“I Saw a New Heaven…!”

A Sermon Based Upon Revelation 21: 1-6

By Rev. Dr. Charles J. Tomlin, DMin

Flat Rock-Zion Baptist Partnership

May 28, 2017, Easter Series, 7/7: ‘Jesus Christ Revealed Today’

When David Jensen moved his family to Texas, they inherited a cat named Whitney.  The previous owners told them she was a stray that just showed up on the porch one day.  And she stayed there.   She stayed there when the previous owners moved out.  She stayed there when the new owners moved in.   Whitney came with the house, so that when they arrived at this house, their family increased by one.  

“We are not necessarily cat people,” Jensen writes.  That changed with Whitney.  Everyone came to love this cat.   Eventually, Whitney moved from the outside to inside.   She charmed everyone with her meows, cuddles and purrs.  They allowed her to sleep at the foot of their beds and she greeted everyone each morning.  Whitney was a ‘happy cat’ who made the whole family happy.  

They did not know how old Whitney was, but after several years, it then became very clear Whitney was in her old age.  The last few months of her life were not her best, but she still loved to be held and petted.   After Whitney died, the Jenson family needed to hold an impromptu memorial service, with each member of the family sharing a word, a prayer, and of course, shedding tears.   It was after all this that his young daughter named Grace asked: “Dad, Is Whitney in heaven?”  (From Living in Hope, David H. Jensen, WJK Press, 2010, p. 50).

John also tries to answer the unanswerable when he says: “I saw a new Heaven and a new Earth….”  John’s grand vision includes a ‘great city’ coming which has ‘the throne of God and the lamb’ at its center (22:3).   John is not telling us everything the future looks like, but John is telling us what it looks like to have a future in God.   He says loud and clear:  A brand new world is coming!    While there will be similarities to the old world; like a river, stones, streets, with a city (maybe also with cats), everything will be renewed and refreshed.  It is the kind of vision that is supposed to help us live without fear, saying with John:“Even so, Come Lord Jesus” (22: 20).  

BEHOLD, I MAKE ALL THINGS NEW (v. 5)

The most important word in John’s vision is new.   God himself says: ‘Behold, I make all things new!...  Look closely God’s promise is not that He will make all new things, but this vision says: God will make all things new (Eugene Boring).    John does not envision new different things (Gk. neos), but John envisions renewed, transformed same sorts of new (Gk. kainos) things.   Just like Paul said we will also be ‘changed’ (1 Cor. 15), this ‘new’ redeems what already is. 

In the gospel of Matthew, Jesus refers to this hope of redemption as the ‘the regeneration’ (KJV) or renewal (NIV) that comes when ‘the Son of Man sits on the throne of His glory’ (Matt. 19:28; 29).   In other words, God is not going to simply trash, throw away, or dispose of this world, but the Christian hope is that God promises to remake this world into a renewed and refreshed creation (Isa 65:17).  John’s vision reflects Jesus promise of ‘renewal’ and they both go straight back to Isaiah’s original vision which interestingly includes cats, but changed cats, saying: “the lion will eat straw like the ox, and the child will play near the cobra’s den….  (Isa. 11:7-8).  These are not altogether ‘new’ animals and reptiles, like some high-tech robot imagined in  science fiction, but this is the promise of ‘renewed’ creatures, losing their destructiveness, the curse of sin, and even becoming vegetarians (v. 7).   (You didn’t see that coming, did you?)   Revelation promises a re-genesis, with the world being transformed into a new creation, just as we are called to be a ‘new creature in Christ’ (2 Cor. 5:17) by the ‘rebirth and renewal by the Holy Spirit’ (Titus 3:5).  Paul says that this is a transformation God will bring ‘in the twinkling of an eye’ by transforming, not trashing, this world that belongs to him. 

Understanding that God makes all things new, not all new things helps us not misunderstand 2 Peter, where we read of the coming ‘the day of the Lord’ when ‘the heavens shall pass away…the elements will melt…the earth will be…burned up (2 Pet. 3: 10-12).   My mother, in telling me about the rainbow, told me how God ‘destroyed’ the world with a flood the first time and how the rainbow in the sky promised God would never do that again.  “But the next time,” she warned, “God will destroy the world with ‘fire’.   It was a rather strange way to explain the rainbow, but it did keep my attention.  

Peter’s words about ‘fire’ and ‘destruction’ are obviously tempered by his assurance that ‘the long suffering of our Lord is salvation’ (3:15) because ‘God is not willing that any should perish, but that all should come to repentance’ (2:9).   Most importantly, in his first letter, Peter has already spoken of being ‘tried’ (KJV) or ‘refined’ (CEB) by ‘fire’ (1 Pet. 1:7), perhaps recalling how Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego came through the fire without as much as ‘a hair on their head singed’ (Dan. 3:26) just like Noah and his family, and the earth too, came through the flood, and were not destroyed (2 Pet. 2:5).  In a similar way, Scripture pictures God as a ‘consuming fire’ (Hebrews 12:39), causing some to be ‘saved’ by ‘fire’ (1 Cor. 3: 13-15) because good works, both God’s and ours, will make it through the refining, renewing fire.

