14. The God Who Triumphs
14
The God Who Triumphs
We come now to Revelation 21–22: the last two chapters of the last book of the Bible. We shall begin, however, rather tangentially.
In the Sermon on the Mount, which is recorded in Matthew 5–7, Jesus says,
19Do not store up for yourselves treasures on earth, where moth and rust destroy, and where thieves break in and steal [or where the stock market can erode it all]. 20But store up for yourselves treasures in heaven, where moth and rust do not destroy, and where thieves do not break in and steal [and where the stock market has no effect whatsoever]. 21For where your treasure is, there your heart will be also.
Matthew 6:19–21
That last sentence is astonishingly important. Note carefully what Jesus says. He does not say, “Guard your heart”; he says, rather, “Choose your treasure.” There are other passages where we are told to guard our hearts: “Above all else, guard your heart, for everything you do flows from it” (Prov. 4:23). But in this passage in the Sermon on the Mount, that is not what Jesus says. What he presupposes is something like this: “Your heart will follow your treasure, so choose your treasure aright.”
In other words, if what you value the most has to do with treasures down here—things that may in themselves be good, things to appreciate and for which to give thanks—if that is the entire horizon of your treasure, that is where your heart will go. “Heart” does not refer merely to one’s emotions or to one’s romantic impulses. Often in the Bible “heart” has to do with the essence of what any human being is: who you are, what you think, what you cherish. And if what you value out there has to do with everything in this life and that’s all, then that is where your heart will go. That is where your creative imagination goes; that is where your energy goes; that is what you think about; that is what you hope for, what you dream about. Of course, if you are a Christian, then at some sort of level you will also believe, say, that there is a new heaven and a new earth to be gained, but such belief will not mean a blessed thing about how you live unless the new heaven and the new earth are something you yearn for, something you treasure. If all your treasures belong to this life, then belief that a new heaven and a new earth are coming will not shape you in any powerful way.
If, on the other hand, though you can thoroughly appreciate all the good things that God gives us in this life (and there are so many of them), what you treasure the most has to do with the new heaven and the new earth, then that is where your imagination will go; that is where your energy will go; that is where your heart goes. Christians in parts of the world where there is a lot of persecution, violence, or suffering have no difficulty understanding that at all. You meet Christians in the southern Sudan or Iran, and they instinctively understand the point.
By contrast, if we live in parts of the world that are lavish in the goods of this world, our hearts will easily pursue what is here and rarely get excited about what is to come. That means that one of the things we ought to do if we are to take the injunction of the Lord Jesus seriously is take time pretty often to reflect on passages from the Bible that tell us what the new heaven and the new earth are like. We need to fire up our imagination so we see what it is that the Lord Jesus is commanding us to treasure, to think about, to value, to run after.
Few passages in all of the Bible are more calculated to do that than Revelation 21–22. These chapters are deeply symbol laden, and there is too little time for me to go through every verse step-by-step to unpack all the symbols. Nevertheless, even with a superficial flyby, one begins to see what Jesus is on about.
1Then 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. 2I saw the Holy City, the new Jerusalem, coming down out of heaven from God, prepared as a bride beautifully dressed for her husband. 3And I heard a loud voice from the throne saying, “Look! God’s dwelling place is now among the people, and he will dwell with them. They will be his people, and God himself will be with them and be their God. 4‘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, “I am making everything new!” Then he said, “Write this down, for these words are trustworthy and true.”
6He said to me: “It is done. I am the Alpha and the Omega, the Beginning and the End. To the thirsty I will give water without cost from the spring of the water of life. 7Those who are victorious will inherit all this, and I will be their God and they will be my children. 8But the cowardly, the unbelieving, the vile, the murderers, the sexually immoral, those who practice magic arts, the idolaters and all liars—they will be consigned to the fiery lake of burning sulfur. This is the second death.”
9One of the seven angels who had the seven bowls full of the seven last plagues came and said to me, “Come, I will show you the bride, the wife of the Lamb.” 10And he carried me away in the Spirit to a mountain great and high, and showed me the Holy City, Jerusalem, coming down out of heaven from God. 11It shone with the glory of God, and its brilliance was like that of a very precious jewel, like a jasper, clear as crystal. 12It had a great, high wall with twelve gates, and with twelve angels at the gates. On the gates were written the names of the twelve tribes of Israel. 13There were three gates on the east, three on the north, three on the south and three on the west. 14The wall of the city had twelve foundations, and on them were the names of the twelve apostles of the Lamb. . . .
