The New Heavens and the New Earth

“Nevertheless we, according to His promise, look for new heavens and a new earth, wherein dwelleth righteousness.”—2 Peter iii. 13.

The passage: In keeping with God’s promise, we look for new heavens and a new earth in which righteousness lives.

The language of the Bible, if it is the book we believe it to be, must be simple language, suited to people of every condition. But what we assume to be the simplest and most natural reading of it may not actually be so. Our reading may come from very artificial habits of ours, or we may have adopted it without looking at the context and at similar passages. When these are examined, we may find a meaning just as near to us and just as open to ordinary illustration, but far richer, fuller, and more helpful in the work of our lives.

I think this has happened with the words “new” and “change” in Scripture. “New” is opposed to “old,” and “change” to “continuance.” A new thing may be one we have never seen or had anything to do with, and a change may be the substitution of one thing for another. We are probably inclined to think that this is the obvious force of the words. But is a man speaking some strange dialect when, coming out of his room after an illness, he says, “How new all things are to me; I feel as if I had a new life in me”? Or do we shock anyone by saying of another man, “What a happy change in him! His gloom has gone; he is what we remember him ten or twenty years ago”? The first expression plainly does not mean that the man had never breathed the air before. His feeling of newness would lose all its delight if it were not the counterpart of a feeling he had known, and much of it if the things around him were not familiar. He might adopt the poet’s words, about eyes dim with childish tears and a heart idly stirred because the same sound is in his ears that he heard in those days.

Surely, too, when we speak thankfully of a change in ourselves or others, we do not mean that anyone has lost his identity. All the thanksgiving would vanish, and a shivering horror take its place, if that thought could enter our minds.

Which of these two meanings, both possible, is more likely St. Peter’s when he speaks of a “new Heaven and a new Earth”? Before answering, it may be better to recall a few other places where this word or a related one appears.

I. I will not count the verse, “who satisfieth thy mouth with good things, so that thy youth is renewed like the eagle’s,” though I suspect it might throw great light on the Psalm where it stands and on the whole subject. I prefer to begin with passages that seem to require the opposite reading. The most important is St. Paul’s exhortation to the Ephesians to put off the old man and put on the new. This language beyond doubt means casting away something nearer to them than their clothing, and taking up something altogether different, which would become as much one with them as the old had been. But what is cast away? “The old man, which is corrupt according to the deceitful lusts”: a vile, withered thing formed by low, grovelling desires, which checked all growth, life, and breathing. The man himself may throw it off as a vile excrescence. And what is put on? “The new man, which after God is created in righteousness and true holiness”: true, essential humanity, God’s original creation, now shown in Christ, which the man has a right to claim. His youth may be renewed like the eagle’s. He is not to ask for something novel or rare. He wants the permanent and eternal that was always with him, and that the old man, restless after novelties and rarities, was always hiding from him. The more you meditate on this passage, the more I think you will find in it the sense I have clumsily tried to bring out.

What of the other passage where the same Apostle says of himself and his fellow Christians, “Old things are passed away; behold, all things are become new”? Does he mean that the objects themselves did not exist before? Or does he utter exactly the feeling of the man rising from a fever: “How new everything is! The sun and sky instead of the bed curtains, fresh breezes instead of the air of sickness, and what new clearness and proportion! We had looked at everything with jaundiced eyes, colouring it with our morbid feelings; now we see it as it really is”?

If we test St. Paul’s phrasing by two or three such cases, we need not doubt that we have the clue to many others. His language, however fervent and free from formality, is not loose or accidental; the more you examine it, the more consistent it proves, and apparent exceptions fall under the general law. But I will take one more example, the well-known “The trumpet shall sound, the dead shall be raised incorruptible, and we shall be changed.” A great writer of our day, who has a marvellous power of presenting his inmost experiences but perhaps lets his imagination fill the gaps in his memory, has described with fearful intensity the horror with which, as a young child, he heard these words read at the funeral of a much-loved sister nearly his own age. The thought that she was to become someone other than the creature he had known and loved overwhelmed him. And with good reason, if that had been the meaning; the words would crush every mourner. But if we look closely, their meaning is the very reverse. Paul is affirming with the utmost vehemence that the human substance, even the body, persists through all vicissitudes. “Thou fool,” he says to the man who asks with what body the perfected man will come: what you sow is not quickened unless it die; you sow not the body that shall be, but bare grain; God gives it a body as it pleases Him, and to every seed its own body. How could he speak otherwise? His argument is that in the death and resurrection of our Lord we read the law for all human creatures. If we do not rise, he says boldly, Christ is not risen. It would have been anguish to him to think that the face that blinded him on the road to Damascus was not the face that was marred more than any man’s in Gethsemane and on Calvary. His faith required him to acknowledge Christ’s identity through all changes, from the cradle at Bethlehem until His body entered the glory He had with the Father before the worlds. How then could he doubt the identity, through birth, growth, decay, and renewal, of anyone made a living soul like the first Adam and given the quickening spirit of the second?

