Does the church seem feeble and nasty? Look at what God sees (Revelation 21:1-8)
Certain words evoke certain gut feelings.
Glade. Park. Lagoon. Oasis. Smorgasbord. Such words bring good feelings.
Swamp. Dungeon. Clinic. Vegan sausage. Such words incite foreboding.
My impression is that the word church evokes more unpleasant than pleasant feelings.
There are many reasons for this.
First, we’ve been saturated for decades with the phrase “church sex-abuse scandal.” The abuse of children, so wicked, so monstrous and abhorrent to the Gospel and all that the church is intended to be, has nonetheless stained the word.
Then, church leaders are a sorry parade of more-or-less flawed people. There are fallen celebrity preachers like Jimmy Swaggart (who contracted prostitutes), and Joshua Harrris (who kissed Christian sexual ethics, his wife, and Christ goodbye.) There are the great intellectuals whose good work was flawed in some way, like Augustine (who taught baptismal regeneration) and John Wesley (who taught perfectionism). All the Reformation fathers bore a magnum vitium, a great blemish, like Luther (who wrote fiercely against the Jews), and Calvin (who oversaw the burning of Servetus). Local church leaders are more-or-less weak, inconsistent, ungodly, and hypocritical. I know...
We may add a nagging sense that the church seems little, feeble, and pathetic in comparison to such world powers as Google, Hollywood, and the CCP.
And who hasn’t suffered conflict, disappointment, and a lack of love and care in the church?
To top it off, Christians are now routinely demonised or ridiculed in the social sphere, so church-membership is not safe. That was certainly true for the first readers of Revelation, for whom church membership meant social ostracism at best, and even violent death.
Perhaps you feel all of this, and you are already treading the well-worn path out of the church: losing your joy in church; losing your desire to serve and give to the church; losing your confidence in the church and your love for the church; and learning to dislike and despise the church.
You take excuses and opportunities to stay away. In your heart you have left, and actual leaving is imminent.
In short, we are all somewhere on a spectrum where the church looks more-or-less irrelevant and unattractive, and where we are tempted to leave.
How does the church look in God’s eyes? Does he share our negativity, our pessimism, our dislike? Is it something he’d like to leave?
God shows us how he sees the church in Revelation 21:1-6. He shows us the church as he sees it.
We may highlight four things from this magnificent passage, this Mount Everest of Scripture.
1. God is preparing an extraordinary place for the church
Revelation 21:1 Then I saw a new heaven and a new earth, for the first heaven and the first earth had passed away, and there was no longer any sea.
Compare this with the opening words of the Bible, “In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth.” To punish sin, God cursed his perfect creation: with pain in child-bearing, marital conflict, frustrating and toilsome labour, and death (Gen 3:16-19).
Yet, Christ comprehensively destroys sin in the lake of fire (Rev 20:14). He lifts the curse for sin, and John sees here a “new” heaven and earth.
Two Greek words are translated “new” in the New Testament. νεος, neos, means new in time, something recently come into being. (Matrix fans will recognise Neo, the “new man,” who frees the world from bioelectric enslavement.) καινος, kainos, means new in quality. Archbishop Trent explained that the kainos is “set over against that which has seen service, the outworn, the effete or marred through age” (Synonyms of the New Testament, 1876, p. 212).
Ancient Judaism argued over three theories as to how God would remake the world: that God would return things to the pre-Fall Edenic state; that God would return the world to formless and void chaos and then remake things from there; or that God would destroy everything utterly and make from scratch something completely new (Rogers and Rogers, Exegetical Key to the Greek New Testament, 1998, p. 649).
Revelation 21 teaches none of these. For it describes not a neos but a kainos heaven and earth.
Revelation 21 does not show us a heaven newly brought into existence, never before seen. It shows heaven and earth remade, renewed, restored, and vastly greater because we will see something that Adam and Eve could not see before the Fall—God’s grace.
