Revelation 21

Today’s Passage: Revelation 21

Here is where the whole Bible has been going since the third chapter of Genesis, and if you have been waiting a long time for good news, sit down and take your coat off, because it has come. John sees a new heaven and a new earth. He sees the holy city, the new Jerusalem, coming down out of heaven from God, dressed like a bride on her wedding morning. And then a loud voice from the throne says the sentence that is the center of this chapter and very nearly the center of the Bible: the dwelling place of God is with man, and He will dwell with them, and they will be His people, and God Himself will be with them as their God. Everything else in the chapter is the setting around that one stone. God wipes away every tear from their eyes, and the wiping is done by His own hand, which means He has come near enough to reach them. Death is finished. Mourning is finished. Crying and pain are finished. The One seated on the throne, who has hardly spoken in the whole book, speaks now to say that He is making all things new, and tells John to write it down because these words are faithful and true. Then comes the invitation, in the second-to-last chapter of Scripture: to the thirsty He will give freely from the spring of the water of life. After that an angel carries John to a high mountain to see the city itself, and the measurements and gates and jewels come pouring out, extravagant beyond any city that ever stood. And in the middle of all that gold, the one thing John does not see is a temple, because he does not need one. God is there.

As you read, hold this: The end of the story is not souls escaping upward but God coming down to live with His people on a made-new earth, wiping every tear away with His own hand.

Revelation 21:1–4 (BSB)

¹ Then I saw a new heaven and a new earth, for the first heaven and earth had passed away, and the sea was no more. ² I saw the holy city, the new Jerusalem, coming down out of heaven from God, prepared as a bride adorned for her husband. ³ And I heard a loud voice from the throne saying: “Behold, the dwelling place of God is with man, and He will dwell with them. They will be His people, and God Himself will be with them as their God. ⁴ ‘He will wipe away every tear from their eyes,’ and there will be no more death or mourning or crying or pain, for the former things have passed away.”

Slow down here. You have come a long way through this book, through seals and trumpets and bowls, through the dragon and the beast and the great city fallen, and this is the ground the whole road has been climbing toward. A new (καινός) kainos, pronounced KY-noss. Strong's G2537, new in kind and quality, fresh, renewed rather than merely recent. Greek has two words for new, and everything depends on which one is used. Neos means new in time, recently made, the next one off the line. Kainos, the word here, means new in kind and in quality: fresh, unspoiled, better than what stood before. It is the word for the kainos covenant Jesus announced over the cup, the word for the kainos creation a person becomes in Christ, the word for the kainos song heaven sang to the Lamb, the word for the kainos name promised to the one who overcomes. And it is the word the One on the throne uses a verse later when He says He is making all things new. Hold on to the distinction, because it settles a question many believers carry quietly for years. God is not scrapping this world and starting over with something unrelated to it, the way a man throws out a broken chair and buys another. He is doing to creation what He does to a soul: taking what He made, which sin has ruined, and making it kainos, the same and yet transfigured, recognizable and yet beyond anything it has been. The body that goes into the ground is the body that is raised. The earth that groans is the earth that is set free. Your God is a restorer, and He does not abandon His work. heaven and a new earth. Not a replacement world that has nothing to do with this one, and not a dissolving of matter into spirit, but heaven and earth made new, which is the same thing God has been promising through His prophets for seven hundred years and the same thing He does to every sinner He saves. And notice what happens to the sea. In the imagery of this book and of the Old Testament behind it, the sea is the restless deep, the place of chaos and monsters, the thing that swallowed Pharaoh’s chariots and separated an old pastor on Patmos from every church he loved. The beast came up out of it. To a man in exile across forty miles of water, “the sea was no more” is not a threat to the ocean. It is the end of everything that ever kept him from the people he loved and the God he served. Whatever in this world is deep and cold and dividing, it is gone.

And now look carefully at the direction things are moving, because a great many sincere readers have this backwards and it costs them something. The city comes down. It comes down out of heaven from God, and John says it twice in this chapter so you will not miss it. The hope held out at the end of the Bible is not that our souls will finally escape upward out of a doomed world and float free of it. It is that God will come down and make His home here, on a renewed earth, with resurrected people, forever. That is a very different hope, and it is a far better one. It means the groaning of this creation is not pointless noise but labor pains. It means that your body matters, that the ground matters, that the work of your hands is not so much scaffolding to be knocked away. Paul saw the same thing and said it plainly.