22I did not see a temple in the city, because the Lord God Almighty and the Lamb are its temple. 23The city does not need the sun or the moon to shine on it, for the glory of God gives it light, and the Lamb is its lamp. 24The nations will walk by its light, and the kings of the earth will bring their splendor into it. 25On no day will its gates ever be shut, for there will be no night there. 26The glory and honor of the nations will be brought into it. 27Nothing impure will ever enter it, nor will anyone who does what is shameful or deceitful, but only those whose names are written in the Lamb’s book of life.
1Then the angel showed me the river of the water of life, as clear as crystal, flowing from the throne of God and of the Lamb 2down the middle of the great street of the city. On each side of the river stood the tree of life, bearing twelve crops of fruit, yielding its fruit every month. And the leaves of the tree are for the healing of the nations. 3No longer will there be any curse. The throne of God and of the Lamb will be in the city, and his servants will serve him. 4They will see his face, and his name will be on their foreheads. 5There will be no more night. They will not need the light of a lamp or the light of the sun, for the Lord God will give them light. And they will reign for ever and ever.
Revelation 21:1–14; 21:22–22:5
In one of the first-year courses I teach to seminary students, I sometimes assign them an essay in which they are to work through Revelation 21–22 and pick up every single allusion to anything in the Old Testament. There are scads of them. What these two chapters do is pull together a great deal from the Old Testament—much of what we have seen in the thirteen previous chapters of this book. We can pick up only a small part of them, but they are wonderful.
What does the author John see in this his final vision? He sees what is new (Rev. 21:1–8), what is especially symbol laden (21:9–21), what is missing (21:22–27), and then what is central (22:1–5).
What Is New (Revelation 21:1–8)
What John sees initially is nothing less than “a new heaven and a new earth” (21:1). Of course, that calls to mind the opening words of Genesis 1: “God created the heavens and the earth.” So the opening of the Bible connects with the very closing of the Bible. But now this new heaven and new earth (as we will see in the following verses) is untainted by any of the residue of the sin of Genesis 3. It is a new heaven and earth. That is what John sees: a transformation of existence. John adds, “and there was no longer any sea” (21:1). For those of us who love the sea, that seems a bit harsh, doesn’t it? But what you must understand is that for the ancient Israelites the sea was associated with chaos. The Israelites were not a seagoing people.
I was born in Canada, but my parents were both born in the United Kingdom. British people are born with saltwater in their veins, doubtless owing to the fact that they are an island nation. That geographical reality has made them a seafaring people, with the result that their literature and their poetry are full of sea images. Even as a boy growing up in Canada, I memorized poems like this:
I must go down to the seas again, to the lonely sea and the sky, And all I ask is a tall ship and a star to steer her by, And the wheel’s kick and the wind’s song and the white sail’s shaking, And a grey mist on the sea’s face and the grey dawn breaking. . . .
John Masefield[1]
But the ancient Israelites were not like that. They were a landlocked people, and the one time under Solomon when they tried to build a navy, the ships had to be manned by people from seagoing pagan ports up the coast. So as a result Israelite poetry is full of negative uses of the sea; the sea may be associated with chaos and danger and the like. So in Isaiah, “the wicked are like the tossing sea, which cannot rest, whose waves cast up mire and mud” (Isa. 57:20). This is not talking about the properties of water in the new reality, whatever they will be. It is saying that in this new heaven and new earth, there is no more chaos, no more destruction, no more muck and mire.
This expression, “a new heaven and a new earth,” goes all the way back to Isaiah (see Isa. 65:17) and crops up from time to time in the Bible. It appears, for example, in one of Peter’s writings (see 2 Peter 3:13). Sometimes the same essential vision is described in other terms. The apostle Paul writes about this present world order groaning like a woman in pregnancy, waiting for the final transformation of God’s people when the whole universe will be transformed as well (see Rom. 8:19–22).