The renewed heaven and earth, astonishingly glorious, is nonetheless only the setting for something greater.
2. God has prepared the church to be his Son’s bride
Revelation 21:2 I saw the Holy City, the new Jerusalem, coming down out of heaven from God, prepared as a bride beautifully dressed for her husband.
We decorate wedding venues with beautiful and expensive things. Guests dress up in their better clothes. The groomsmen’s beards are clipped and their new shoes shine. A pianist plays calming ballads amidst fragrant bouquets of ivory roses.
Yet the person everyone is waiting for, the focus of attention, is the bride. What groom would disagree that all the beautiful accoutrements are a setting for his bride?
It is the same with the New Heaven and Earth. God renews it and prepares it as the breathtaking setting for the arrival of his Son’s bride.
The bride is described as Jerusalem, the City of God, God’s chosen dwelling.
By the time Revelation was written, earthly Jerusalem had been razed. Jesus prophesied this, and the Romans under Titus came in 70 AD to obliterate the city that had committed both cosmic and political rebellion.
Here in Revelation 21 is the true Jerusalem, of which the earthly city was a pale and flawed shadow. It is the kainos Jerusalem, Jerusalem renewed, restored, vastly greater than its earthly antitype.
God prepares and adorns the city-bride for his Son. κοσμεω, kosmeō, means, on one level, to tame chaos, “to put in order so as to appear neat or well organised.” On another level it means “to adorn, to decorate ... to make beautiful or attractive” (BDAG, p. 560).
This is the church in God’s eyes, the beautiful bride that he has adorned for his Son.
Note, God did not pick up the pre-existing institution of human marriage as a metaphor for the relationship between Christ and the Church. Christ and the Church is primary, human marriage is secondary. Our marriages are meant to be object lessons, living billboards, showing our children, our society, and the world, the love of Christ for his Church.
The church is heaven’s brightest jewel, as verses 9-27 will show. Though we will see even greater glories.
3. God sees the church as his home
Revelation 21:3 And I heard a loud voice from the throne saying, “Now the dwelling of God is with men, and he will live with them. They will be his people, and God himself will be with them and be their God.”
After Adam sinned, God banished and drove him out from Eden, where God was present (Gen 3:23-24). Revelation 21 shows that our banishment has ended.
“Dwelling” translates the biblical word for tabernacle (σκηνη, skēnē). As God camped with Israel in the desert, so God will come in the new heaven and earth to live closely with his people.
Yet whereas Israel’s tabernacle served to separate the people from God’s holy and dangerous presence, there will be no such separation in the new heaven and earth. “Now we see but a poor reflection as in a mirror; then we shall see face to face” (1Co 13:12).
I was always told that “the church is God’s house.” Thus as a child I believed that God’s invisible presence haunted the shaded inner stairs of the Salvation Army church hall at 121 Brookdale Street, Floreat Park.
My naive imaginations were only partly heretical.
Since the Temple veil was torn, God has not tied his presence to any building or city or “sacred space.” Yet the Holy Spirit blazes over the heads and within hearts of each and every one of his people—just as the Pentecost tongues of fire made evident. And the Father’s grace, mercy, and peace is “with us in truth and love” (2 John 1:3). And the Son has thrillingly and abundantly kept his promises to be a constant living presence among his people: “Where two or three come together in my name, there am I with them.” “Surely I am with you to the very end of the age” (Mat 18:20, 28:20).
The Church is glorious because He is not just El, “God,” but Immanu-El, “God with us.”
4. God sees the church as creation perfected
Revelation 21:4-5a “He will wipe every tear from their eyes. There will be no more death or mourning or crying or pain, for the old order of things has passed away.” 5He who was seated on the throne said, “Look! I am making everything new!”
Sin brought the curse, and the curse brought death and pain, grief and tears. But these πρωτα, prōta, these “first things,” or “former things,” have “completely gone.” (The verb is emphatic, perfective.)
