God With Humanity
GOD WITH HUMANITY
REVELATION 21:1-8
Remember that you can be made new!
“A new heaven” (21:1): this is the same word as in 20:11; it is the sky and not God’s home that is meant. The word for new in Greek implies that there is some link with the old, just as there is between our resurrection bodies and those that now are. The “new Jerusalem” is the wife of the Lamb (21:9), ie the glorified church. Contrary to popular opinion the age to come does not see the abolition of this creation in favor of heaven—that is a legacy of Greek thought with its despising of the material—but its transformation through its being linked with heaven by the glorified church. “With man” (21:3): not the church but the new nations (21:24). It is likely that we should translate 21:3 as “God-with-them shall himself be their God” (NEB, margin), ie we have finally the complete fulfillment of the promise of Isaiah 7:14.
In this section of Revelation we do not merely have a picture of the future, for the Bible is never interested in the future merely as future, but in its bearing on our lives in the present. So repeatedly there is a message addressed to the reader, eg 21:5-8: “Trustworthy and true” (21:5) the same as the name in 19:11—as the speaker, so his words. “It is done” (21:6); what John had seen was not to find its fulfillment until many centuries had rolled by, but since God is the Creator and Sustainer from beginning to end, his decree would bring the vision to certain fruition.
Those who are finally to enjoy these things must be like Christ (1 John 3:2) and be God’s children because they have been transformed into the image of the Son of God. Exclusion is due to lack of Christlikeness. The sins mentioned fall into three categories. Liars (see also 14:5), cowards, faithless persons (ie those who having no faith in God cannot be trusted) are those who fear other people rather than God, and who place the judgment of others above that of God. The murderers and sexually immoral destroy lives now and children who have not yet been conceived. Then there are the idolaters, those who would make God in their own image, and the sorcerers, those who seek to twist God round their own will by magic of all kinds; such people are polluted, for they have no interest in the cleansing that only God can offer.