The passage: John saw a new heaven and a new earth, for the first ones had passed away and there was no more sea. He saw the holy city, new Jerusalem, coming down from God out of heaven like a bride prepared for her husband. A great voice announced that God’s dwelling is now with men: He will live with them, they will be His people, and He will wipe away every tear; death, sorrow, crying, and pain will be gone. The One on the throne said He makes all things new, that these words are true and faithful, that it is done, and that He is the beginning and the end. He will freely give the thirsty the water of life; whoever overcomes will inherit all things and be His son. But the fearful, unbelieving, abominable, murderers, immoral, sorcerers, idolaters, and liars will have their portion in the lake of fire, which is the second death. Then one of the seven angels with the seven last plagues showed John the bride, the Lamb’s wife: the holy city descending from God, radiant with God’s glory, bright like a jasper stone clear as crystal, with a great high wall, twelve gates with twelve angels and the names of the twelve tribes of Israel written on them (three gates on each side), and twelve foundations bearing the names of the twelve apostles. The angel measured the city with a golden reed: it lay foursquare, its length, breadth, and height equal, twelve thousand furlongs, and its wall a hundred and forty-four cubits. The wall was jasper, the city pure gold like clear glass, the foundations set with twelve kinds of precious stones, the twelve gates each a single pearl, and the street pure transparent gold. There was no temple, for the Lord God Almighty and the Lamb are its temple; no need of sun or moon, for God’s glory lights it and the Lamb is its light. The saved nations walk in its light, kings bring their glory into it, its gates are never shut because there is no night, and nothing unclean or false enters it—only those written in the Lamb’s book of life.
Before the vision of the great white throne and the One who sat on it, heaven as well as earth had fled away. In that perfect light there seemed for a while to be no place for the spiritual world any more than the material one. But soon that glory, which had cast everything into shadow, brought each thing into full view. The dead, small and great, stood forth; the sea gave up her dead; the thoughts of every person’s heart came into judgment. Each one knew what he was. Death and life stood out in dreadful contrast. And death and hell “were cast into the lake of fire; this is the second death. And whosoever was not found written in the book of life was cast into the lake of fire.”
Those last words strike one as a very terrible ending to the vision. I believe they are very terrible; and yet, taken together with the words before them, they contain, it seems to me, an infinite comfort. Death and hell mean a separation from God, a denial and contradiction of God. The bottomless pit is Atheism—the condition of being without God. Here we are told that these are conquered by Him; they are cast into the lake of fire. That lake of fire is no longer regarded as outside His dominion, beyond the circle of His grace and love. It is His, to be used for His divine purposes. What those purposes are we have been hearing throughout this book—throughout the Bible, of which it is the climax. Our first thought is that whoever is not found written in the book of life—whoever has chosen death instead of life—must remain forever in that condition. When I reason about the nature of a spirit, arguing about its immortality, I can find no escape from that conclusion, though I feel it withers my energies as well as my hope. But God’s revelation gives me what all my speculations cannot. I know that He can act upon spirits; I know that He can and does raise them out of death. I know that the process of rising out of death into the awareness of life is, and must be, agonizing. I know that when a prodigal is coming to himself, his conscience passes through a fire whose intensity none but God knows, though the man knows something of it. If I am told that whoever lacks life is not left in that utter wretchedness, but is cast into a lake of fire—if I am told that death, hell, and whatever divides us from God is cast into that same lake—may I not accept this as a message from above that meets all the needs, fears, and longings of my heart? Must I set up the poor measure of my own intellect against the word of God, merely because that word brings me, as it always does, the most divine consolation in the midst of the most divine warnings?