"For the creation was subjected to futility, not by its own will, but because of the One who subjected it, in hope that the creation itself will be set free from its bondage to decay and brought into the glorious freedom of the children of God." Romans 8:20–21 (BSB)

The city arrives dressed as a bride. Every other city in this book was built by somebody, brick on brick, tax on tax, and this one is given. She does not climb; she is brought. And she has been adorned, which is a passive word, meaning that someone else did the adorning. Whatever beauty the people of God have on that morning was put on them by the Bridegroom who bought them with His blood.

Then the loud voice from the throne, and here is the heart of it. Everything else in this chapter, every gate and jewel and measurement, is the wrapping around this one sentence. The dwelling place (σκηνή) skēnē, pronounced SKAY-nay. Strong's G4633, tent, tabernacle, the dwelling God pitches among His people. The word is skēnē, which means a tent. Not a palace, not a temple, a tent, the ordinary shelter of a traveling people, and it is the word the Greek Old Testament uses hundreds of times for the tabernacle Moses built at Sinai: the portable sanctuary of hides and poles that God told Israel to make so that He might dwell among them. Think of what that meant. In a wilderness full of tents, God pitched one too, right in the middle of the camp, and when the people moved He moved with them. That tent was always a shadow, and the shadow had a limit: the veil hung across it, and no ordinary Israelite ever went past. Then John, in his Gospel, used the verb form of this very word about a baby: the Word became flesh and tabernacled among us, and we have seen His glory. God pitched His tent in a human body and walked our roads. Now here, in the last vision of the Bible, the tent is pitched a third time and never struck again. There is no veil in it, no outer court, no priest standing between. Follow that line from Sinai to Bethlehem to the new Jerusalem and you will see the settled desire of God’s heart: not to be admired from a distance, but to live with His people. He has wanted it all along, and He has paid everything to get it. of God is with man, and He will dwell with them. They will be His people, and God Himself will be with them as their God. Read that four times slowly. This is not chiefly a promise about a beautiful place. It is a promise about a Person, and about proximity. The ache underneath every other ache in the human race is that we were made for the presence of God and were driven out of it, and every religion humanity ever invented has been an attempt to claw back up to Him. And here at the end, He comes down and moves in. Notice too that the promise is stated in the oldest covenant words in the Bible, the words God said to Israel at Sinai and repeated through Jeremiah and Ezekiel: they will be My people, and I will be their God. That is the sentence the whole Old Testament was reaching for, and it lands here, in full, forever.

And then verse four, and I want you to take it one piece at a time rather than letting it wash by as a lovely sentence. First: He will wipe away every tear from their eyes. Consider who is doing it. Not an angel with a cloth, not time, not distraction, not the gradual dulling that people call healing. God Himself. And to wipe a tear from someone’s face you must be standing close enough to touch them, close enough to see their face, bending toward them the way you bend toward a child. The God who fills heaven and earth comes near enough to do that for you personally, and He does it for every tear, which means not one of them was unnoticed and not one of them is dismissed. Then: there will be no more death. That is the enemy that has emptied every chair at every table since Eden, and it is simply gone, not managed, not softened, gone. Then: no more mourning, which is the long ache that comes after the funeral, when the casseroles have stopped arriving and the house is quiet. Then: no more crying, the sound itself, the sound of a hospital corridor at two in the morning, never heard again anywhere in creation. Then: no more pain, the daily grinding kind that wears a person down for decades in a body that will not cooperate. Take them one at a time. Say each one out loud. If you have stood at a graveside, this verse is not decoration to you, and it was not written as decoration. Isaiah had been given it centuries before.

"He will swallow up death forever. The Lord GOD will wipe away the tears from every face and remove the disgrace of His people from the whole earth. For the LORD has spoken." Isaiah 25:8 (BSB)

For the LORD has spoken. That is the only guarantee any of this has, and it is the only guarantee it needs.

