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 language of the Bible, if it is the book which we believe it to be, must be simple language, adapted to people of all conditions and in all circumstances. But it is not certain that what we assume to be the simplest and most natural interpretation of this language is actually the simplest and most natural. It may have been derived from habits of ours which are very artificial, or it may have been adopted without reflection upon the context and upon similar passages. Where these have been examined, we may discover that there is a sense in them quite as near to us, quite as capable of ordinary illustration, far richer, fuller, more helpful in the work of our lives.

Thus it has happened, I think, with the words “new” and “change” in the Scriptures. “New” is, of course, opposed in these, as in all other books, to “old”; “change” is opposed to “continuance.” And a new thing may be one which we have never seen or had any connection with. Change may be the substitution of one thing for another. This, we are probably inclined to think, is the obvious force of the adjective and the substantive. But does a man speak in a strange or unusual dialect, who says, when he is coming out of his chamber after an illness, “How new all things are to me; I feel as if I had a new life in me”? Or may we not say of another man, without exciting any great surprise, “What a happy change has taken place in him! His gloom has passed away. He is what we remember him ten or twenty years ago”? Clearly the first of the expressions does not intimate in the least that the man had never breathed the air before. The feeling which he calls “new” would lose all its delight if it were not the very counterpart of one which he has had before; it would lose much of its delight if the objects around him were not familiar objects. He who in this sense says that the world is all new to him, might fully adopt the poet’s words:—

“My eyes are dim with childish tears,
My heart is idly stirred,
For the same sound is in my ears
Which in those days I heard.”

And surely, when we speak thankfully of a change in ourselves or in others, we do not mean that they or we have lost our identity. All the thanksgiving would depart—a kind of shivering and horror would take the place of it—if that thought could by possibility enter our minds.

Now which of these meanings—both, I admit, possible—is most likely to be St. Peter’s when he speaks of a “new Heaven and a new Earth”? It may be better, before we answer that question, to recall a few other sentences in which this or some cognate word presents itself.

I. I will not reckon among these the phrase, “Who satisfieth thy mouth with good things, so that thy youth is renewed like the eagle’s,” though I suspect that that verse might throw great light on the beautiful Psalm in which it is found, and upon the whole subject. I prefer however to take some of the passages which appear to require the opposite interpretation. None is more important than that of St. Paul, in which he exhorts his Ephesian disciples to put off the old man and to put on the new. Beyond all doubt, this language denotes the casting away of something which was nearer to them than their garments, the appropriating something altogether different from that which was thenceforth to become no less one with them than it had been. But what is it which is to be cast away? It is “the old man, which is corrupt according to the deceitful lusts.” A vile, withered, decayed thing had been formed by a series of low, grovelling desires. It checked all growth, life, breathing. This might now be thrown aside. The man himself might throw it aside as a vile excrescence. And what is to be put on? “The new man, which after God is created in righteousness and true holiness.” It is the true essential humanity, God’s original creation, now manifested in Christ, into which the man may enter, which he 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, the eternal, which was always with him, and which the old man, restless in the pursuit of novelties and rarities, was always hiding from him. The more you meditate on this passage, the more, I think, you will see that the sense which I have clumsily and feebly endeavoured to bring out, is contained in it.

How is it with that other passage, in which the same Apostle says of himself and of his brother-Christians, “Old things are passed away; behold, all things are become new”? Does he wish us to understand that the things themselves, the objects, did not exist before? Or does he utter exactly the feeling of the man who was rising out of a fever: “How new all things are! The sun and sky instead of the curtains of the bed! The fresh breezes instead of the atmosphere of sickness! And then what new clearness, significance, proportion! We have been looking at everything with jaundiced eyes, colouring them with our morbid feelings; now we can behold them as they really are.”

If we test St. Paul’s phraseology by two or three instances such as these, we need not doubt that we have found the clue to it in a number of others. For it is not loose and accidental, however fervent it is, however free from formality; the more you examine it, the more will you be surprised by its consistency, the more will apparent exceptions fall under the general law. But I will take one example more. It is that we all know so well, where he says, “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 us his inmost experiences, but who sometimes perhaps allows his imagination to supply the defects of his memory, has described in fearfully glowing language the horror with which he listened to these words as a young child, when they were read at the funeral of a much-loved sister, nearly of his own age. The thought that she was to become another than that creature whom he had known, and to whom he had been so intensely attached, he says, overwhelmed him utterly. And, I think, with good reason. If the interpretation of the boy, or of the man imputing his thoughts to the boy, had been the true one, the sounds would be crushing to the heart of every mourner. But if we consider them attentively, we shall be convinced that their meaning is not only not this, but is the very reverse of this. He is affirming with the utmost vehemence the permanence of the human substance, even of the human body, through all vicissitudes. “Thou fool,” he says to him who asks with what body the new and perfected man will come, “that which thou sowest is not quickened, except it die: and that which thou sowest, thou sowest not that shall be, but bare grain, it may chance of wheat, or of some other grain: but God giveth it a body as it hath pleased 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 under which all human creatures are placed. If we are not to rise, he argues boldly, “Christ is not risen.” Now it would have been anguish to him to have thought that the face, which it blinded his eyes to look upon when he was on his way to Damascus, was not really that face which had been marred more than any man’s in Gethsemane and on Calvary. It was a necessity of his faith to acknowledge the identity of Christ in all possible changes, from the cradle in Bethlehem till His body had entered into the glory which He had with His Father before the worlds were. How then could he doubt the identity, through all circumstances of birth, growth, decay, renovation, of any one who had been made a living soul like the first Adam, and who had received the quickening spirit of the second Adam?