I am not anxious to answer the argument that such a hope dangerously encourages wrongdoers. The same charge has been made in every age against the teaching that man is justified by faith and not by his own deeds or merits—and rightly made, if the faith is not in a living God who frees the conscience from the guilt, burden, and power of sin, but only in a God who merely cancels the just and merciful punishment of sin. God can take care of His own cause; we take very poor care of it. Left to ourselves, we would always cheat men out of a Gospel, for fear it should make them careless about the Law. And we get the fitting reward of our dishonesty. Men are not able to keep the Law. Its terror has no power to make them obey it—only to make them hate it. They begin to keep the commandment when they trust the One who gave it, when they acknowledge that He is working in them to will and to do according to His good pleasure. Weaken that trust in any way; lead men to think that God is not the same yesterday, today, and forever; make them believe a time will come when He will change as we change—and just so far you are doing the devil’s work. Your clever, worldly calculations do not make us better, only more indifferent, more desperate.
There is another assertion of far greater force, if it is taken rightly. We are often told that we must apply the same measures to the blessedness of the righteous that we apply to the misery of the wicked. Yes—and not only to their degrees, but to their kind and quality. If we imagine the misery to be merely material, we will imagine the blessedness to be merely material. If we imagine the misery to be spiritual, we will imagine the blessedness to be spiritual. If we do not tell ourselves exactly what we mean in the one case, we will fall into the same vagueness about the other. If we take all material misery to be an instrument in God’s hand for delivering men out of the greater and more terrible spiritual misery, then we will take all material blessedness to be the result of spiritual blessedness. And so we will be able to enter into this twenty-first chapter about the new heaven and the new earth. For we will understand the old heaven to be what we picture while our vantage point is on earth. And we will understand the new heaven and the new earth to be both of them seen as they truly are in the light of God—the heavenly or spiritual as the substance, the earthly as the form or body that has been redeemed into its proper subjection, now able to display the glory it once hid. Think how the earth appeared to a heathen of the ancient world. His own land was the one dear, cherished spot in the midst of it, and everything else was viewed in relation to it. The earth was made up of many different countries, each with a different soil, customs, laws, language, and worship. Then think of the heaven! There dwelt the objects of those worships, the beings to whom the soil owed its richness or barrenness, who were the source of the varieties of customs, laws, and languages. This is the natural way of judging about Heaven and Earth. Do not call it heathenish—it is yours and mine. We start from what is nearest to us, and judge and measure what lies beyond by that standard. Yet we are driven to admit something we cannot see, which nevertheless has power over us and touches us in a thousand ways. What it is we can only guess. The things we do see, especially those objects over our heads that influence all we do in such marvelous ways, shape our guesses. Heaven is felt to come before earth; yet earth appears to come before heaven. How can we descend from the unknown to the known, merely because the unknown seems to be the original? Must we not instead ascend from the known to the unknown?
The Jew was taught that he could not judge the infinite by the finite, or the original by the image. The unseen God spoke to Abraham; the I AM unveiled Himself to Moses. The care of the land, and the laws, customs, and sacrifices of the chosen people, were grounded on that revelation. In everything, heaven claimed precedence over earth—the government of earth. But could man be satisfied with the discovery merely of a Name, even of a Government? If he was the image of the One who bore that Name and exercised that Government, must he not behold his Original, must he not meet with Him? The revelation that the Apostles declared to be the necessary sequel and fulfillment of the revelation given to Abraham’s family—the one the Jewish rulers and priests rejected—claimed to be exactly this. It claimed to meet the demands of the Gentiles, whose thoughts had risen from earth toward heaven in search of their Ruler, no less than the demands of the Jew, who had confessed that the Ruler of heaven was making Himself known to earth. If that were so—if it were true that the Son of Man, who came down from heaven, ascended up to heaven, and even while on earth was in heaven—then there truly was a new Heaven and a new Earth; and the Spirit of God might enable the purified eye of man’s spirit to behold them.