Revelation 21:5–8 (BSB)

⁵ And the One seated on the throne said, “Behold, I make all things new.” Then He said, “Write this down, for these words are faithful and true.” ⁶ And He told me, “It is done! I am the Alpha and the Omega, the Beginning and the End. To the thirsty I will give freely from the spring of the water of life. ⁷ The one who overcomes will inherit all things, and I will be his God, and he will be My son. ⁸ But to the cowardly and unbelieving and abominable and murderers and sexually immoral and sorcerers and idolaters and all liars, their place will be in the lake that burns with fire and sulfur. This is the second death.”

Now hear who is speaking. Through twenty chapters of this book the One seated on the throne has been described, worshiped, sung to, and feared, and He has scarcely said a word out loud. Angels have spoken. Elders have spoken. The Lamb has spoken. Now the One on the throne opens His mouth, and what He says is: Behold, I make all things new. Not “I make all new things,” which would leave your history in the dustbin, but all things new, which reaches back and takes hold of the very things that were spoiled and remakes them. And notice the tense. He does not say I made or I will make. He says I make, present and ongoing, the work of a God who is already at it. Then He tells John to write it down, and gives the reason: these words are faithful and true. That instruction is a kindness aimed squarely at readers like us, who believe such promises easily in a bright room and with great difficulty at three in the morning. God knew that. So He put it in writing.

“It is done.” He says it as an accomplished fact while John is still standing there watching, because when God speaks a thing it is as good as finished. And then He names Himself with the name that has run through this whole book like a thread of gold: I am the Alpha and the Omega, the Beginning and the End. The first letter and the last of the Greek alphabet, which is to say: everything that can be said is said within Me. He was there before the first page and He is there after the last, and every chapter between belongs to Him. Take note, too, that the risen Christ claims this same title for Himself in the next chapter. This book will not let you hold Jesus at any distance from God.

And then, without a pause, the throne turns and speaks to whoever is thirsty. To the thirsty I will give freely (δωρεάν) dōrean, pronounced doh-reh-AHN. Strong's G1432, freely, as a gift, without cost. Dōrean is the adverb built from dōron, a gift, and it means as a gift, gratis, for nothing, without cost. In ordinary Greek you would use it for something handed over with no price attached, and it could even carry the edge of for no reason at all, the way our word “gratuitous” can. Paul uses it for the very center of the gospel when he says we are justified dōrean by His grace through the redemption that is in Christ Jesus, freely, as a gift, at no charge to us. Jesus used it when He sent out the Twelve: freely you have received, freely give. So when the One on the throne says He will give dōrean from the spring of the water of life, He is using the language of the gospel at the end of history exactly as it was used at the beginning. Understand what that costs. Water this good has a price; it simply is not charged to you. It was paid in full by a Lamb standing as though slain, and the receipt is the scar. There is nothing to bring. That is precisely what offends us about it, because we would all rather owe God something manageable than owe Him everything. Come thirsty, and drink. from the spring of the water of life. Look where that sentence is standing. Two chapters from the end of the Bible, after the seals and the trumpets and the bowls, after the great white throne, after death and Hades have been dealt with, and God is still holding out water to anyone who wants it. Not to the qualified. Not to the accomplished. To the thirsty, which is the one thing you need to be, and the one thing you cannot fake. The invitation has not been withdrawn. It stands open on nearly the last page of Scripture, and it will be repeated one more time in the chapter to come, and if you are reading this with a dry mouth and a long list of reasons why it could not possibly include you, then it is addressed to you by name.

Then the promise to the one who overcomes, and if you have read the letters in chapters two and three you will hear the echo at once. Seven times the risen Christ made a promise to the one who overcomes: the tree of life, the crown of life, the hidden manna, the morning star, the white robe, a pillar in the temple, a seat on the throne. All seven of those promises come home here. And they were made to ordinary, struggling congregations, not to spiritual heroes, and the overcoming was never a matter of unusual strength. Earlier in this book we were told exactly how the saints conquered, and it was by the blood of the Lamb and the word of their testimony. Now the inheritance is named in the plainest and warmest terms available: I will be his God, and he will be My son. That is adoption language, family language, the language of a house rather than a courtroom.

