I am Making Everything New - Revelation 21:1-6

The New Revised Standard Version The New Heaven and the New Earth

The New Heaven and the New Earth

21 Then I saw a new heaven and a new earth; for the first heaven and the first earth had passed away, and the sea was no more. 2 And I saw the holy city, the new Jerusalem, coming down out of heaven from God, prepared as a bride adorned for her husband. 3 And I heard a loud voice from the throne saying,

“See, the home of God is among mortals.

He will dwell with them as their God;

they will be his peoples,

and God himself will be with them;

4 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 have passed away.”

5 And the one who was seated on the throne said, “See, I am making all things new.” Also he said, “Write this, for these words are trustworthy and true.” 6 Then 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 as a gift from the spring of the water of life.

How do we imagine the world made right to be?

Think for a moment, of the world as it ought to be. What do you imagine it is like? Share with a neighbor. What do you see there, what is happening? How does it feel?

Ok, if you’ve got this image or a description in mind, hold it.

Now, consider: does your image of the world as it ought to be, the world made right, could it possibly conflict with someone else’s ideal, new creation?

The problem with ideals is that they very often conflict when we get real about what we need in relation to what others need.

Let’s use a simple example to illustrate this: This week, the Seattle Mariners baseball team is on the road playing the New York Mets, Toronto Blue Jays, and Boston Red Sox. Now, as a lifelong Mariners fan, my ideal reality is that the M’s would win all of those games and come back from the road having moved up in the American League West standings. My ideal world is one in which the Mariners win the World Series…someday.

But you can see the conflict written into this: people similarly long to see the Mets, the Blue Jays, or the Red Sox win. That is victory, hope, and promise for them!

I know baseball standings do not ultimately matter in the scheme of things. But think on it: the conflicting reality of hopes for these four different baseball clubs show us the conflicting realities that we have across humanity. This is both a fun part of social games like baseball, but also a deep struggle that creates rifts across cultures when it comes to things like access to water or life saving medicine, land or property.

Is there anything that transcends these conflicting desires?

Does this passage help us to see something beyond such conflicts?

God’s promises

God’s promise is not necessarily that all we imagine a utopian world to be will actually be what comes.

But there is a promise that does transcend, that does cut through all conflicting interests. And that is the end of death.

The promise of God is a fundamental rewiring of how we understand life. No longer are we to see life as fleeting, but a wisp and then gone. Instead, we start to see a new heaven and new earth where death holds no more power.

Now, we practical people want to wonder at the logistics here. How could humanity possibly occupy earth, as it is, with an undoing of death. The population would overwhelm the planet, as it is already threatening to do. No death means more scarcity, right? More struggles for there to be enough food and space.

Or we look at it from the angle of the scientific implausibility of such a thing. There is really nothing that we understand about the way the human body works (or any living thing, for that matter) that would lead us to believe that cells can stop dying and then just start living forever. We know that biology doesn’t work that way.

So what are we, the pragmatists that we are, to do with these promises of no more death, no more mourning or crying or pain…these first things passing away?

Shifting Our Perspective

What is required here is that we must see all of these promises from a shifted perspective. The promise of death being done away with presents to us an opportunity to reimagine all existence. And this is where John’s Revelation is helpful — it’s an imagination for a world that is to come, that is promised, however farfetched or impossible it may seem.

I’ll get philosophical for a moment: the New Testament writers were steeped in a world of Platonic thought. Plato, and Aristotle after him, developed great schools of philosophical debate and learning in the centuries that precede the life of Christ. A core principle to Platonic thought is this concept that there are idealized, perfected forms of all things. Let’s consider this example: picture in your mind a tree. Now, you might picture a giant fir tree or a small Japanese maple. You might smell pine or cedar. Our individual imaginations conjure up a variety of images, based on our upbringing, our current context, and our knowledge of trees.

Well, Platonic thought would argue that there is a first tree behind all of these imaginations of a tree. An ideal tree, a form of a tree into which all other trees fit. There is a purity of thought that is beyond these images that come to our minds.

Stay with me here.

Now, as we listen to the opening words of this Revelation passage once again, consider this: John’s revelation shows us the unveiling of an altered, renewed reality.

The New Revised Standard Version (The New Heaven and the New Earth)

21 Then I saw a new heaven and a new earth; for the first heaven and the first earth had passed away, and the sea was no more. 2 And I saw the holy city, the new Jerusalem, coming down out of heaven from God

Here we get a picture of new heaven and new earth. In keeping with Platonic thought, it is not even simply a renewed version of the earth and heavens we know, but the ideal, the way they are meant to be, new, fresh, pure, filled with hope and promise.

And now, back to shifting our perspective: We cannot hear this passage rightly if we limit our imaginations to simply seeing things renewed and restored to what they once were. Instead, we have to shift our hopes and imagination to be open to a revealing of a world that is beyond our imagination — where death and tears and weeping and war are no more.