Such a vision was granted to the last Apostle, for his own sake and for ours. It was the result and reward of all those visions of conflict that had come before. That divided heaven of the ancient world had passed away. The narrow heaven of the Jew, still mingled with earth and yet separate from earth, had passed away. This was the Heaven of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit—of God dwelling in His own perfect light, revealing Himself to all in the Divine Word, giving life by His own Spirit. Perfect distinctness; perfect unity. Each Apostle was appointed to bring out some aspect of the mystery. St. Paul, when he was carried to the third heaven, could only wonder and adore, not put into words, what he had seen. But it came out to sustain him in his own weakness; he could speak it in broken words when he cried, “Of him, and to him, and through him are all things, to whom be glory for ever”; when he preached at Athens about the God whom the people “were feeling after, if perhaps they might feel after him and find him, though he was not far from any one of them, since in him they lived, and moved, and had their being”; and more clearly still when he “bowed his knees to the Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, of whom the whole family of heaven and earth is named,” asking that God would grant the Ephesians to be strengthened by His Spirit in the inner man, that Christ might dwell in their hearts by faith, that they might be rooted and grounded in love, and might know with all the saints the height, length, and breadth, and know the love of Christ that surpasses knowledge—and when, having made this wonderful request for them, he entrusted them to Him who could do “exceedingly abundantly for them above all that they could ask or think.” You see how, in this act of adoration, heaven and earth inevitably meet; how impossible it was for St. Paul to enter into the glory of the higher without seeing a new glory resting on the lower. And it was an earth in which there was no more sea—no more necessary separation of families, tribes, and tongues; yet no confused mingling of them into a huge Babel despotism. Pentecost had established the fellowship that Babel had counterfeited. All were one in the true Head of the body. One Spirit broke down the barriers of language so far as they destroyed the intercourse of spiritual beings, and upheld the variety of tongues so far as they witnessed to distinct gifts and callings, to distinct grasps of the one Truth, to the different cultivation God had assigned to different parts of His vineyard. And so now, at last:
I. “I John saw the holy city, new Jerusalem, coming down from God out of heaven, prepared as a bride adorned for her husband. And I heard a great voice out of heaven saying, Behold, the tabernacle of God is with men, and he will dwell with them, and they shall be his people, and God himself shall be with them, and shall be their God.” John had seen the old Jerusalem—the dear city of his fathers, the witness for the living God to men—vanish in flame and smoke. Behind it and within it was this other Jerusalem; the old walls and battlements had fallen down so that it might be revealed. It is not a material city standing on earth, yet it is joined to the earth as the old city never was—because it descends from God out of heaven; because it is truly the city of God; because it represents humanity in its true, redeemed, bridal condition, united to its everlasting Husband, shining with His brightness. The name Emmanuel, spoken over the cradle of the Child who was King of the Jews, is fulfilled. God is indeed with men. The New Covenant is a reality and not a dream. God has truly said to man in His Son, “I will be to you a Father, and you shall be to me sons and daughters. And your sins and iniquities I will remember no more.”
- “And God shall wipe away all tears from their eyes; and there shall be no more death, neither sorrow, nor crying, neither shall there be any more pain: for the former things are passed away. And he that sat upon the throne said, Behold, I make all things new. And he said unto me, Write: for these words are faithful and true. I am Alpha and Omega, the beginning and the end. I will give unto him that is athirst of the water of life freely. He that overcometh shall inherit all things; and I will be his God, and he shall be my son.”