II. We must ask, then, whether St. Peter’s language in the text is formed on the same model as St. Paul’s or on the opposite principle. Are the new Heaven and new Earth like the new man, like the things that became new, like the glorious body into which the body of humiliation is to be transfigured? Or did Peter expect another Heaven and Earth, other objects substituted for those among which he had lived? I have no doubt this last is the impression the passage makes on a great many people, and at some time on all of us. There is hazard in rudely attacking an opinion under which a precious jewel may lie hidden, and which may be woven into expectations its holders can ill afford to lose. But there is hazard also in leaving our minds vague and confused, grasping at we know not what, supposing that what is given us is not what we want. From such a state of feeling, however it justifies itself by phrases of Scripture, come weariness and restlessness, and at last indifference and unbelief.

(1) St. Peter says, “We, according to His PROMISE, look for new Heavens and a new Earth.” Plainly the way to learn what he meant is to ask which promises he refers to. The first and most natural is Isaiah’s, which must have been in his mind: “Behold, I create new heavens and a new earth: and the former shall not be remembered, nor come into mind. But be ye glad and rejoice for ever in that which I create: for, behold, I create Jerusalem a rejoicing, and her people a joy. . . . and the voice of weeping shall be no more heard in her.” Hearing “the former things shall not be remembered,” you might suppose the prophet expected a heaven and earth with no connection to anything he had known or cared for. But look again at how full the words are of Jerusalem, the home of his childhood and city of his fathers, and how all his hopes turn on her deliverance and the establishment of God’s kingdom in her. Observe also how he comments on his rapture later: “As the new heavens and the new earth, which I will make, shall remain before Me, so shall your seed and your name remain.” So the coming heaven and earth are directly tied to the continuance of his people, of the seed of Israel, and, if we take the words as they stand, of their very name. Fix the time and manner of fulfilment as you will, it could not be fulfilled unless everything dearest and most sacred to him were vindicated and preserved, and the influences that threatened its life were taken away and forgotten.

This was one of the books on which St. Peter had been nourished from childhood. It had grown dearer to him as he recognized the Person who is its subject, no longer in vision but clothed in a man’s form and suffering as a man. Its words came back to him with full power as he looked toward a crisis that would reveal that divine and human sufferer as King of the nation that rejected Him, and of the world. Unless he dissented altogether from the old teacher of his land, or twisted its language into the opposite of its first sense, he must have given the word “new,” in connection with heaven and earth, the same force St. Paul gave it when he spoke of the regenerated man and the risen body.

2. Think, again, how inconsistent any other use of “new” would be with what Peter must always have meant by the first noun it qualifies. He had heard the Rabbis speak of different heavens, a heaven of the heavens; perhaps he took little of that lore in. But he had been in his boat on the Lake of Galilee on clear starry nights, and the words of Scripture about the firmament had come to him. The firmament had spoken to him of fixedness, permanence, and calm. Had he been like the neighbouring peoples, he would have bowed down and worshipped those symbols of what his spirit most longed for. He was forbidden to. He had been told that there was One from whom the light came, One who is and was and is to come, and that these bright forms are only the works of His hands. The God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, who made a covenant with his fathers, had made the sun, moon, and stars shine and fixed them in their courses. From Him came the light that makes all things visible and the heat that makes them grow and bear.

So the heavens he saw were witnesses to the Jew (the Psalmist said to the ends of the earth) of One he could not see but could speak with, and in whom he might find refuge from the confusions around him and in his own heart. The prophets called heaven God’s throne and habitation, and called all spirits doing His commandments Heavenly Powers. Yet they also taught that He dwelt among men, filled Solomon’s Temple, and met His people there. Now this language had gained a deeper and clearer sense. One who dwelt in Galilee and was called a carpenter’s son had spoken of a Kingdom of Heaven, told His disciples it was near, sent them to tell their countrymen, and enabled them to show its nature by healing diseases and delivering from evil. He had removed the barriers of space and time that hid it, saying, “No man hath ascended up into Heaven, but He that came down from Heaven, even the Son of Man that is in Heaven.” Was it this Heaven that was to pass away or be changed for another? This kingdom that ruled over all, whose very marks are permanence and eternity? The question answers itself. If this were the blessing the Apostle looked for, he was setting at nought all that God had taught him from infancy, through his work, the divine books, the words of Jesus, and the Spirit who was to abide with the disciples for ever and bring all things to their remembrance.

