John Lennon. John Lennon sang, “Imagine there’s no heaven; it’s easy if you try.” Well, he’s right—it is easy to imagine there’s no heaven. And that’s because it’s not easy to imagine exactly what heaven’s like in the first place; in fact, it’s very difficult. It’s far more difficult to believe that heaven exists and to say what it’s like than it is simply to say it’s not real or it’s a fantasy world; or it’s a reward for good people or compensation for those having a bad life now. Even those who wrote the Bible appear to have found it difficult to find the right words to describe heaven. And yet for Christians, the hope of heaven—or the life of the world to come, the life everlasting, as our creeds put it—for Christians, the hope of heaven is basic to what we believe. And it’s basic to what we believe because heaven and everything it is and everything it represents is nothing less than the fulfilment of creation, the completion or the final perfecting of all things. At the end of this present age, the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, and the Holy Spirit, will bring God’s rule to this world in a powerful and utterly transformative way. Think about what this could mean and then ask yourself: How can we put this sort of thing into words? How can we express the inexpressible? How can we describe the indescribable? “‘What no eye has seen, what no ear has heard, and what no human mind has conceived—these things’,” says the apostle Paul, “‘these things God has prepared for those who love him’” (1 Cor. 2:9 tniv). John Lennon sings, “Imagine there’s no heaven”—but this is taking the easy way out.
So this is our challenge for today: to try to piece together some of the many ideas and pictures and symbols found in the Bible to give us a slightly better understanding of what awaits us in the future—and not just us as Christian believers, but also the physical world of space and time in which we live. Let’s start with a basic point: “In the beginning,” says Genesis 1, “God created the heavens and the earth.” This simple sentence is extraordinary in what it claims: that everything that is not God need not exist; that the reason anything exists at all is because God decided that it should be here. And so God created the universe and everything within it, from the most sprawling of galaxies to the tiniest of particles; from elephants and blue whales to elephant shrews and tardigrades; all these things were created by God through God’s Word and by God’s Holy Spirit. God the Trinity is the Creator and the Source of all that exists.
And this includes heaven—not just what we might refer to as “space,” but to the realm where God lives and rules. The Old Testament depicts heaven in various ways. One of the most common is heaven as God’s royal court. In passages such as Isaiah 6 and Ezekiel 1, God is described as sitting on a throne, attended to by court officials, including angels and cherubim and seraphim. These passages, and others like them, are quite strange. But the thrust of these passages, and perhaps the Old Testament’s presentation of heaven as a whole, can be summarised in two verses, both from Isaiah. In Isaiah 63:15, “heaven” is described as God’s “holy and glorious habitation”; and in Isaiah 66:1, the Lord says, “‘Heaven is my throne / and the earth is my footstool’.” However we understand heaven, God is right at its centre, sitting on the throne, and his authority and rule reach down from heaven to the earth.
But this is where I need to introduce another topic, although briefly: the temple in Jerusalem. And I need to do this because the way the Old Testament portrays the temple affects the way we read Revelation 21 and 22 and the vision of heaven given there. I want to make a basic point: for the ancient Israelites, and for the Jewish people of Jesus’s day, the temple was the gate to heaven, and the holy of holies heaven itself; heaven—but on earth.
How so? The temple in Jerusalem was designed to mirror the whole of creation. It was divided into three sections, with the fixtures and fittings, the stonework and the furniture, of each section arranged to represent a specific part of the universe. Have a look at the handout. First, the outer court (in green) represented the world where humans lived. Second, the holy place (in pink) signified the sky and what we now call “space.” And third, the holy of holies (in gold) symbolized heaven, the place where God sat on his throne, and the place where the ark of the covenant was positioned as God’s “footstool.” In terms of the temple’s layout and symbolism, we could say that on the Day of Atonement, for example, the high priest, in walking from the outer court through the holy place and into the holy of holies, was ascending from the earth and entering heaven; heaven—but on earth.
Does all this sound strange or even far-fetched? We have a very different view of the way the world works, that’s for sure. But this is how important the temple was for the ancient Israelites and the Jewish people of Jesus’s day. The temple was heaven—on earth. And this core belief shapes many of the ideas that we find in the New Testament, especially in the book of Revelation, as I hope to show. It’s fair to say that Revelation isn’t the easiest book to understand, but it is slightly easier to appreciate once we recognise how much of it is saturated—positively dripping!—with Old Testament ideas and imagery. Let’s go through our passage from Revelation now, not in huge depth, but in enough detail as to make everything I’ve said so far worth it.
Revelation 21:1: “I saw a new heaven and a new earth.” You’ll note the echo of Genesis 1, I’m sure; but the newness here isn’t that of absolute newness. It’s not something that’s absolutely brand new. It’s not as though God is swapping the first or the old heaven and earth and replacing them with brand new ones, like we might buy a new fridge before getting rid of the old one. The newness here is that of renewing or transforming something from one thing to another—a bit like renovating an old house so it looks and feels better than ever. This is the meaning of “a new heaven and a new earth” here.
And why is the sea mentioned? A world without a sea seems pretty extreme. But in the Bible, the sea often represents chaos, danger, evil—there is no sea, says John, who sees this new heaven and new earth, because in the age to come there will be no evil; there will be no more danger, no more chaos; and so no more sea. In the new creation, there are no tears, there is no death, there is no mourning; there is no crying, no pain; “for the first things have passed away,” and God, seated on the throne, is “making all things new.”