We are all too ready to split the different parts of this passage from one another. The thought of being freed from pain, sorrow, and death is very delightful. Even people who have never felt intense pain, never seen death very close to themselves, think that if only they could be rid of these things they would have the blessedness they are seeking. But those who have endured intense pain, who have felt a little of the horror of death, want something more. Why has the pain been sent to them? Why has death been allowed? They feel that pain is unbearable if it is not a discipline; if it is not meant to make them aware of their own spiritual existence, to make them long for treasures no eye has seen and no ear heard. For them the words about pain, sorrow, and death draw their force from the assurance that God will wipe away every tear from their eyes. They will see an everlasting Friend and Deliverer. He will comfort them. This is the great change they long for: freedom from pain because it has done its work and led them to the source and center of joy; freedom from death because they are brought into fellowship with the One in whom is eternal life. In His presence all things become new, because by His presence all things are restored to their true state—all things seen not marred, distorted, and divided, but healthy, perfect, and harmonious in their Divine Head. “I am Alpha and Omega” is the first note of the Revelation; “I am Alpha and Omega” must be its closing note. The loss of the Son as the ground of all things, and the loss of the Son as the goal and consummation of all things, has brought the earth into darkness, confusion, and death. Those who see Him to be the head and end of creation see it as God sees it—see it without sorrow, pain, or death. They have given up their independence; that giving up is death. They receive continually fresh streams from God; there is the fountain of life. They have overcome their desire to be anything in themselves, anything apart from God; they are content to receive everything from God and to find everything in God, and so they inherit all things. But they can never rise to a higher blessedness than the one granted to them when the Gospel was first preached to them, the one assured to them in their baptism: “I will be their God, and they shall be my sons.” This state of being adopted as sons by the One who sits on the throne is the highest state human beings can reach. Christ died, rose, and ascended so that it might be ours; when we fully enter into it, we receive the highest bliss of heaven. But this is also the highest bliss of earth. Earth is taken out of the hands of its murderer. It becomes what its Creator meant it to be.
- “But the fearful, and unbelieving, and the abominable, and whoremongers, and sorcerers, and idolaters, and all liars, shall have their part in the lake which burneth with fire and brimstone: which is the second death.”
All blessedness—oh, when shall we understand this?—consists in acknowledging what truly is; all misery and damnation consists in denying it. That men disbelieved the good and gracious God to be their Father, that they count Him not their Father but their enemy—this is what makes them cowards; this is what makes them dealers with impure and evil spirits; this is what makes them corrupters and destroyers of one another’s purity; this is what makes them trifle with each other’s life; this is what makes them worshippers of visible things; this is the lie of which all other lies are the offspring. Those spirits which reject truth, which feed on a lie and live in a lie, are in the lake of fire. There is no way to describe their condition but that. A fire is burning in them that nothing can quench. As I said before, if we look at this fire only as reason looks at it, without Revelation, we could find in it only despair. When God enters, despair ceases. He is called in Scripture the God of Hope. Whatever we conceive of as being His must give us hope.
- For consider. “There came unto me one of the seven angels which had the seven vials full of the seven last plagues, and talked with me, saying”—What new doom is this angel about to speak of? His task has been to pour out plagues. What is to be their consummation?—“Come hither, I will shew thee the bride, the Lamb’s wife.” Here is the consummation of the plagues. This is what they have all been leading toward. By them the bride has been disciplined and prepared for her Lord; by them her seducers have been tormented and cast down.
V. What this bride is we have already heard. “And he carried me away to a great and high mountain, and shewed me that great city, the new Jerusalem, descending out of heaven from God, having the glory of God.”