II. We are to inquire then, now, whether St. Peter’s language in the text is formed upon the same model as St. Paul’s, or whether it is to be explained upon the opposite principle to his? Are we to suppose that the new Heaven and the new Earth are like the new man, like the things which had become new, like the new glorious body into which the body of humiliation was to be transfigured? Or did St. Peter expect another Heaven and Earth—a substitution of other objects, for those among which he had dwelt, and with which he had conversed? I have no doubt that this last is the impression which the passage makes upon a great many; probably at some time of our lives this has been the impression it has made upon us all. There is hazard in rudely assaulting an opinion under which a precious jewel may be hidden, which may be interwoven with expectations that those who hold it can ill afford to lose. But there is hazard also in allowing our minds to remain vague and confused, grasping at we know not what, supposing that what is given us is not what we want. Out of such a state of feeling, however it may justify itself by the phrases of Scripture, come weariness and restlessness, at last indifference and unbelief.

(1) St. Peter says, “We, according to His PROMISE, look for new Heavens and a new Earth.” Obviously, our method of ascertaining what he understood by the new heaven and new earth is to inquire what the promises are to which he alludes. The first and most natural reference is to the passage in Isaiah, which must have been in his mind when he wrote the words. It is found in the sixty-fifth chapter, at the seventeenth verse: “For, 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 I will rejoice in Jerusalem and joy in My people: and the voice of weeping shall be no more heard in her, nor the voice of crying.” When you heard that clause, “the former things shall not be remembered,” you might suppose that the prophet at least was expecting a heaven and earth that should have no association with anything that he had known or cared for. But look at his words again. See how full they are of Jerusalem, the home of his childhood, the city of his fathers. Observe how all his hopes turn upon her deliverance from her sorrows, upon the full establishment of God’s kingdom within her. Observe also how he comments on his previous rapture in the twenty-second verse of the sixty-sixth chapter: “For as the new heavens and the new earth, which I will make, shall remain before Me, saith the Lord, so shall your seed and your name remain.” So that this heaven and earth which are to be, are directly, formally, connected with the continuance of his own people, with the permanence of the seed of Israel; nay, if we take the words as they stand, of their very name. Fix the time and mode of the accomplishment of the prediction as you will, you cannot say that it could be accomplished, unless everything that had been dearest and most sacred to him were vindicated and preserved, unless the influences and causes which had threatened its existence and vitality were taken away and remembered no more.

This was one of the books upon which St. Peter had been nourished from his childhood,—which had grown dearer to him, as he recognized the Person Who is the subject of it, no longer in vision, but clothed with the form and undergoing the sufferings of a man,—the words of which came back to him in all their power, as he looked forward to a crisis which should reveal that divine and human sufferer as King of the nation which had rejected Him, and of the world. And we have seen that, unless he dissented altogether from the old teacher of his land, unless he tortured his language into a sense the very opposite of that in which it had been first used, he must have given just that force to the word “new,” in connection with the heaven and the earth, which St. Paul gave to it when he spoke of the regenerated man and the risen body.

2. Think, again, how inconsistent any other use of the adjective would have been with the import which he must always have attached to the first noun which it qualifies. He had heard among the Rabbis of different heavens, of a heaven of the heavens. Of this lore perhaps he might not have taken in much. But he had been in his ship on the Lake of Galilee on clear starry nights. The words of Scripture respecting the firmament had come to him. It had spoken to him of fixedness, permanence, calmness. If he had been like the people on whom his land bordered, he would have bowed down and worshipped those symbols of what he needed most, of what the spirit within him sighed for most. He was forbidden to do that. 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, beautiful forms are but the works of His hands. The God of Abraham and Isaac and Jacob, Who had made a covenant with his fathers, had caused the sun and moon and stars to shine. He had fixed them in their courses. From Him came the light that made all things visible, and the heat that made all things to grow and bring forth.

