see the night.
Even in most places in the desert, lights from the cities can be seen.
That wasn’t always the case.
As dangerous as night is today, it was more so before electricity was harnessed.
Traveling at night could be a deadly activity.
Cities would close their gates at dusk and not open them until morning.
But here, in the place where God is with his people, where his glory is displayed in all its splendor, there is no night and the gates never close.
In other words, what we see is that there is no danger.
The dangers that plague the world, whether physical, mental, bacterial, viral, or whatever they may be, will never enter into this glorious place.
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