The seven features are:
Like Vision V, this is shown to John by one of the Bowl Angels. We may assume that it is the seventh and last of them, who cried, "it is done." (16:17, note also 21:6 - "It is done.") and thereby proclaimed that the Temple was now open to entry, in accordance with 15:8: "No-one could enter the temple until the seven plagues of the seven angels were ended."
1. 21:12
Walls, Gates, Foundations
Security, Access, Strength, Purity
2. 21:16
Four-square Plan
Unity, Completeness
3. 21:22
No Temple
All life is "sacred"
4. 21:23
No sun or Moon
Light not mediated
5. 22:1
River of Water of Life
Life
6. 22:2
Tree of Life
Sustenance
7. 22:4
Night is no more.
Light
The whole section 20:11 - 22:5 is a marvellous recapitulation, like the last movement of a great symphony, in which many themes introduced earlier are gathered together into a final comprehensive statement.
Below are suggestions of them (it is not an exhaustive list).
Alpha and Omega - 1:8 : 21:6
Tree of Life - 2:7 : 22:2, 14
Second Death - 1:11 : 20:14
Morning Star - 2:28 : 22:16
Book of Life - 3:5 : 20:12, 15; 21:27
White Raiment - 3:5 : 3:18; 4:4; 7:9, 13; 22:14
New Jerusalem - 3:12 : 21:2
New Name - 3:12 : 14:1, 22:4
It would be a mistake to try literally to visualise the Holy City from the shapes and measurements John gives it. We have lived with John's symbolism long enough up to this point to know that he is quite indifferent to the literal graphics his symbols might conjure up - he uses symbols to make affirmations, not paint pictures. I have read some quite extraordinary attempts to calculate the city's size in miles and its possible population based on those calculations. If John were shown some of them, I am sure he would wring his hands in despair. "You've missed the point entirely," he would say.
At first sight it seems strange or inappropriate that this final vision - so impressive and uplifting in all its aspects - should be introduced by one of the Bowl Angels who poured the final judgments on the earth. But what John is surely saying thereby is that judgment is not God's last word on the world's ills: redemption and renewal is ... a mindset which has not, unhappily, always been apparent in the Church! All too often our attitude to evil goes no further than our wish to punish it. In that, we are emphatically not being Godlike.
As far back as Isaiah, God had been likened to Israel's husband.
Isa. 54:4-8 - Fear not, for you will not be ashamed; be not confounded, for you will not be put to shame; for you will forget the shame of your youth, and the reproach of your widowhood you will remember no more. For your Maker is your husband, the LORD of hosts is his name; and the Holy One of Israel is your Redeemer, the God of the whole earth he is called. For the LORD has called you like a wife forsaken and grieved in spirit, like a wife of youth when she is cast off, says your God. For a brief moment I forsook you, but with great compassion I will gather you. In overflowing wrath for a moment I hid my face from you, but with everlasting love I will have compassion on you, says the LORD, your Redeemer.
John is seeing the ultimate fulfilment of that prophecy, echoed in Hosea 2:16-21 - "I will betroth you to me in faithfulness and you shall know the Lord."
That John is taken "in the Spirit" to a "great high mountain" indicates that what he is about to see is the true fulfilment of God's final purpose for His children from a vantage point of vision.
Strangely, after the angel has said, "Come I will show you the Bride, the Wife of the Lamb", what he in fact shows him is a city! But it is not strange at all: the one image suggests intimacy, the other community. And it is clear from Paul's letter to the Ephesians that God's ultimate purpose for humanity has from the beginning been a great Cosmic Community: "For he has made known to us in all wisdom and insight the mystery of his will, according to his purpose which he set forth in Christ as a plan for the fulness of time, to unite all things in him, things in heaven and things on earth." (Eph 1:9-10 - see my web pages on Ephesians "Cosmic Community") This should alert us to the fact that in this whole segment, John has people in mind (the People of God), not an architectural blueprint.
... in total contrast to the "great city" which has occupied him in the last two or three chapters, which came up out of the abyss from Satan!
