Today’s reading: Isaiah 58; Revelation 21
Heaven is not some ethereal existence “out there” somewhere, floating among the clouds, but is a physical life on a recreated earth, with Jesus living and reigning among us.
Often when we think about heaven we think about the in-between state, where the faithful who have died are with God today, but the reality is that the current situation will not continue eternally. Jesus told us that He will come back again, and when He does, John tells us, the end of this world will come, but God will create a new world which will be our new home. So when we think of Heaven, we shouldn’t think of the cartoonish caricature of people sitting on clouds with halos and wings, playing little harps for eternity, but should think of a perfect physical life on a perfect physical world, where we all live meaningfully and purposefully with our creator, and where sin and death have been destroyed.
With that said, there are two things about the new earth that struck me this morning.
The first thing that struck me as I was reading this morning is that the new earth has no sea. This may seem like an odd detail to us, but it has an important background and meaning in the Scriptures. In Genesis, the inhabitable creation was drawn up out of the sea. The sea, throughout the Old Testament, is used as an image of chaos that opposes God’s created order. The sea was uninhabitable, unpredictable, untamable, and full of unknown creatures and dangers, the opposite in every way of the Garden of Eden God created and tasked Adam and Eve (along with their children) of spreading throughout the earth. The sea was also the home of Leviathan, the great chaos dragon who had to be restrained by God to make the earth habitable for His people. So I’m not sure if, in the new creation that John is describing, there will really be no body of water large enough to constitute a sea, or if he is speaking metaphorically in this and saying that there will be no place for the chaos that opposes God’s ordered creation in this new earth. Either way, the result is a reconstituted earth that aligns with the original Edenic vision God had when He told Adam and Eve to be fruitful and multiply and fill the earth and subdue it; a home entirely fit for God’s people in every way.
The second thing that struck me is the new Jerusalem coming down out of heaven. John describes the city has having the same length, width, and height. He is not describing a giant cube of a city, but a mountain. In ancient thinking, mountains were the abode of the gods. In fact, Eden is alternatively described as a garden and as a mountain. He also tells us that the glory of the Lord so fills the city that there is no need of the sun or the moon for light (not that they won’t exist, but that the glory of Jesus surpasses their light). So if the tallest mountains were considered the home of the gods, imagine this, the tallest mountain by far, descending down as the eternal home of God Himself, also meaning that as His glory radiates out, it is not stopping at the city wall, but is shining out, covering the whole world. I picture a city like Minas Tirith from Lord of the Rings, only on a much much larger scale.
I always had trouble, as a child, being excited about Heaven, because I had that cartoonish picture in my head of what it would be like, and that always sounded like an incredibly boring way to spend eternity. But I personally find it a lot easier to get excited about the glimpse God actually gives us of the eternal life we will have with Him after His return.
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