That is how John’s vision begins in Revelation 21:1. Almost immediately, it changes. “I saw the Holy City, the new Jerusalem, coming down out of heaven from God” (Rev. 21:2). We are not to think of a new creation into which the new Jerusalem comes, thus melding the two images. Rather, John is simply changing the metaphor; apocalyptic literature happily piles disparate metaphors on top of one another. The point is that the ultimate state can be thought of as a new heaven and a new earth, or it can be thought of as a new city, the new Jerusalem. The change enables readers to glimpse different facets of the same reality.
The vision of a “new Jerusalem” calls to mind the old Jerusalem, which was the city of the great king, the city of the temple, the city where God manifested himself to his people. But now what John sees in his vision is a new Jerusalem without taint or corruption. This new Jerusalem was never defeated by the Babylonians or by anyone else. It is a profoundly social vision. So many of us in the West think of spirituality in highly individualistic terms, but this is the people of God in a social context: a city.
I know that in some of our Western literature the city is perceived to be the cesspool of iniquity, but in the Bible the city can be seen both as a sink or a reservoir of evil and as a glorious place of beauty where God lives with his people. As a result of this tension between two quite different associations with the word “city,” some people, only half jokingly, call the book of Revelation “a tale of two cities” because this book contrasts two symbol-laden cities: Babylon, proverbial for pagan idolatry, and the new Jerusalem.
Then John changes the symbolism again: he sees the new Jerusalem “coming down out of heaven from God, prepared as a bride beautifully dressed for her husband” (Rev. 21:2, emphasis added). The city is now a bride. If any young man reading these pages is about to get married, I strongly urge you not to tell your wife on the first night, “Oh, you’re such a lovely city” or “You remind me of a big city.” I suspect she will not be amused. True to its nature, however, apocalyptic literature piles up the images without making them hang together. John leaps from one to the other.
Again and again in the Old Testament, God presents himself as a kind of bridegroom of his people Israel. The image is extended in the New Testament, with Christ now the bridegroom and the church his bride, the two of them engaged until the great consummating marriage supper. This is a powerful way of saying, in effect, “The joy, the intimacy, the pleasure, the knitting together of soul and mind and heart and body, which we best know in our small corner in a well-ordered marriage, is only an indication of the kind of intimacy and joy we will experience when the church is united with Christ forever.” Because Jesus is also said to be, in another metaphor, a sacrificial lamb, the final wedding banquet can be called “the wedding supper of the Lamb” (Rev. 19:9), and even here in chapter 21 the city is later again referred to as a “bride,” “the wife of the Lamb” (Rev. 21:9).
“And I heard a loud voice from the throne saying, ‘Look! God’s dwelling place is now among the people, and he will dwell with them’” (Rev. 21:3). That notion of God making his dwelling with his people appears again and again in the Old Testament. In Leviticus 26, when the tabernacle is being put together in the desert for the ancient Israelites, long before there was an established temple, God says, “I will put my dwelling place among you, and I will not abhor you. I will walk among you and be your God, and you will be my people” (Lev. 26:11–12). So here, God’s “dwelling place” is associated with the tabernacle, and then later with the temple. That the Israelites will be God’s people is bound up with the tabernacle ritual. Many centuries later, however, when he promises that there will be a new covenant, God says, “I will put my law in their minds and write it on their hearts. I will be their God, and they will be my people” (Jer. 31:33, emphasis added). You have similar language, but if under the old covenant it was bound up with God’s self-disclosure in the tabernacle, under the terms of the new covenant it is bound up with God’s self-disclosure in the minds and hearts of his people. It is the same language, but the entire notion gets ratcheted up. Now in the last stage, the same language (“I will be their God, and they will be my people”) is ratcheted up to such a place that the intimacy is so great, and God is so much present with them, that it is unthinkable that any residue of sin, decay, judgment, loss, or death can prevail anymore. The ratcheting up of expectations is so intense that perfection itself is envisioned. So we read,
3Look! God’s dwelling place is now among the people, and he will dwell with them. They will be his people, and God himself will be with them and be their God. 4“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.
Revelation 21:3–4
Here eternal blessedness is couched in negation—that is, no tears, no pain, no mourning, no death, nothing bad. And that is only the negative side of the glory to come. The positive side is depicted in the imagery that still follows: to be with him in glory and splendor, to see the limitless perfections that all of eternity will still not exhaust because he is our God and we his people dwell with him and he with us forever. Incalculable pleasure!