Thus the heavens which he saw were witnesses to the Jew—the Psalmist had told him that they were witnesses to the ends of the earth—of One Whom he could not see, but with Whom he might hold converse, in Whom he might seek a refuge from all the vicissitudes and confusions of the things about him, and of his own heart. The prophets had spoken of the heaven as His throne, His habitation. They had spoken of all spirits that were doing His commandment, hearkening to the voice of His word, as Heavenly Powers. And yet they had taught also, that He dwelt among men, that He filled the Temple which Solomon had built, that He met His people there. And now this language had received a new life, had acquired a deeper and clearer sense: for One Who dwelt in Galilee, Who was called a carpenter’s son, had spoken of a Kingdom of Heaven; had told His disciples that it was nigh to them; had sent them to tell their countrymen of it; had enabled them to give signs of its nature by healing their diseases, by delivering them from the power of evil. He had removed the barriers of space and time which hid it from men; for He had said, “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, then, that was to pass away, or be changed to some other? this kingdom, which ruled over all; this, of which the very characteristics were permanence, endurance, eternity? The question answers itself. If this was the blessing which the Apostle looked for, he was setting at nought all that God had been teaching him from his infancy, through his occupation, through the divine books, through the words of Jesus, through the Spirit that was to abide with His disciples for ever and to bring all past things to their remembrance.

You will say, then, that he meant not this, but the visible heavens, those which were and are symbols only of the divine presence and eternity. Assuredly I believe he did look for the passing away of all that is merely shadowy, of all that merely appears to us other than it is. We in this age believe that the visible heaven, the firmament over our heads, has an appearance to us which misleads us; that the actual sun and stars are not what our sense reports to us that they are. It would be no shock to our minds, but rather a great relief and deliverance to them, to believe, that some day the senses will not deceive us as they do; that they will perform their appointed and excellent functions, and obtain a freedom and power which they have never had; but that they will not any longer place themselves between us and the truth of things, to disfigure and distort it.

That would be a change indeed. Think how much is involved in it; think also, and more earnestly still, what must precede it. Upon this point I think St. Peter’s words will afford us some guidance, if first we clear our minds of a notion respecting the Earth which haunts us all, and which we often sanctify with religious names and titles, though I believe our conscience and the Scriptures utter a protest against it.

3. We speak scornfully and disparagingly of this earth, as if it were a fit place for poor, fallen, wicked creatures to inhabit; but as if those whom the Spirit makes meet for the Kingdom of Heaven are to look down upon it; at best to regard it only as a place in which they are compelled for threescore and ten years to dwell. These words stand out often in the strongest contrast to the acts of those who use them; sometimes one would think they were determined to establish the truth of their sayings, and prove how wretched the things of earth by the preference which they exhibit for the very meanest and most frivolous of them; especially by their devotion to the earth’s money, the love of which is said to be the root of all evil. And so I believe it must be more and more, if we are not taught reverence for the earth as an article of faith; if it is not declared to us more and more, that the Bible commands this reverence, gives us the strongest and most sacred reasons for it; warns us against the sins into which we must fall when we esteem it lightly. The earth, so the old Hebrews believed, is a grand and awful place, which God has created and cared for, and pronounced very good; which He watches over; the defilers and destroyers of which, whosoever they be, He punishes and will cast out. And those who say that this old belief has been changed by the Gospel, that St. Peter held it less strongly than Isaiah, cannot believe in their heart that the Son of God actually walked this earth, and blessed it, and wept over it, and spent all His days in healing the plagues and curses which were afflicting the inhabitants of it. They cannot think the Incarnation of Christ is really what in our creeds and confessions we declare it to be: else they must suppose that it was the vindication and redemption of this earth for its Creator; the sentence upon those who supposed that it was theirs, and that they might use it for the purposes of their covetousness and ambition; upon those also who declared it to be the Devil’s, and were ready to hold different portions of it as his liegemen and tributaries.