The difference between a fire that ‘burns up’ in destruction and judgment (3:7) and a fire that purifies for the ‘salvation of our souls’ (1 Pet. 1:9) is our ‘choice.’   I think this was the point my mother was trying to get into me, as Peter says: ‘You have purified yourselves by obeying the truth ….” (1 Pet. 1:22f).  Certainly, for the world God called ‘good’, and for God’s people, God’s ‘consuming fire’ means the destruction of the worlds’ corruption, which brings about the reconstruction of God’s new heavens and earth.   We too must allow God’s ‘baptizing’ ‘redeeming’, refining, Spirit-fire (Matt 3:11) to burn within our hearts (Luk. 24:32) so we will inherit the world to come.  Only those who persist in ‘unbelieving’ will find ‘their place’ in the ‘lake that burns with fire…that is, ‘the second death’.    This means, God’s fire is intended to make us new, not destroy us.  The difference in how the fire burns is our choice. 

 NEW JERUSALEM, COMING DOWN … (v 2)

David May says that when he and his wife were once traveling the English countryside, that he was having breakfast with some young travelers, when a young European girl commented how she like to learn English by watching American movies.   She had just seen a ‘typical’ American movie.   When Dr. May asked her what made the movie ‘typically American’, she answered that “Americans like to wrap up all their movies with nice happy endings.  

But Americans are not the only ones who like happy endings.   John’s Revelation wraps up the Bible with a happy ending too, but it’s not exactly put together by popular opinion.   Perhaps the most surprising part of John’s ending vision is that John doesn’t picture everyone ‘going to heaven’ but instead,  John sees ‘the holy city, new Jerusalem, coming down from God out of heaven, like a bride dressed beautifully for her husband’ (v. 2, CEB).  Of course, John is not denying that our we go to ‘heaven’ when die, but John envisions even bigger things in store God’s people, for both our souls and even our bodies too.  

Now, of course, I realize that ‘going to heaven’ is where most popular Christian culture tend to put our ‘focus’ on the ‘life to come’.   And of course, we should have hope of being reunited with our loved ones, who are among ‘the dead in Christ’, whom Christ will ‘bring with him’ when he returns.   But John also wants us to see something even bigger, assuring us that there is much more to God’s future for us than becoming angels floating on clouds all day.    In fact, I have an interesting little book in my study with the very catchy title that is closer to what John sees, entitled: “Heaven: It’s Not the End of the World.”   For what God is going to do when he ‘he makes all things new’ is greater than most of us have taken time to imagine.   For example:

NEW JERUSALEM:  First, what comes down to earth from God is the NEW JERUSALEM, far exceeding the original one.   Unfortunately, this heavenly vision hasn’t reached many of those Israelis and Palestinians who are still fighting for a piece of ‘old Jerusalem’ real estate.   The new world that God is building is based on God’s future, not the past, and this future ‘comes down’ to be established by God alone.   What if those still fighting over earthly real-estate, could only come to understand that matters most is people, not land.

THE DWELLING OF GOD:  Secondly, “Jerusalem” comes down from heaven because finally and fully God ‘comes down’ live among his people.   Again, this is not a picture of people going to be with God, but it’s a picture of God coming to dwell in his people—and to be their God (v. 3).   This is the final answer to the grand dream of the Old Testament Prophets that ‘earth will be filled with the glory of God’ (Isa. 6:3).  John’s says that this ‘dream’ will become real in God’s renewed world.   Recall that even king David—a man after God’s own heart—was not allowed to build God a house.   In the same way, the New Testament says God doesn’t ‘live in temples built by human hands’ (Acts 17:24) but that our ‘bodies are temples of the Holy Spirit’ so that we should ‘honor God with our bodies’ (1 Cor. 6:19-20).   Here, John envisions God’s continual, abiding presence at the center of this ‘new’ creation.

THERE WAS NO MORE SEA:  Finally,  when God perfectly dwell’s in, and among us in this new world, what isn’t there is almost as important as what is: ‘no more tears, no more death, no more mourning, and not more crying or pain.’  This happens not because God is there to wipe the tears away’ and also because ‘the old order of things has passed away’ (21:4).   What is harder for us to imagine is how this can be a ‘new earth’ where there is also ‘no more sea’ (21:1).   I like the sea, don’t you?  I like the sea a lot more than I like cats. 

But in the ancient Jewish and early Christian world, it was the Romans who controlled the sea with their great ‘ships’.  Those Romans most often sailed those seas to other lands, where they landed their armies and invaded other nations and killed many peoples.   Imagine how many peoples would watch the sea and worried with fear for the next ships bearing armies that came to kill, destroy, and conquer, making them all slaves to this dominate foreign power.  In this way, even the wonderful ‘sea’ could become a ‘curse’ and a threat.