But how? Verse 2: “I saw the holy city, the new Jerusalem, coming down out of heaven from God, prepared as a bride adorned for her husband.” Notice how John is struggling to describe precisely what he is seeing: he sees a new heaven and a new earth—but these look like a city, and a city wearing a bridal gown and many, many jewels! Clearly, all this is a metaphor: try imagining what Penge High Street would look like in a giant wedding dress! It’s a very strange idea. But John is trying to describe the indescribable using ideas and imagery found scattered throughout the Old Testament; he is trying to express the inexpressible as best as he can by piling image on top of image, metaphor on top of metaphor, symbol on top of symbol in a way that even John Lennon would never attempt. And the total effect is this: God is coming to us; heaven is penetrating and permeating and perfecting the world; and God and God’s creation will share a sort of unceasing and everlasting and intensely ecstatic intimacy that no human has ever experienced before. “The home of God is among mortals. He will dwell with them; they will be his people, and God himself will be with them.” This is our hope: heaven—but on earth.
So what about the rest of our passage from Revelation? What’s the point of all the measurements and precious stones and the like? What do all these have to do with heaven? This is where what I said earlier about the temple in Jerusalem comes into play. If we treat verse nine onwards as explaining verses one to eight in more depth, we can begin to sketch connections between this new Jerusalem and the holy of holies in the old Jerusalem temple. All the jewels, all the precious stones, even the very shape of the new city—a cube!—all these things call to mind the temple and its symbolism, and especially the high priest, his clothing, and the cube-shaped holy of holies. In the past, the high priest alone could go into the holy of holies to make a sacrifice on the Day of Atonement; but this passage from Revelation portrays the entire new Jerusalem, the entire new creation, as a new holy of holies. The whole of the world is now the place where God lives in an entirely different, an entirely new, way—and all those who are in Christ have access to God’s presence in the new Jerusalem; heaven—but on earth.
You would need to use a decent study Bible or a good commentary and go through books such as Exodus, Isaiah, and Ezekiel to see these connections emerge clearly—but they are there. And the point of all this is not simply to overwhelm us with unnecessary details, or to confuse us, or even to bore us on a Sunday morning. The point of all this is to attempt to express the inexpressible belief that the future state of this universe, of this world, is and will be completely unlike anything we can possibly imagine: heaven—but on earth.
Verse 22 onwards offers us yet another way of putting the same ideas. There is no temple in the new creation because “the Lord God the Almighty and the Lamb” together are the temple, together in full and perfect unity. There is no need for a physical temple, an actual building, in the new Jerusalem because the presence of God in Christ drenches the fabric of the universe with the river of the water of life—the Holy Spirit. There is no night, no darkness, and therefore no danger, because the glory of God and the Lamb are the city’s ever-shining light. Imagine this divine light reflecting and refracting off the jasper walls and the golden street and the shimmering water, with the throne of God and the Lamb at its centre, and we are only beginning to approach what lies in store for the world: heaven—but on earth.
Bear with me—there’s more. The walls of the new Jerusalem surround the world, and people of all nationalities and all ethnicities, Jews and Gentiles, are able to enter through its twelve gates. There is no racial discrimination in the new creation, and presumably no sexual discrimination or class discrimination. It is a place of absolute purity, for this transformed world, this new Jerusalem, is the holy of holies come to earth. An angel stands at each of the twelve gates, ensuring that nothing impure enters this new creation. Anything or anyone considered impure is shut out while those inside serve God as priests serving in a grand cosmic temple. This is what awaits us; this is God’s promised future for us, for the world, for all things. This is our future: heaven—but on earth.
When we look at the world around us, the idea that heaven will come to earth and completely transform it is almost unbelievable. But it is going to happen, even if we cannot comprehend it, or if we find John’s way of putting things simply too bizarre or fantastical to contemplate. All John’s language is, of course, highly evocative: he’s not offering a point-by-point account of what heaven-on-earth will be like, but uses a range of metaphors drawn from the Old Testament and piled on top of each other to give us a taste of the flavours and the sounds and the colours that God has in store for the universe. How else could John express the inexpressible? How else could John describe the indescribable? A series of metaphors, strange though they are, is really the only way to paint a picture of a landscape no one has seen.
Did I say “the only way”? Sorry—I meant to say “one of the only ways”. You see, God has already kick-started the future transformation by raising Jesus from the dead, giving him the Spirit-infused body and life of the age to come. And what God has started, God will finish. Each one of us here today who is in Christ is assured of a place in the transformed new earth because in Christ, the Holy Spirit has already made us part of the new creation. “Anyone who believes in Christ is a new creation,” says Paul (2 Cor. 5:17 nirv). And because we are in Christ, every time we extend compassion and show mercy; every time we fight against injustice and stand on behalf of others; every time we live our ordinary, everyday lives in step with God’s Holy Spirit, we throw a rock through the dirty and bloodstained window of this present age and allow the hope and promise of a future irradiated with the light of God’s glory and of the Lamb to burst through the holes.
John Lennon sang, “Imagine there’s no heaven.” But we look forward to a future where heaven and earth embrace and never let go. Let this vision, this hope, inspire us today and every day until the Spirit brings us to the Father of our Lord Jesus, until we see our God face to face, in our resurrected flesh, in heaven—but on earth.
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