Note a poignant detail. God does not promise to “wipe tears” from our eyes, but to “wipe every tear,” as in every individual tear. He will specifically and individually assuage every single cause of upset, and every single manifestation of upset.
Mourning refers to inner anguish, the quiet grief that we so often feel. Crying refers to those loud outward expressions of grief, to wailing, and even shouts of pain and distress. The point is, every type and expression of grief will be removed. There will be nothing left to grieve for.
Here and now pain stabs and claws at our hearts. Warm friendships grow cold. Family ties are rent by stinging words. Drenching cascades of bitter regrets soak us to the bone. Our frail bodies ache and tire under inexorable grinding disintegration. Death’s arrows, black and sharp, defeat every armor, pierce every tender place. Sin, that bleak ghoul, that anti-Midas, turns everything it touches to poison and shame.
For now, sackcloth is our native garb. Dust and ashes is our wretched crown. “I am worn out from groaning; all night long I flood my bed with weeping and drench my couch with tears” (Psalm 6:6). “My tears have been my food day and night” (Psalm 42:3).
Yet, the Man of Sorrows came to help. “Surely he took up our infirmities and carried our sorrows” (Isaiah 53:4). He bore our sin, and grief, sin’s poisonous fruit. He has wiped away every tear.
God loves the church because in the New Heaven and Earth the church will never grieve and will always rejoice.
Revelation 21:5b-6a Then he said, "Write this down, for these words are trustworthy and true." 6 He said to me: "It is done.
There is something thrilling about those three words, “It is done.” It is not the same as “It is finished,” when Jesus declared his redeeming accomplished. “It is done” translates a word (γινομαι, ginomai) that refers to the process of being born, created, and becoming.
Imagine God’s work of new creation painted on a vast canvas. On the left hand side is the death and resurrection of Christ. In the middle is the Last Days in which we now live. On the right hand side is the Final Judgment, and the final presentation of the bride to the Son.
We live in the midst of the picture, and what we see around us is far from complete. God sees the whole finished picture, “it is done.” (Wordnerds will want to know that this verb is in the perfect tense. The action is completed and the resulting state is ongoing now.) And here he shows us the completed picture so that we can enjoy it and be encouraged by it.
Revelation 21:6b-8 I am the Alpha and the Omega, the Beginning and the End. To him who is thirsty I will give to drink without cost from the spring of the water of life. 7 He who overcomes will inherit all this, and I will be his God and he will be my son. But the cowardly, the unbelieving, the vile, the murderers, the sexually immoral, those who practice sorcery, the idolaters and all liars—their place will be in the fiery lake of burning sulfur. This is the second death.”
Do you want the new heaven and earth? Do you hunger and thirst for it?
It is free. It comes free from the grace of God. All we must do is hold onto Christ and stand firm in the onslaught of evil.
The character traits of those who succumb reflect the reasons why people leave the church. Sometimes they give in to cowardice, for it takes guts to remain in the church. They leave to be free to unbelieve, to act vilely, to hate, to indulge in sexual immorality, to indulge in alcohol and narcotic substances (that’s what sorcery involved), and to pursue other world views, other gods, and untruth.
Yes, the word church may evoke unpleasant feelings. Monstrous scandals, flawed leaders, weakness, conflict, disappointment, and lovelessness have stained the church’s reputation. Church-membership is not safe.
We’re always tempted to leave. Many have, and many more will. Maybe you are half out the door.
Revelation 21:1-6 shows us the church as God sees it. He’s created a renewed heaven and earth for it. It is his Son’s precious bride. The church is the home of Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. And he will perfect the church from sin and the grief of sin. In fact he will transform our flaws into tools, tools that create humility, empathy, hatred of sin, and total dependence on the Saviour.
May we learn to see, love, cherish, and honour the church as God does. May no persecution or hardship push us out of the church. May we stand firm now, so that we will stand and enjoy her then, and for all eternity, in all her perfected glory.
Photo by Timothée Pons on Unsplash