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

4. St. Peter did not believe that the Heavens were the seat of a tyrant’s throne, as the Romans believed, as the Jews believed. He did not believe that the earth was left under its curse, and was meant to be a habitation of oppressors, visible or invisible. And therefore he looked, according to God’s promise, for a new Heaven and a new Earth, “wherein dwelleth Righteousness.” There is the explanation of his assurance; by that word his belief and his hope were to be tested. He was sure that Christ had revealed a kingdom of absolute Righteousness; that He had shown the Ruler of the armies of Heaven to be the Righteous One. He might go forth with that Gospel to the Nations. He might proclaim the crucified Man to be the one image of the invisible God. He might declare that in Him that invisible God was the father of the whole Families of the earth. Just so far as that Gospel was received would there be a new Heaven; that old Heaven, in which powers of Nature, capricious gods, sometimes oppressors, sometimes deliverers, governing by fear, not justice, had passed away, and would not be remembered. A Righteous Being, Who by all His judgments, by all His blessings, is seeking to make men righteous, to form them after His image, would be confessed and adored. And then there would also be a new earth. Man, the minister of His purposes, would no longer thwart those purposes, would no more outrage His divine and blessed laws, would no more set himself up as an independent satrap, to make laws for himself and the Universe, and, so far as in him lay, to mar and destroy both. And all the blessed processes of God, fiery processes often, for purifying and renewing the earth, for making it what He designed it to be, for casting out of it whatsoever loveth and maketh a lie, would work freely and mightily. And it would be seen that the earth had been foully and ungratefully reviled, when it was declared not to be a fit habitation for the Saints of God, who, if we believe the New Testament, can have no higher and more blessed occupation than to assist in working out the intentions of God for it, in bringing it within the range and compass of Christ’s Redemption and Sacrifice.

5. In the midst of an Apostate Jewish Nation, in the midst of a world ruled by Nero, St. Peter held fast this hope. And very soon he will have discovered, as we believe, that it was a hope which did not make ashamed, and that he had not followed a cunningly devised fable. There came an hour,—it may have been on a cross, like his Master,—when the earth passed away as a scroll from his eyes, when the elements seemed to melt with fervent heat, when all that he had seen was for him dissolved. And then he knew that the visible framework of the Heavens on which he had gazed was not the Heavens indeed. And then he knew that all the corruption and tyranny and falsehood which he had witnessed on earth did not constitute this earth, but were only that which vexed and disturbed it. And then the true Heaven of Righteousness, which he had seen imperfectly, as through a glass darkly, but which he had seen in the Only-begotten of the Father, will have stood out in all its fulness and perfection. And will he not have seen then also a new earth? Will not the hills and valleys and lakes, amidst which he had lived in his childhood, have been clothed with a new and celestial beauty? Will he not have looked into them then, instead of only looking upon them? Will there have been one line in the old picture wanting? 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 will he now feel all those spots of earth, and every part of it, glowing with that presence! How he will have known that Christ was in the midst of that earth, and of those who were gathered together upon it in His Name, and that He would be till the end!

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

III. But whatever insight or foresight may be vouchsafed to those who have left the world, there are lessons for us who are in it which we should lay to heart. The first I shall speak of is a negative one. It concerns what we have not to expect. You cannot be ignorant that there is much excitement at this time on the subject of prophecy; that events of a very appalling kind are said to be near at hand; that some are trembling at the thought that perhaps the earth is approaching the time of its destruction.

1. Now the study of prophecy, I conceive, may be a most healthy study, provided we remember that the true prophets of God always connected the future with the past and the present; that their main object was to teach their countrymen that in God’s government nothing happens by chance; that they lived to assert a Right Order, which must triumph at last over all that is wrong. If we observe these laws of prophecy, we shall remember that all times and seasons are not laws but accidents, and that about them we must be liable to continual mistakes, the meditation upon it will strengthen all our resolutions, deepen our thoughts of what is going on around us, make all our actions more serious and consistent. Especially we shall be less slaves of the newsmonger and quidnunc. Every event will have solemnity and importance as one of a long series which must be leading to an issue; no event will be in itself a mere subject for idle wonderment. We shall feel that every moment is a critical moment; that God’s judgments are always proceeding; that the eternal is always standing side by side with the changeable and temporary; that our own times are the gravest of all times, because all which have gone before have been contributing to give them their character for good and for evil. But there is a study of prophecy which is just the reverse of this, and produces exactly the opposite effects on the character. It keeps alive a habit of guessing about the future; it fastens on some special incidents, perhaps of little significance in themselves, because they chime in with some favourite theory of the interpreter; it dislocates and disorganizes history; it subjects Scripture to the freaks of private and party interpretation; it becomes a tool in the hands of those who trade in panics; it confuses the minds of good and weak people with vague fears of some change and subversion which is to befall the universe, and which, though they call it God’s judgment, they dread as if it were to be the work of an Evil Spirit; it leads to the neglect of homely duties and common morality. And as it has this effect upon the well disposed, who, if they were under sound teaching, might act well, it strengthens the evil in the conviction that all things continue the same as they were from the foundation of the world, and that they may safely go on with their cheats and lies, seeing that there is no actual order in the world, or that it is unable to assert itself, or that God has some maxims of His own which have nothing to do with the vindication of Justice and the discovery and extirpation of Injustice. I believe many of these errors will be corrected, and the evil consequences of them removed, if we thoroughly and distinctly assure ourselves that what we look for is not another Heaven and another Earth, different in principles from the Heaven which is ruling us now, from the Earth in which God has placed us now.

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