Can you imagine this? No? Well, that makes sense!

The promise that things are going to be made new. Beyond our imaginations, beyond our schemes and hopes, beyond our shared or conflicting interests.

The world we get a glimpse of is certainly still complex, filled with diverse people who have all sorts of needs and interests. But the common element, the principle that leads all creation to the ideal form, the resurrected and made new world, is, going back once again, to the undoing of the power of death.

Your perfect heaven and earth are probably in conflict, at least to some degree, with my idea of perfect heaven and earth.

But what I hear in this passage, in the words from this loud voice from the throne, is the promise of two things that we likely share across humanity and therefore give all people something to hope for and collectively share.

I have mentioned the first many times already: In the new creation, death is no more. Think of our common problems in this world: disease, famine, unbearable climates, misused power, poverty and greed. We can pretty safely agree that all of these things are struggles for all humanity. And I would say that these are all markers of the power of death. If we did not struggle against the reality of death, then diseases would have no power. Hunger and famine would be non issues, there would be no need to hoard or starve. The struggles with these things are rooted in the impending nature of death which we are all trying to fight off and delay. When death dies, we are collectively released from that burden.

The second piece in this passage that binds us up into a common hope, a shared interest in the new creation, new heaven, and new earth, is presence. God’s presence, among us, to be exact.

I’ve read a lot of things from traditions of faith all around the world. All across the religious spectrum is this deep hope that the divine might be present with us. Certainly we can easily see this in Christianity, Judaism, and Islam — the desire to please God and be with God. But I would argue this expands even beyond those religious traditions. Even the one who does not believe in God, is yet, as a human being, one who desires presence. Perhaps they describe that as consciousness or awareness. Maybe it is found in the intimacy of a loving partnership with another person. Whatever way this desire gets lived out, there is something deep within us that longs for presence, in ourselves and from the other. And what we’re seeing here, in this new heaven and new earth, is that presence has come to dwell with us. God with dwell with the people and be with them. There is proximity and intimacy and presence here. What all creation has groaned for, longed after, sought out, has now come close. God with us. Emmanuel. God actually present, no longer in the ideal, no longer away up there in the sky, no longer distanced by laws or rules or social structures. Presence.

The one who is the beginning and the end is now present to us, in all time and space, with us.

I love the image that John closes this part of the reading with: To the thirsty, God will give water as a gift from the spring of the water of life.

For us who share in a world that is fraught with death and hunger, pain and war, what is yet another common interest we have? Water! To quench our thirst, both physically and spiritually. Convince me that humanity does not share this common need for the waters of life.

This is the new creation that John shares with us: a new heaven, a new earth, the old broken things passing away, the promise of life to its fullest now spreading out over all things.

A quick aside to this passage that must be mentioned, and then we’ll look at how we practically live this text together.

The aside is this: Many people, well meaning to a point, have taken this passage to be a good excuse to not care for the world we inhabit today. The logic is this: If God is creating a new heaven and new earth and all is passing away, then why should we really care about how we steward this present world. Extract everything we need from this old rock, because it is passing away. Pollution doesn’t matter, destruction of rainforests doesn’t matter.

This logic is faulty. It reads this text far too literally and ignores so many other teachings in the Scriptures that call humanity to steward and care for creation. And even if the new creation is a restoration and full picture of what the world is meant to be, there is a very important piece to this that must be attended to: when we desecrate creation now, we participate actively in the ways of death. Strip mining ruins the water for communities and hurts people who rely on it for drinking. Pollution waste harms the livelihood of those who breathe it. And even if all things, including the people made sick by such destruction, are made new, we have to reckon with the harm that such a line of thought creates. Even now, we are to be about the recreating of all things, making them better, stewarding and caring for each other. As we await the day of God’s glory, we still must participate in the restoring of life for all who face death.

Care for the earth.

Ok. Now, let’s close with the practical: this is yet another fantastic image given to us in the book of Revelation. What does it mean to us, here and now?

Simply put, I believe this teaching gives us hope.

Hope is having an imagination for a future, a holding to what is promised and not yet seen. Hope is seeing that God has been good and cared for creation and therefore trusting in God’s continuing goodness to and restoring of creation. The one who is the beginning and the end, the ultimate presence and reality we seek, is promising to make things as they are meant to be, ultimately.

Now, that can feel ethereal and abstract.

But it can also be the thing that gets us out of bed in the morning. Hope is our driver. If we have no hope, we simply yield to the power of death. But when we hold hope, when we find purpose and promise, then we wake up, we grow strong in the Lord’s power, we find ways to serve and live that bring others hope.

This is a letter of hope from the end of the world, this Revelation of John.

My hope would be that we see this “making all things new” even happening here, among us. And my prayer would be that this hope founded upon God’s promises would bind us together, give us common cause, and guide us as we await these promises made real.