Brothers, I believe that we read these words and the ones that follow them in our childhood; that they then made a deep impression on us; that the impression seemed to fade; that we came to regard them as Oriental poetry with nothing to do with the business of life; that, holding that opinion, we dismissed them irritably, as though they were setting before us a phantom world that could never stir our longings or affect our lives; but that, nevertheless, without our knowing it, these early impressions do come back to us in the midst of crowded cities and the hum of earthly voices. When for a moment we contrast them with what we see around us, we begin to suspect that what surrounds us is the phantom world, and that these words may testify of the real one; that what we see is only of today, while this is the permanent and unchangeable; that what we see addresses our eyes and ears, while this reveals the proper home of those to whom the eyes and ears belong—the home we were created to live in, the home our hearts are striving toward, and away from which we must be weary and restless. Oh, that God would give us grace to think in this way of that city the Apostle saw descending out of heaven from God! And I believe He will. I believe that the more we read the history of the world—and see what political orders men have tried to build for themselves, and what promise of good, of real good, there was in them, and what disappointment followed; how each one recognized some Divine power at work in its origin and preservation, and asked that power to keep its members true and the whole society united, and yet what falsehoods were spread in the attempt to make these invisible influences bear on men’s visible doings; how old societies fell through weakness, and those that rose in their place were forced to beg help from the traditions they had thrown away; how great experiments for freedom ended in cruel tyrannies; how men have spoken of great ideals and clung to them with earnest faith, and then sighed because the ideal was not real; how the nations of the earth and the Church of God are alike split into factions, each envying and hating the other; how yet the attempts at unity seem worse than the sectarian hostilities they meant to end—the more, I say, we dwell on such sights, the more this vision of an eternal city, founded on the union of God with man, will dawn on us through the mists of the past, through the confusions of the present, through our faint flickering hopes for the future; and the more sure we shall be that God has revealed to us what has been, is, and must be—that which reconciles all ideals, which binds the ideal to the actual, which the world, the flesh, and the devil are always trying to shut out from us, and which they have never been able to shut out; because He who is for us, whose name we are sealed with—the Father, the Son, the Holy Ghost, the God blessed forever—is stronger than those who are against us.
Yes, dear friends, our baptism was truly the witness to us that we are, every one of us, citizens of this new Jerusalem. And we may continually ask the Father of our Lord Jesus Christ to give us the Spirit of wisdom and revelation, so that we may know the hope of our calling and the greatness of our inheritance. This light will come to us through all the turmoils and trials that make us feel our need of it. In hours of unspeakable darkness we shall remember that there is a “light like unto a jasper stone, clear as crystal”; that this light dwells in God Himself and is able to fill the hearts and spirits of men. When we brood on the weakness and insecurity of every material barrier and defense, the thought of “that wall, great and high,” surrounding the Divine City will scatter our cowardly fears and assure us that it can be in no danger. When, in the poverty and helplessness of those who seem to be Christ’s champions on earth, we cry out for invisible friends and helpers, the “twelve gates with the twelve angels” will rise before us as no imaginary thing but a most real revelation. When we feel it is very grievous to be cut off from the past, to have left its living treasures far behind, we are reminded that “on these gates are names written, which are the names of the twelve tribes of Israel.” When we ask whether then we are to be brought back once more to the narrowness of the old Jewish order, which met men only on one side of their lives, which was national and not universal, we are told that in the new Jerusalem “there are on the east three gates, on the north three gates, on the south three gates, on the west three gates.” When we imagine that the Church of former days, the Church we read of in the New Testament, is hopelessly divided from the Church of our own day, this cheering message comes to us: “And the wall of the city had twelve foundations, and in them the names of the twelve Apostles of the Lamb.”
Everywhere we find theologians going about with measuring rods to determine how far the city of God reaches. Each school and sect has its own rod, and each makes the boundaries narrower. It is some comfort to know that this task is unnecessary; that it was undertaken long ago, by competent hands; and that this is what came of it.
- “And he that talked with me had a golden reed to measure the city, and the gates thereof, and the wall thereof. And the city lieth foursquare, and the length is as large as the breadth: and he measured the city with the reed, twelve thousand furlongs. The length and the breadth and the height of it are equal. And he measured the wall thereof, an hundred and forty and four cubits, according to the measure of a man, that is, of the angel.” That measure of a man, which is drawn not from his fallen nature but from his angelic nature, is God’s measure. The city that lies foursquare is His city. He knows its measure. Perhaps we shall be wiser and safer if we do not make much use of our own measuring rods.
But it is when we think of the materials our human fellowship is made of that we are likely to feel the most despair. We see the corrupt doings of other men; we find a deep root of corruption in ourselves. In stones dug out of the quarries of earth, what can we expect but continual crumbling and decay? Nothing else—if they are only dug out of earth’s quarries. But men are not children of the earth; they are children of the light, children of God. When they know this, when they turn to the light, when they receive His brightness and reflect it, then this is the description of them and of the society they form.