It could not literally be both, for jasper is reddish and opaque! But that does not phase John at all! He is scouring the jeweller's world for images to conjure up the brilliance and transparency of God's glory which suffuses the whole assembly of His people. Trivial contradictions are of no significance at all!
As we review the features of the new Jerusalem as John enumerates them, have Isaiah 60 before you. The references back to it are so numerous that John must have had its sonorous verses before him as he wrote.
The People of God in their heavenly dwelling place are eternally secure.
Another contradiction! Why gates if the whole people of God are housed within the city for their protection? Again John would be impatient with our nit-picking. From the very beginning, it had been God's purpose that "in Abraham, all the nations of the earth should be blessed" - like gates, the tribes should usher the nations in to their God-planned heritage. In a moment (v. 14) John will tell us further that the city has twelve foundations (another impossible concept!) inscribed with the names of the twelve apostles, for "the household of God is built upon the foundation of the apostles and prophets, Christ Jesus himself being the cornerstone, in whom the whole structure is joined together and grows into a holy temple in the Lord; in whom you also are built into it for a dwelling place of God in the Spirit." Indeed there are no Scriptures that better inform our understanding of these verses in Revelation than Paul's similes in Ephesians.
The angels at the gates here are surely in contrast to the angel with a flaming sword which turned every which way to guard the way to the tree of life in the Garden of Eden from which Adam and Eve had been expelled. (Gen 3:24) The angels are at these gates to invite men in!
Very confusing this - for the city turns out to be a cube (v.16. Note that the Holy of Holies in Solomon's Temple was cube-shaped, I Kings 6:21) How does a population occupy a cube? "Pshaw!" says John, "You're nit-picking again! The People of God is a perfectly proportioned creation. How better do you want me to say it?" I have read extraordinary articles on the number of the redeemed the city could accommodate assuming that, since it is a cube, they could occupy multiple levels of the city. As though our ultimate bliss is to be stacked in tiers like crates of eggs! It is absurd. You just have to accept that John is hugely enjoying himself piling up images that overall make no sense at all; he is just pasting them into a startling collage, expecting us to have the good sense to enjoy poring over the details in the glorious jumble. How, for example (v. 18) can the city be "pure gold, clear as glass"? But of course, the People of God is a community imbued with total integrity and transparent honesty ... at last! The society we know only in our dreams is at last reality!
As to the city's size, 12,000 stadia equals 1,500 miles! One side of the city would reach from Melbourne to Townsville, the other almost to Perth. Again, John has taken the standard unit of measurement, the stadia, multiplied it by 12 to symbolise the People of God (12 Patriarchs, 12 Apostles), and multiplied it again by 1,000 to indicate the vastness of their number. Elsewhere he refers to them (7:9) as "a multitude no man can number." John agrees with Jesus' teaching in the parable of the Sower that the God's harvest will be bigger than the devil's bonfire!
So .. at last, heavenly standards and earthly standards have coalesced!
The precious stones correspond to those on Aaron's breastplate which signify the twelve tribes of Israel. Since these foundations already bear the names of the Twelve Apostles, John is affirming the wholeness of the People of God through both Covenants Old and New.
See Isaiah 54:10-12. John, like other contemporary Jews, interpreted carbuncles as pearls. It is probably a fancy of my own, but I like to think that where a pearl was always a private item of wealth, jealously guarded, John has them function as gates open to all. There is no private wealth in the Kingdom!
See John 2:19-22. The absence of a Temple in the Holy City was inconceivable to any Jew. The promise of a "temple not made with hands" (Mark 14:58) indicates that the risen Christ is the place where God meets with man. He is in Himself all that temples ever stood for. It is in our relations with Him that God meets us with grace and we meet Him with worship. "He is the one Mediator between God and Man" (I Tim. 2:5 ). But John also, by his careful use of language, indicates a subtle change in our experience of the Lord's mediatorial office: the Temple IS the Lord God the Almighty and the Lamb. He brings God so near and real that his mediatorial role almost disappears from view in the immediacy of our fellowship with God in Him.