Almost as if our faith needs to be reassured, John adds:
5He who was seated on the throne [that is, God himself] said, “I am making everything new!” Then he said, “Write this down, for these words are trustworthy and true.”
6He said to me: “It is done. I am the Alpha and the Omega [the first and last letters of the Greek alphabet], the Beginning and the End [from creation to the consummation to the new creation; from creation in its perfection with its horrible dip of sin and destruction and decay to the work that I have done in the sending of my own Son and the pouring out of the Spirit now to the consummation; I am the Alpha and Omega, and the turning point is Jesus; now we arrive at the consummation]. To the thirsty I will give water without cost [there is grace all over again] from the spring of the water of life. 7Those who are victorious [in this book, this refers to those who persevere to the end in confidence in Jesus; it does not refer to the kind of Christian who sails through life with nothing ever sticking to them; to be victorious in Revelation means that you persevere in faithfulness by God’s grace to the very end] will inherit all this, and I will be their God and they will be my children. 8But the cowardly, the unbelieving, the vile, the murderers, the sexually immoral, those who practice magic arts, the idolaters and all liars—they will be consigned to the fiery lake of burning sulfur. This is the second death.”
Revelation 21:5–8
So what is new? The new heaven, the new earth, the new Jerusalem, the consummated union between Christ and his people. Spectacular!
What Is Especially Symbol Laden (Rev. 21:9–21)
Much of what has already been said has been deeply symbol laden, but in these verses the symbols pile on top of each other so quickly that a reader may feel swamped by the imagery. It would take many pages just to work through all the symbols. Instead, I shall unpack two or three of them.
We are told that the city that John sees shines “with the glory of God” (21:11). That is, the people, this city coming out of heaven, shines “with the glory of God.” Let us be quite frank: even the very best churches here today (churches that are full of the gospel, where there is discipline and accountability, where Christians really do love each other) are a flawed bunch. The church still has its share of sin. It is made up of sinners like you and me, sinners who have been declared just, yes, but sinners still, not yet perfected, not even close to what we will be. But one day the city itself will glow with the presence of God. No taint anywhere. The language is drawn from Old Testament prophets who anticipated the Jerusalem that would be built after the exile, looking forward to the ultimate Jerusalem. This is addressed to Zion, to Jerusalem:
1Arise, shine, for your light has come
and the glory of the Lord rises upon you.
2See, darkness covers the earth
and thick darkness is over the peoples,
but the LORD rises upon you
and his glory appears over you.
Isaiah 60:1–2
Now God’s glory is manifested in the church, in the new Jerusalem. Notice the strange dimensions of this city:
15The angel who talked with me had a measuring rod of gold to measure the city, its gates and its walls. 16The city was laid out like a square, as long as it was wide. He measured the city with the rod and found it to be 12,000 stadia in length, and as wide and high as it is long. 17He measured its wall and it was 144 cubits thick, by human measurement, which the angel was using.
Revelation 21:15–17
The significance of the 12,000 and the 144: apocalyptic literature loves symbolism, and it is calling to mind the twelve tribes of Israel and the twelve apostles: 12 multiplied by 12 equals 144. It is a way of saying that all of the old covenant people and all of the new covenant people together constitute this unified people (like the “one new humanity” in Christ in Eph. 2:15).
But a city built like a cube? Even the most spectacular of our high-rise cities does not look cube-like. Once again, this must be symbol laden. So you stop and ask yourself, “Okay, where is there a cube in the Old Testament?” There is only one: it is the Most Holy Place of the tabernacle or the temple. You will recall that the tabernacle was built three times as long as it was wide, and two-thirds of it took up the first part, the Holy Place, and the last third—perfectly cube-like—was the Most Holy Place. This is where the ark of the covenant was found, including the top, on which the blood of bull and goat was sprinkled in the presence of God on the Day of Atonement. It was the place where God manifested himself in his glory when the blood was poured out. Now we are told that the entire New Jerusalem, the whole city, is built like a cube. This is a way of saying that all of us are forever in the very presence of God. We no longer need a mediating priest. We no longer need any blood sacrifices. It is equivalent to what we discovered when Christ was crucified: the veil of the temple was torn, the way into the Most Holy Place, the presence of God, was opened. And now the whole new Jerusalem is built like a cube.