And then verse eight, and we must not hurry past it and we must not linger over it either. John sets the two destinies side by side, and he does it without a shred of relish, and neither may we. He names cowardice first, which ought to sober anyone who has ever been tempted to keep quiet about Christ to keep a job or a friendship, and this was written to people for whom that temptation was daily and expensive. Then unbelief, and then a list of the ways human beings brutalize and betray and deceive each other. Their place, John says, is in the lake that burns with fire and sulfur, and he calls it the second death. Scripture does not soften this and we will not either. It is real, it is final, and it is the settled teaching of this book. But notice how John writes it: soberly, briefly, and then he moves on. There is no gloating in the text and there must be none in us. And notice something else, which the very next verses will make plain. The gates of this city stand open, and the water is still being offered free, and the list in verse eight is a list of what people do and are, not a list God is unwilling to wash. That is the whole point of a Lamb who was slain. Every category in that verse has been washed clean in the churches John was writing to, and in every generation since.

Revelation 21:9–13 (BSB)

⁹ Then one of the seven angels with the seven bowls full of the seven final plagues came and said to me, “Come, I will show you the bride, the wife of the Lamb.” ¹⁰ And he carried me away in the Spirit to a mountain great and high, and showed me the holy city of Jerusalem coming down out of heaven from God, ¹¹ shining with the glory of God. Its radiance was like a most precious jewel, like a jasper, as clear as crystal. ¹² The city had a great and high wall with twelve gates inscribed with the names of the twelve tribes of Israel, and twelve angels at the gates. ¹³ There were three gates on the east, three on the north, three on the south, and three on the west.

There is a deliberate symmetry here that a careful reader will enjoy. Back in chapter seventeen, one of these same seven angels with the seven bowls came to John and said, come, I will show you the punishment of the great prostitute, and carried him away in the Spirit into a wilderness. Now the same kind of angel comes with the same invitation and the opposite errand: come, I will show you the bride, the wife of the Lamb. And this time he carries John not into a desert but up a great and high mountain, which is where Ezekiel was set down when he was shown his city. Two women, two cities, two destinies, and John has been given a look at both. One was gorgeous and drunk and cruel and is now ashes; the other is radiant and belongs to the Lamb.

Notice that the angel promises to show him a bride and then shows him a city. He does not correct himself. The city is the bride, and the bride is the people of God, and so every dimension and gate and stone that follows is a description of what the Lord has made out of ordinary believers. The city shines, and John is careful to say where the shining comes from: it is the glory of God, not any light of the city’s own. Her radiance is like jasper, clear as crystal, which is the very stone John used at the throne itself in chapter four to describe the appearance of the One seated there. She looks like Him. That is what happens to people who spend eternity in the presence of God.

Then the gates, and here is a picture worth carrying home. Twelve gates, three on each of the four sides, so that whichever direction you come from, north, south, east or west, there is a way in. Not one narrow entrance around the back for the sort of people who barely qualify, but gates on every side, and each one carrying the name of a tribe of Israel, so that no one may ever forget the covenant people through whom salvation came into the world. Angels stand at the gates, and every earlier picture in Scripture of an angel at a gate is a picture of someone being kept out, from the cherubim with the flaming sword at Eden onward. Not here. These gates, we will be told in a moment, are never shut.

Revelation 21:14–17 (BSB)

¹⁴ The wall of the city had twelve foundations bearing the names of the twelve apostles of the Lamb. ¹⁵ The angel who spoke with me had a golden measuring rod to measure the city and its gates and walls. ¹⁶ The city lies foursquare, with its width the same as its length. And he measured the city with the rod, and all its dimensions were equal—12,000 stadia in length and width and height. ¹⁷ And he measured its wall to be 144 cubits, by the human measure the angel was using.

Twelve tribes on the gates and twelve apostles on the foundations. The whole people of God, from Abraham’s family to the churches John pastored, built into one city, and there is no seam between the halves. And look at the tenderness hidden in that detail. The names on those foundation stones belonged to men who argued about which of them was greatest, who fell asleep in the garden, who ran away, who denied Him with curses by a fire. God carved their names into the footings of the eternal city. Grace does not merely forgive men like that; it builds on them.