- “And the building of the wall of it was of jasper: and the city was pure gold, like unto clear glass. And the foundations of the wall of the city were garnished with all manner of precious stones. The first foundation was jasper; the second, sapphire; the third, a chalcedony; the fourth, an emerald; the fifth, sardonyx; the sixth, sardius; the seventh, chrysolite; the eighth, a beryl; the ninth, a topaz; the tenth, a chrysoprasus; the eleventh, a jacinth; the twelfth, an amethyst. And the twelve gates were of twelve pearls; every several gate was of one pearl, and the street of the city was of pure gold, as it were transparent glass.”
We sometimes hear of the wealth and extravagance of Nature—her countless forms, her beauties of color and light, which seem to have no eye to look at them. That wealth and extravagance can cause us no grief. It can only encourage us to reflect on the infinite love that has produced this variety of life. But have you never groaned over the wealth and extravagance of human gifts, which seem truly to be thrown away? Religious men have seen the waste and tried to reduce everything to a safe dullness and uniformity. All beautiful talents get abused and perish; why not hide them in the earth? Is that not the way to keep them safe for the hard Master? Oh, think of God’s City! Each human character, each human talent, is a distinct pearl, out of which He would build it, with which He would adorn it. Nothing He has given can be lost: all is for use, and grace, and delight. All is meant to reflect a portion of His glory. Only remember that we are nothing in ourselves, that we are created in His image—and then you will understand how each precious stone shall contribute to the glory of the whole; how the purest human gold shall be like transparent glass, through which the Divine beauty shows itself.
- But what has taken the place of that temple in the old Jerusalem, whose destruction was the sign that the age had ended? This has been the question of Christendom in every century since its fall. Can we not have some temple in some earthly city that shall be like that one, or that is essentially the same? Can we not have some earthly city that shall be like the Divine City—the capital of the new world as that was of the old?
This was the question of the early ages and of the middle ages; it is the question that must be settled in ours. The miseries of division are obvious; it is plain to most thoughtful men that none of the little sect-cities men have built is the city that lies foursquare, whose length is as large as its breadth—and that all of them combined into one could never make such a city. So they ask, “Has there not been a Christian order on this earth that had a center? Shall we not attach ourselves to that?” And I know no answer but this: “Oh yes; in God’s name let us attach ourselves to the order that has a center. Or rather, let us believe that we are attached to it already. For this is the Divine description of it: ‘And I saw no temple there, for the Lord God Almighty and the Lamb are the temple of it.’” These are the centers of the society; from them its worship and sacrifices begin, and in them they end. Whenever we inwardly grasp that this is so—when we confess that it has always been so, only that men have denied it, and have put their own notions and fancies between themselves and heaven, and have tried to separate heaven and earth which God has joined into one—then the remaining words of the chapter will also be received in their fullness: “And the city had no need of the sun, neither of the moon, to shine in it, for the Lord God did lighten it, and the Lamb is the light thereof.” Just as truly as the sun and moon give light to the visible earth, so truly is the Lord God and the Lamb the light of Man, the appointed lord of that earth. The Church has existed, and does exist, to bear witness to that truth—to declare that God is light, that in Him there is no darkness at all; to declare that Christ is the Light of the world, that “His life is the light of men.” Because she has borne that witness so imperfectly, because she has denied that God is light, and has blocked His light, and has made herself the sun instead of Him, the nations of the earth within reach of her influence have been cold and dark when they might have been living in the full blaze of truth and love. But the words are still true, and shall one day prove themselves true: “And the nations of the earth which are saved shall walk in the light of it, and the kings of the earth shall bring their glory and honour into it.” And this because “the gates of it shall not be shut at all by day; for there shall be no night there.” And this because “there shall in no wise enter into it anything that defileth, neither whatsoever worketh abomination, or maketh a lie: but they which are written in the Lamb’s book of life.”