You will say he meant not this Heaven but the visible heavens, which were and are only symbols of the divine presence and eternity. I believe he did look for the passing away of everything merely shadowy, everything that appears other than it is. We in this age believe that the visible firmament misleads us, and that the actual sun and stars are not what our senses report. It would be no shock but a great relief to believe that some day the senses will not deceive us as they do, that they will perform their appointed functions with a freedom and power they have never had, and no longer stand between us and the truth of things to distort it.

That would be a change indeed. Think how much it involves, and, more earnestly, what must precede it. St. Peter’s words can guide us here, if we first clear our minds of a notion about the Earth that haunts us all, which we often sanctify with religious names, and against which I believe both conscience and Scripture protest.

3. We speak scornfully of this earth, as if it were a fit place for poor, fallen, wicked creatures, while those the Spirit makes fit for the Kingdom of Heaven look down on it, regarding it at best as a place where they must live for threescore and ten years. These words often contrast sharply with the acts of those who use them; one would think they were out to prove how wretched earth’s things are by preferring the meanest and most frivolous of them, above all earth’s money, the love of which is the root of all evil. So it must be more and more, unless reverence for the earth is taught as an article of faith, and we are told that the Bible commands this reverence, gives the strongest and most sacred reasons for it, and warns against the sins we fall into when we esteem the earth lightly. The old Hebrews believed the earth a grand and awful place, which God created, cared for, and pronounced very good, which He watches over, and whose defilers and destroyers He punishes and will cast out. Those who say the Gospel changed this belief, and that Peter held it less strongly than Isaiah, cannot believe in their hearts that the Son of God actually walked this earth, blessed it, wept over it, and spent all His days healing the plagues and curses afflicting its inhabitants. They cannot think the Incarnation is what our creeds declare it to be. Otherwise they must suppose it was the vindication and redemption of this earth for its Creator: a sentence on those who thought it theirs to use for covetousness and ambition, and on those who declared it the Devil’s and were ready to hold parts of it as his liegemen and tributaries.

No! St. Peter believed the earth had been made evil by its inhabitants, just because they did not recognize its relation to and dependence on the Kingdom of Heaven, and denied that there was one Lord of both: a Lamb slain on earth and worshipped among the Hosts of Heaven. So Heaven suffered as much as earth. One became cold and dark, remote from sympathy, the seat of a tyrant’s throne; the other became the prey of bad men and bad spirits who supposed God had left it at their mercy.

4. St. Peter did not believe, as the Romans and the Jews did, that the Heavens were the seat of a tyrant’s throne. He did not believe the earth was left under its curse as a home for oppressors, visible or invisible. So he looked, according to God’s promise, for a new Heaven and new Earth “wherein dwelleth Righteousness.” That word explains his assurance; by it his belief and hope were tested. He was sure Christ had revealed a kingdom of absolute Righteousness and shown the Ruler of heaven’s armies to be the Righteous One. He could go to the Nations with that Gospel, proclaim the crucified Man as the one image of the invisible God, and declare that in Him that God is the father of all the Families of the earth. Just so far as that Gospel was received there would be a new Heaven. The old Heaven, with its powers of Nature and capricious gods, sometimes oppressors, sometimes deliverers, ruling by fear rather than justice, would pass away and not be remembered. A Righteous Being, who by all His judgments and blessings seeks to make men righteous and form them after His image, would be confessed and adored. And then there would be a new earth. Man, the minister of God’s purposes, would no longer thwart them or outrage His laws or set himself up as an independent satrap making laws for himself and the universe and marring both. All God’s blessed processes, often fiery ones, for purifying and renewing the earth and casting out whatever loves and makes a lie, would work freely and mightily. And it would be seen that the earth had been foully and ungratefully reviled when it was called unfit for the Saints of God, whose highest and most blessed work, if we believe the New Testament, is to help carry out God’s intentions for it by bringing it within the range of Christ’s Redemption and Sacrifice.