Again, we should resist the temptation to assume that John is here giving us astronomical information. He is reiterating Christ's affirmation that He is the Light of the world, "the source of salvation and the manifestation of the divine glory for all mankind". (G. Beasley-Murray, Revelation, Eerdmans p. 328)
In contrast to the old order when nations walked by the light of the beast's deceit and error, and dedicated to it their power and wealth.
From its innermost sanctum to its farthermost boundaries, traffic is free and open. Freedom and intimacy pervade all the life of the People of God.
John's vision of the life of heaven is no vision of idleness! We shall not glide about on clouds idly playing harps. National life with all its variety, enterprise, productivity and culture is in full swing.
Here I venture to enter a very personal note of commentary. The religious atmosphere in which I was reared is one for which I shall be for ever grateful, but it had a deficiency in that the realms of the spirit and the flesh were so starkly contrasted, and the realm of the flesh so uncompromisingly condemned as the realm where evil held sway, that I grew up lacking any appreciation of the rich diversity of native human cultures. That all belonged to the "world", which was destined to pass away along with all the more obviously detestable works of the devil. And so I grew up regarding as of little or no value humanity's cultural heritage - a view which, I sadly believe, has been characteristic of much cross-cultural missionary endeavour. As I have grown older, I have realised that this had led to a tragically deficient appreciation of the race God created in His image, and as the years have gone by I have had to try and make up lost ground in my appreciation of the rich cultural diversity of our world.
John, however, suffered from no such disadvantage! He sees heaven peopled by a race as culturally diverse and productive as this world's ("the kings of the earth shall bring their glory into it)", but restored to the image of God. It is an exciting vision, in which nothing of value will be lost, but rather, redeemed and glorified. What enterprises the nations of the new earth will be engaged upon lies beyond the reach of our present imagination, but that it will supply room for initiative and achievement at least as noble and satisfying as anything in our human saga, there can be no doubt.
There is another feature of John's vision too which calls for comment. All through my ministry I have met with curiosity about the after-life; will we be recognisable there for example, and will we recognise our loved ones? (Answer: "Yes" - if Moses and Elijah were recognisable on the Mount of Transfiguration I see no good reason why the rest of us shouldn't be.) But the curiosity never extends beyond the narrow circle of family and friends! I do not recall ever being questioned about the nature of society in heaven. Our vision of the world to come is curiously blinkered. The same narrowness of vision is apparent even in the pursuit of contact with "those who have passed over" through mediums etc. The whole exercise is boundaried by trivial details of the narrow field of dead kith and kin. It seems never to occur to those who indulge in all this nonsense that if contact with the dead were truly being established, their dead would surely give some indication of a nobler life and more exalted interests than is revealed by the inconsequential patter of those who "come through." The credulity and small-mindedness of the human race is staggering! What is so salutary about John's vision is that he shows no interest at all in our narrow personal concerns about the life of the world to come, but a vital interest in its community aspects!
Neither sin nor any of the chameleon-like disguises it parades will appear anywhere in human experience!
Again it is silly to ask scornfully how this vastly complex city of many levels can have but one Main Street! John is concerned to celebrate Paradise Restored. As the Tree of Life was "in the midst of the garden" (of Eden Gen. 2:9), so now the river of the water of life with its attendant Tree of Life "flows through the middle of the street of the city." In Paradise Lost, access to the Tree of Life had to be denied to the human pair lest they "put forth their hand and take also of the Tree of Life, and eat and live for ever ..." (Gen 3:22) The sentence was there left unfinished as though the prospect of man living for ever in sin would be unspeakably horrible. Here, access to the Tree of Life is restored unhindered. As the Caribbean Calypso has it, now "Man shall live for evermore because of Christmas Day"!
The whole paragraph 22:1-5, the climax of John's vision of the new world, is pure poetry, and any attempt to analyse its component phrases threatens to spoil its sublimity. He who demands such an analysis has already lost all sensitivity to the transcendent, and will learn nothing from the attempt: he no longer hears the language of the heart. Like all true poetry, the language teases us toward a comprehension of the incomprehensible, and it is better to teeter on the brink, bedazzled and lost in wonder, than collapse it all in a brash attempt to contain the beatific vision within the limits of our present power of comprehension. Be content with the evocative language with which John has expressed the inexpressible!
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