But in God’s new world, there would be ‘no more sea’ for such invaders to sail on.  The lesson here is not geographical, but it is political and spiritual.   In God’s new world the ‘saints’ will rule and the powers will be benevolent, loving, and life-giving, not destructive, invasive, and murderous.   “No more sea” was the promise of the end of a cruel, unrelenting evil power that brought nothing but harm and hurt to God’s people. 

We can imagine our ‘hope’ for the future in many, many ways, because this future is God’s future that is still coming in ways we can still hardly imagine, except by faith.    John goes on imagine more about ‘the holy city’ (Rev. 21: 10ff), seeing it setting on a high on a mountain in the shape of a great cube (4 square).  This city is envisioned to have high walls with gates that are always open, built upon the foundations of prophets and apostle.  It is a city shinning with everything precious with a perfect garden and a crystal river so that nothing ‘impure will ever enter’ (21: 26) because God’s glory resides among who’s names are written in the ‘lamb’s book of life’.   As this ‘Revelation of Jesus Christ’ arrives at its final destination on a high mountain, this is not the‘end’ of the world, but this is a whole new beginning.  

 

TO THE ONE WHO IS THIRSTY…

The day before Martin Luther King Jr was murdered in Memphis, he made one of the most important speeches in American history.  He too spoke of a mountain top, saying,  “I don’t know what will happen now.  We’ve got some difficult days ahead.  But it doesn’t matter with me now.  Because I’ve been to the mountaintop…  And I don’t mind….I just want to do God’s will.  And He’s allowed me to go up to the mountain.  And I’ve looked over.  And I’ve seen the promised land.  I may not get there with you.  But I want you to know tonight, that we, as a people, will get to the promised land… I’m happy tonight.  I’m not worried about anything.   I’m not fearing any man.  Mine eyes have seen the coming of the glory of the Lord.”

Of course, we all have differing ways to imagine God’s glory to come—on earth as it is in heaven.   Most of our ways of imagining heaven are very personal, connected to missing our loved ones, and hoping to be reunited with them.   This is part of the Bible’s picture of heaven too, especially when Paul promises that Christ will come when ‘the dead in Christ will rise first’ and also where Martha tells Jesus that she has hope that she will meet her brother again ‘in the resurrection’.  

 But what I find it most interesting in Revelation, is that the images concluding this vision are strikingly void of personal, private hopes—like our hope for loved ones, or like a child’s hope for her pet.   It is not be because these hopes are unimportant, but because John’s vision includes everything—declaring that all creation will be redeemed, not just humans or animals.    God will make ‘all things made new’  and not ‘all new things’.   And the one who makes this promise names himself “Alpha and the Omega”,  ‘the beginning and the end,’ ---the A and the Z of all reality.   This God who will ‘make all things new’ invites all those who are ‘thirsty’ for this kind of hope to drink ‘freely’ (KJV) from the ‘spring of the water of life’ (v.6) already flowing through his Son, Jesus Christ.   Jesus is the one who said he has ‘living water’ (Jn. 4:10ff).   

Have you ever been thirsty? I mean really thirsty? Some of you may remember a cowboy song by a group called the Sons of the Pioneers that went like this:  “All day I faced/ The barren waste/ Without the taste of water/ Cool water/ Poor Dan and I/ With throats burned dry/ And so I cry for water/ Cool, clear water/”   The Sons of the Pioneers sang with that famous cowboy star and his equally famous wife, Roy Rogers and Dale Evans.   Their theme of “Cool Water” was very close to that of Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s “Rime of The Ancient Mariner.”  After he slew the albatross, the mariner was stuck aboard a ship lost in a cruel ocean with no hint of a breeze “a painted ship on a painted ocean.” Little food, no drink.  And then the plaintive plea, “Water, water, everywhere, And all the boards did shrink; Water, water, everywhere, Nor any drop to drink.”

In 1996, Joey Mora was standing on an aircraft carrier patrolling the Iranian Sea when he fell overboard. His absence was unnoticed for 36 hours.  A search and rescue mission began, but was given up after another 24 hours. After all, no one could survive in the sea without a lifejacket for 60 hours. His parents were notified that he was “missing and presumed dead.”  About 72 hours after he had fallen into the water, four Pakistani fishermen found Joey Mora. He was treading water in his sleep, clinging to a makeshift floatation device made from his trousers. He was delirious. His tongue was dry and cracked and his throat parched. About two years later, Mora spoke with Stone Philips on NBC Dateline and told his incredible story. He said it was God who kept him struggling to survive. But the one thought that took over his body and pounded in his brain was “Water!”  In the middle of a sea and dying of thirst.   http://www.lectionarysermons.com/mar993-07.html.

We do not need to perish with thirst for hope.  ‘The healing’ waters (22:2) are already flowing from God’s throne now.   You can drink from this hope, now.   And you can drink ‘free of charge’  (NET), as God’s ‘free gift’ (NIV), now.    If you are ‘thirsty’ for this kind of ‘hope,’ and the kind of redeemed, new world, only God can create, you can drink from that hope, right now.    AMEN!