5. In the midst of an apostate Jewish nation and a world ruled by Nero, St. Peter held fast this hope. And very soon, as we believe, he discovered that it was a hope that did not make ashamed, and that he had not followed a cunningly devised fable. An hour came (perhaps on a cross, like his Master) when the earth passed from his eyes like a scroll, the elements seemed to melt with fervent heat, and all he had seen dissolved. Then he knew that the visible framework of the heavens he had gazed on was not the Heavens indeed, and that the corruption, tyranny, and falsehood he had witnessed on earth did not constitute this earth but only vexed and disturbed it. Then the true Heaven of Righteousness, which he had seen imperfectly, as through a glass darkly, but had seen in the Only-begotten of the Father, stood out in all its fulness. Will he not then also have seen a new earth? Will not the hills, valleys, and lakes of his childhood have been clothed with a new and celestial beauty? Will he not have looked into them instead of only looking upon them? Will one line of the old picture be missing? And yet will not all have become new? He had once trodden that ground following his Master, sometimes in rash confidence, sometimes trembling and amazed. How he will now feel every spot of earth glowing with that presence! How he will know that Christ was in the midst of that earth, and of those gathered on it in His Name, and would be to the end!

Such visions, or rather such fulfilments of their earthly visions, we may believe were granted to those of that company of just men made perfect whom we have remembered this week. And surely we may believe that some of them can look on and see how the events that pass us so quickly, and that we heed so little, have all been removing some hindrance to the full showing of that true Heaven and true Earth which our sins shut out from us. They may see how all of history, the brave deeds of good men and the crimes of evil men, has been helping to reveal and establish that Righteousness by which all unrighteousness shall be overcome; how every passage in national or personal life has been a divine Judgment, understood or overlooked by those who went through it; and how each judgment is a step to the final judgment that shall divide for ever between the false and the true.

III. Whatever insight may be granted to those who have left the world, there are lessons for us who are in it. The first is a negative one, about what we have not to expect. You cannot be ignorant that there is much excitement just now about prophecy; that events of a very appalling kind are said to be near; and that some tremble at the thought that the earth may be approaching its destruction.

1. The study of prophecy, I think, may be most healthy, provided we remember that the true prophets of God always connected the future with the past and present. Their main object was to teach their countrymen that in God’s government nothing happens by chance, and they lived to assert a Right Order that must triumph at last over all that is wrong. If we observe these laws of prophecy, we shall remember that particular times and seasons are not laws but accidents, about which we are liable to continual mistakes, and the study will strengthen our resolutions, deepen our thoughts about what is going on around us, and make our actions more serious and consistent. Above all we shall be less the slaves of the newsmonger and gossip. Every event will have solemnity as one of a long series leading to an issue, and none will be a mere subject for idle wonder. We shall feel that every moment is critical, that God’s judgments are always proceeding, that the eternal always stands beside the changeable, and that our own times are the gravest of all, because all that went before has contributed to their character for good and evil. But there is a study of prophecy that is just the reverse and has the opposite effect on character. It keeps up a habit of guessing about the future. It fastens on special incidents, perhaps of little significance, because they chime with the interpreter’s favourite theory. It dislocates history, subjects Scripture to the freaks of private and party interpretation, and becomes a tool for those who trade in panics. It confuses good, weak people with vague fears of some subversion of the universe which they call God’s judgment but dread as if it were the work of an Evil Spirit, and it leads to neglect of homely duties and common morality. And while it does this to the well disposed, who under sound teaching might act well, it confirms the wicked in the conviction that all things continue as they were from the foundation of the world, so that they may safely go on with their cheats and lies, since there is no actual order in the world, or it cannot assert itself, or God has maxims of His own that have nothing to do with vindicating justice and rooting out injustice. I believe many of these errors would be corrected, and their evil consequences removed, if we make ourselves thoroughly sure that what we look for is not another Heaven and Earth, different in principle from the Heaven that rules us now and the Earth in which God has placed us now.

2. But it is equally necessary that we expect a new Heaven and a new Earth wherein dwelleth Righteousness. We should remind ourselves day by day and hour by hour of the mighty change God has promised, by laying bare every deception, falsehood, and hypocrisy to which any of us yield, and bringing His Truth into full light. That is the terror we are to set before ourselves and our brethren, and that is the hope. It is a terror, because there is that in each of us which cleaves to deception, falsehood, and hypocrisy, and therefore to perdition. It is a hope, because there is that in each of us, a spirit in our race, which longs for deliverance from fraud and hypocrisy and cries out for the living God of Righteousness. The preacher’s duty, and every man’s, is to assure that bad nature of ours that it must be disappointed, since it is married to the evil that is under God’s eternal curse, a curse to be executed to the uttermost; and to assure the better spirit within us that its highest hopes fall below what God has promised. And, my friends, will not that be indeed a new Heaven, in which we shall see only a Perfect Love that sacrificed itself for its enemies? Will not that be a new earth, in which the robber and spoiler prevail no more, and which the meek, who inherit it now, shall rule alone and for ever?