What Is Missing (Rev. 21:22–27)
John tells us what he did not see in the city, what was missing:
1. Temple
“I did not see a temple in the city, because the Lord God Almighty and the Lamb are its temple” (Rev. 21:22). There is no temple in the city because the whole city is built like a cube: we are already in the Most Holy Place. One cannot imagine a temple in the Most Holy Place! Or to change the language just a wee bit, God himself, the one who sits on the throne, and the Lamb are the temple, the focal point, the heart of the universe, the heart of the temple—and that is where his people are. We no longer need mediating temples that have served us across the centuries to prepare us for the coming of Christ, for Christ has come.
2. Sun and Moon
“The city does not need the sun or the moon to shine on it, for the glory of God gives it light, and the Lamb is its lamp” (Rev. 21:23). This is not a way of unpacking for us the astronomical structures of the new heaven and the new earth any more than the absence of a sea discloses the hydrological arrangements. As usual, the language is symbol laden. In the ancient world, in a culture where there is no electric light, the night hours brought great darkness, especially if there was no moon. It was customary to shut down the city gates in order to enhance security. You made yourself safe because the nighttime was bound up with danger and wickedness. In such a culture, the sun and the moon not only give structured time by providing the normal cycles of life, but they signal relative safety. But now we are told, “The city does not need the sun or the moon to shine on it, for the glory of God gives it light, and the Lamb is its lamp. The nations will walk by its light, and the kings of the earth will bring their splendor into it. On no day will its gates ever be shut, for there will be no night there” (21:23–25).
No danger, no curse, no sin, no rebellion.
3. Impurity
More sweepingly, there will be no impurity. “Nothing impure will ever enter it, nor will anyone who does what is shameful or deceitful, but only those whose names are written in the Lamb’s book of life” (21:27).
Have you ever tried to imagine what it would be like not only to be immaculately, perfectly pure but also to live in a culture that was immaculately, perfectly pure? It is so hard to imagine. What would it be like never ever to have lied about anybody or anything? What would it be like always, always to have loved God with heart and soul and mind and strength and your neighbor as yourself? What would it be like to live in a society where that was true of absolutely everyone around you? Don’t you see? This is normal in God’s mind. It is the way it was at the beginning. It is the way it will be at the end. But now with resurrection existence and no possibility of falling again, no impurity will ever be allowed to enter there. None. No one-upmanship. No greed. No holocausts. No hate. No betrayal. No jealousy. Above all, no idolatry. All who enter will be completely and utterly and totally and joyfully God-centered, because that is the way it should be. Finding all of our supreme joy and contentment in the God who is there, this God who discloses himself forever and perfectly, inexhaustibly, before his own blood-bought people, means that all of the culture of the new heaven and the new earth will be suffused with shalom, with the well-being, the flourishing, the social peace whose measureless source is the one who sits on the throne, and the Lamb.
What Is Central (Rev. 22:1–5)
This is the culmination of the vision: we see what is central. Two things are emphasized:
1. The Water of Life Flowing from the Throne of God and of the Lamb (Rev. 22:1–3)
The language is once again drawn, in part, from Genesis:
1Then the angel showed me the river of the water of life, as clear as crystal, flowing from the throne of God and of the Lamb 2down the middle of the great street of the city. On each side of the river stood the tree of life, bearing twelve crops of fruit, yielding its fruit every month. And the leaves of the tree are for the healing of the nations. 3No longer will there be any curse. The throne of God and of the Lamb will be in the city, and his servants will serve him.
Revelation 22:1–3
“The throne of God and of the Lamb” harks all the way back to the great vision of Revelation 4–5 mentioned in the previous chapter: this Lamb, Christ Jesus himself, is the one who emerges from the throne and who brings all of God’s purposes to pass because he is the lion-king. The throne is a shared throne, as it were: it is the throne of God and of the Lamb, and all that we need for eternal life comes from his reign. The water of life comes from his throne, utterly dependent upon him with a pure supply. The twelve months bring forth twelve fruits, the “twelve” reminding us once again of the twelve tribes and of the twelve apostles: all the people of God.
There is such a transformation that there is healing of the nations.
2. The Vision of God (Revelation 22:4–5)
Indeed, the most spectacular part of the whole vision is found in verses 4–5. It is sometimes called the beatific vision, the blessed vision—the vision of God.