Now the measuring, and here is where a reader’s attention can quietly slide off the page, so let me make it concrete. A stadion was a little over six hundred feet, so twelve thousand of them is something near fourteen hundred miles. Take that seriously for a moment. To a man on Patmos, that is roughly the span of the whole known Roman world, from the coast of Asia to the far side of the Mediterranean. And then John says the thing that makes it stop being a map and start being a message: the length, the width, and the height are all equal. Nothing anyone has ever built is shaped like that. This is not a plan you could hand to a mason. It is a cube, fourteen hundred miles on every side, and there is exactly one cube in the Bible before this one. The Most Holy Place in Solomon’s temple was a perfect cube overlaid with pure gold, the room where the glory of God dwelt above the ark, the room a single man entered a single day each year with blood in his hands and bells on his robe so the others would know he was still alive. That room was twenty cubits on a side. This one is fourteen hundred miles. Do you see what John is telling you? The place where God’s presence was locked away behind a curtain has expanded until it is the whole city, and the whole city is where His people live, and they walk about inside it freely, all of them, forever.

And then the wall, measured at a hundred and forty-four cubits, which is twelve times twelve, the number of the tribes multiplied by the number of the apostles, the same arithmetic running through the whole vision. Set that figure of two hundred feet or so beside a city fourteen hundred miles high and you will see that this wall was never meant to be a defense. Nothing is coming. The wall is not there to keep enemies out; it is there because a city in that world had a wall the way a home has a door, and this one has twelve of them, and they stand open day and night. The angel measures with a golden rod, and measuring in the prophets always means the same thing: this belongs to God, it has been counted, and it is secure. Not one cubit of it is uncertain.

Revelation 21:18–21 (BSB)

¹⁸ The wall was made of jasper, and the city itself of pure gold, as pure as glass. ¹⁹ The foundations of the city walls were adorned with every kind of precious stone: The first foundation was jasper, the second sapphire, the third chalcedony, the fourth emerald, ²⁰ the fifth sardonyx, the sixth carnelian, the seventh chrysolite, the eighth beryl, the ninth topaz, the tenth chrysoprase, the eleventh jacinth, and the twelfth amethyst. ²¹ And the twelve gates were twelve pearls, with each gate consisting of a single pearl. The main street of the city was pure gold, as clear as glass.

A list of stones can go past a reader like a jeweler’s inventory, so let us stand in front of it and actually look. Twelve foundation courses, each one a different jewel, each one enormous, catching the light of the glory of God and throwing it in twelve colors. Green and blue and fire-red and gold and violet, laid in bands beneath a wall of jasper, under a city of gold so pure it is transparent. Now the gates. Twelve pearls, and here John does something quietly staggering: each gate consisting of a single pearl. One pearl, big enough to be the gate of a city. There is no such pearl. There has never been such an oyster. That is exactly the point. And then the street, and notice that John says the main street, the great colonnaded thoroughfare that every proud Roman city paved with the best stone it could afford and lined with statues of its benefactors. Here it is gold. Paved with it. Walked on. The most precious substance in the ancient economy, the thing men crossed oceans and murdered each other and enslaved whole peoples to get, is the surface underfoot, and it is so pure it is clear.

Feel what the extravagance is saying, because it is not saying that heaven will be gaudy. It is saying that everything this world grasps after and cannot keep is, in the presence of God, simply paving. Every one of these stones was a currency of status in the Roman world. Merchants shipped them, emperors wore them, and the great city in chapter eighteen was decked in gold and precious stones and pearls and traded in human beings to pay for them, and when she fell her merchants stood a long way off and wept because no one would buy their cargo anymore. And now here is all of it, in quantities no market could survive, and nobody in this city is trading in it. God is not stingy. He was never stingy. He has been saving the best of everything for a people who could not have afforded any of it, and He is giving it away with both hands. There may also be a gentler note in the stones themselves: Israel’s high priest carried twelve engraved gems on his breastpiece, one for each tribe, held over his heart whenever he went in before the LORD. In this city the names are not on a man’s chest for an hour. They are cut into the foundations forever.

Revelation 21:22–27 (BSB)

²² But I saw no temple in the city, because the Lord God Almighty and the Lamb are its temple. ²³ And the city has no need of sun or moon to shine on it, because the glory of God illuminates the city, and the Lamb is its lamp. ²⁴ By its light the nations will walk, and into it the kings of the earth will bring their glory. ²⁵ Its gates will never be shut at the end of the day, because there will be no night there. ²⁶ And into the city will be brought the glory and honor of the nations. ²⁷ But nothing unclean will ever enter it, nor anyone who practices an abomination or a lie, but only those whose names are written in the Lamb’s Book of Life.