4They will see his face, and his name will be on their foreheads. 5There will be no more night. They will not need the light of a lamp or the light of the sun, for the Lord God will give them light. And they will reign for ever and ever.
Revelation 22:4–5
“They will see his face.” Do you remember Exodus 32–34, where Moses asked to see more of God’s glory, to see God’s face? God replied, “You cannot see my face, for no one may see me and live” (Exod. 33:20). The closest we can get to seeing God before the consummation is Jesus himself, the God-man. But now we have been so transformed that our sinfulness, as it were, has been burned away, the last stages of the old nature and its sinful desires all gone. Now in God’s grace we have the privilege of gazing at God in all of his transcendent holiness. We sometimes sing these things even when we scarcely understand them:
Face to face with Christ, my Savior,
Face to face—what will it be,
When with rapture I behold him,
Jesus Christ who died for me?
Only faintly now I see him,
With a darkling veil between,
But a blessed day is coming
When his glory shall be seen.[2]
The wonder of the new heaven and the new earth is not in the first instance that you may link up with your mother who has gone on ahead. Undoubtedly there will be a reunion of the people of God. But the Bible says very little about such reunions compared with how much it says about the sheer God-centered, spectacular, unimaginable glory that will be ours forever as we contemplate God in his perfections. All the other biblical descriptions of the final state, everything that is said in other parts of the Bible about the work we will do and about our increased joy and responsibility and about the peacefulness of everything (“The wolf will live with the lamb, the leopard will lie down with the goat, the calf and the lion and the yearling together; and a little child will lead them,” says Isa. 11:6), as wonderful as these prospects may be, they all pale in comparison of this vision of the sheer Godhood of God, which consumes us and empowers us and leaves us perpetually transformed.
Part of my job takes me to many different parts of the world. I fly far too much. But once in a while I am heading to some place closer to home, and I drive. And when I drive, I bring lots of music, and my musical tastes are painfully eclectic. Not too long ago I was listening to Roger Whittaker, a folk singer whose trademark is to sing the folk songs of many different parts of the world. On this recording he sang a folk song from Canada, which immediately perked up my ears. He sang a song of Cape Breton. The song describes the location in extravagant lyrical terms. In the last stanza Whittaker sings that if he could end his time perfectly,
God’s gift of heaven would be made up of three:
My love, Cape Breton, and me.[3]
And I thought to myself, “My dear Roger, you just defined hell.” Roger and his “love” would breed like rabbits, sinners still. Pretty soon you’d have Cain and Abel all over again, and another downward spiral. “God’s gift of heaven would be made up of three”? He is still thinking in entirely self-focused terms: his love, his preference for Cape Breton, and himself. Absolutely nothing about God—which means that idolatry reigns.
In the Bible, what the song calls “God’s gift of heaven” is first and foremost consumed with the centrality of God such that for the first time without any exceptions or caveats or failures, we will know by experience what it means to obey what Jesus calls the most important commandment: to love God with heart and soul and mind and strength. And we will be so transformed in this beatific vision that we will know by experience what it means to love our neighbors as ourselves.
So Christians in every generation and every location come together and pray using words drawn from the end of this chapter, “Yes, amen—come, Lord Jesus.”
Concluding Prayer
How constrained is our vision, how inadequate our words, how paltry our love for you, Lord God, in the wake of all that you have done, in the wake of all that you have disclosed of yourself in your Son through your Word. Fill our hearts with joy that we may not only be ashamed of sin and loathe it, but also that we may be drawn to your own dear Son, to holiness, to transparent love for one another—all secured by Christ and his work on the cross on our behalf. Draw us on to the new heaven and the new earth precisely because that will also make us better stewards of your grace here. Grant that even now we may understand in our own experience how the Holy Spirit is the deposit of the promised inheritance, the anticipation of what will one day be. Grant us the power to grasp, together with all of God’s people, the limitless dimensions of your love for us. Shape our lives by gratitude and adoration. Give us courage and stamina and with it holy joy and a love for all that is holy. Open our eyes to see Jesus, the cost that he bore, the grace that he pours out upon us, until we are ravished by his beauty, consumed by a heart full of adoration. For Jesus’ sake, Amen.