Now the single most surprising sentence in the chapter, and if anything in these verses is to stay with you, let it be this. John has been shown a city built on the pattern of everything holy in Israel’s history, gates named for the tribes, foundations for the apostles, the shape of the Most Holy Place, and then he says: I saw no temple (ναός) naos, pronounced nah-OSS. Strong's G3485, the inner sanctuary of a temple, the room where God dwells. Greek has two words for a temple. Hieron is the whole complex: the courts, the porticoes, the money changers’ tables, the crowds, everything a visitor to Jerusalem would have called the temple. Naos, the word here, is the sanctuary itself, the inner house where the deity dwells, and in Israel’s case the Holy Place and the Most Holy Place behind the veil. That is the word John says is missing. And once you notice how the New Testament uses naos, this verse opens all the way. When Jesus said, destroy this naos and in three days I will raise it up, He was speaking of His body, the true dwelling of God among men. Paul told the Corinthians that they, together, were the naos of God and that His Spirit lived in them. Matthew tells us that at the moment Jesus died the curtain of the naos was torn in two from top to bottom, and the tearing was done from the top, by a hand no one could see. Follow the line. The sanctuary was a building; then it was a body on a cross; then it was a people indwelt by the Spirit; and now, at the end, the sanctuary is God Himself and there is no structure left at all, because there is nothing left to keep anyone out. The veil is not merely torn. The room has become the world. in the city. Ezekiel’s closing vision was nine chapters of temple. Every holy city anyone in the ancient world could imagine had a sanctuary at its heart; that is what made it holy. Every city in the province of Asia was competing to build another one. And in the eternal city there is not a temple anywhere, and John gives the reason in the same breath: because the Lord God Almighty and the Lamb are its temple. A temple is a building that exists to solve a problem, and the problem is distance. It marks the one place where a holy God may be safely approached by unholy people, with a veil and a priesthood and blood, because we cannot bear Him and He will not be handled. The problem has been solved. When God dwells with His people face to face, the building that stood between them has nothing left to do. And observe, with reverence, who is named as the temple: the Lord God Almighty and the Lamb, together, as one. Nobody in that first congregation would have missed it. The slain Lamb is not an addition to God. He is God.

Then the light. No sun, no moon, and again John is not describing an astronomical arrangement so much as a settled fact: the glory of God illuminates the city, and the Lamb is its lamp. Isaiah had said it seven hundred years earlier, that the sun would no longer be the light by day nor the moon by night, for the LORD would be an everlasting light and the days of sorrow would cease. Every light we have ever had was borrowed. Now the source is here in person, and the Lamb, of all things, is the lamp: the light of the eternal city is a slain and risen Man, and creation will see God forever through Him.

And look at who is walking in that light. The nations. Kings of the earth bringing their glory in, and the honor of the nations carried through the gates. That is a breathtaking thing to say in a book where the nations have raged and the kings of the earth have made themselves drunk on the wine of Babylon. Whatever is genuinely good and glorious in the peoples of the world, every tongue and craft and song and honest labor, is not burned as rubbish. It is carried in and laid down. And the gates stand open. Isaiah promised that too, gates always open, never shut day or night. In the ancient world a city shut its gates at dusk, every night, because darkness meant danger and a gate left open was a city asleep with the door unlocked. These gates are never shut, and John gives the reason with four words that end the whole history of fear: there will be no night there.

Then verse twenty-seven, and it is the same sober fence as verse eight, and it should be read the same way. Nothing unclean will ever enter, nor anyone who practices an abomination or a lie. God will not admit into that city the things that ruined this one; a heaven with sin still in it would only be Eden again, waiting to be lost. But notice how the sentence ends, because it does not end on exclusion. It ends on a book. Only those whose names are written in the Lamb’s Book of Life. Not those whose records are clean, not those whose achievements qualify them, but those whose names are written, and written in a book that belongs to the Lamb, which is to say a book bought with blood. If you are wondering how anyone could possibly get in, that is the answer, and it is the only answer this book ever gives.