The New Heaven and the New Earth, Pt. 1
Revelation 21:1-3
I think throughout the history of the church, heaven has been a preoccupation of God's people. Many songs have focused on heaven. Because people through the years in the life of the church have been loosely tied to earth and so they have longed for heaven. I suppose even this time in the history of the world around the globe where Christians don't have it as comfortably as we do, there is still a great anticipation for heaven.
Most Christians, I suppose, through the centuries could say with the psalmist in Psalm 73, "Whom have I in heaven but Thee and besides Thee I desire nothing on earth." That is the expression of the heart that longs for God. Much like Psalm 42 where the psalmist says, "As the deer pants after the water brook, so pants my soul after Thee, O God." The psalmist in the same Psalm 73 said, "Nearness to God is my good." He said, "God is my portion forever." Being preoccupied with the person of God, longing to be in the presence of God was on the heart of Christians.
In fact, the pure in heart, according to the words of Jesus in the Beatitudes, are promised that they will some day see God. Through the centuries that desire to see God, to be in God's presence, to enjoy God forever, that desire that there is nothing in the world that can satisfy has been on the hearts of believers. But it's not so in this culture.
Not in this society in which we live in the western world. We are living in a society of instant gratification, material comfort and endless indulgences. And the church has become worldly. Nothing demonstrates that, I don't think, anymore graphically than the lack of interest in heaven. Most Christians are, to some degree or another, more interested in laying up treasure on earth than in heaven. They're more concerned with their investments and their retirement package and their own future on earth than they are with heaven. I suppose most Christians sacrifice the eternal blessing of glory on the altar of temporal gratification. We don't talk about heaven much. We don't sing about heaven much because we're really not that interested.
The old song said "heaven on my mind," but that's not really true anymore. Because believers do not have heaven on their minds, they waste their lives, they hinder the power of the church and they are consumed with fading things.
We could address this issue of having lost the heavenly perspective from a number of passages. We could talk about Paul's words to the Philippians in which he reminds them and us that our citizenship is in heaven, chapter 3 verse 20 and that we are waiting for the One who will transform the body of our humble state into conformity with the body of His glory, or we might even look at Colossians 3 where it says, "Set your affections on things above and not on things on the earth." Or we might even study 1 John 2:15 to 17 where it says, "Love not the world, neither the things that are in the world, for all that is in the world, the lust of the flesh, the lust of the eyes and the pride of life, is not of God but is of the world and the world passes away." We could even study the passage in James where James says, "Friendship with the world is enmity with God."
You see, everything connected to our spiritual life and destiny is in heaven. Our Father is there. Our Savior is there. Our Comforter is there. Our fellow believers are there. Our name is there, our life is there, our inheritance is there, our home is there, our citizenship is there, our reward is there, our treasure is there. Everything that belongs to us is there.
Consequently, Paul told the Romans that they should be rejoicing in hope. That they closer they are to heaven the more joy they should experience. I don't know that we see that. I see even Christians close to heaven trying desperately to hold on to this life. But the preacher in Ecclesiastes chapter 7 and verse 1 was right. He didn't intend it this way but he was right when he said, "The day of one's death is better than the day of one's birth," and that is true for a Christian. And though he may have approached it cynically, what he said was indeed truth. It is better to die than to be born because to die for a believer is to enter into a better place than birth ushers us into. The Apostle Paul understood that when he said, "For me to live is Christ and to die is gain." Therein he voiced his perspective.
The reason we should have a longing for heaven is because God is there. And whom have we in heaven but Him? And whom do we desire on earth but Him? He should be our supreme affection, our supreme love, our supreme desire. And if He's in heaven then heaven should be the place we long to be.
In 1 Kings chapter 8, eight times it says that God is in heaven. And if indeed He is the supreme object of our affection, if He is our great love, if we love the Lord our God in any proximity to loving Him with all our heart, soul, mind and strength, then we would long to be in heaven with Him. And we would say with the psalmist, "I desire nothing on earth but You and whom have I in heaven but You." I want to be there because You're there, not because my friends are there, not because my family is there, not because my relatives are there but because You're there.
This has a powerful effect on our lives, to desire heaven. And frankly, we could wish that we lived in a less comfortable culture, we could even wish that we lived in a poor culture, we could wish that we lived in a persecuted culture so the world would not seem so good to us and heaven would seem so much better.
In 1 John chapter 3 the first two verses, John says, "See how great a love the Father has bestowed on us that we should be called children of God and such we are. For this reason the world doesn't know us because it didn't know Him. Beloved, now are we the children of God and it has not appeared as yet what we shall be. We know that when He appears we shall be like Him because we shall see Him just as He is." That's the attraction of heaven, we'll see Him just as He is...no more veil, no more distance, no more mystery, the complete revelation of God. And then John says in verse 3, "He that has this hope in Him purifies himself." It purges your life to hope for heaven.
John Bunyan writing in that marvelous Pilgrim's Progress which demonstrates such genius in making the Christian life into a graphic illustration or allegory has a conversation between two pilgrims who are on their way to the celestial city, which, of course, is heaven. One of the two pilgrims says to the other, "When do you find yourself in the most wholesome and most vigorous spiritual state?" To which the other pilgrim says, "When I think of the place to which I am going." Bunyan understood that. When he wrote that he understood that heaven on your mind changes your life. The living in a joyous anticipation of the presence of God changes everything.
Sadly, I suppose most Christians are more like the cynical Mark Twain who when told about heaven remarked flippantly, "You take heaven, I'd rather go to Bermuda."
A true and vivid longing for heaven has many marvelous implications and many marvelous benefits. A true and vivid longing for heaven, for example, is an evidence of genuine salvation because when a person longs for heaven, you know they're longing for God. They're demonstrating love for the Lord. They're showing you where their heart is.
And not only that, where you see a strong longing for heaven there is incentive to the highest excellence of Christian character. Why? Because anyone who loves heaven and anyone who longs for heaven and anyone who seeks that which is above and anyone whose heart is in heaven is one who loves to commune with the living God, one who travels there in meditation, who travels there in devotion, who travels there in prayer, who travels there in study, and that's a purging fellowship.
Furthermore, a true and vivid longing for heaven is the truest path to a life of joy because if you're really living in heaven and if all your anticipation is there and you recognize that that is the great desire of your heart, then you can endure absolutely anything in this life and never have your joy affected. What does it matter what happens here in view of heaven's glories?
Furthermore, a true and vivid anticipation of heaven is the best preservative against sin because the more heavenly minded you are the less likely you are to stoop to the degrading level of the world. The more you set your affections on things above, the less likely you are to follow fleshly impulses.
Furthermore, a true and vivid longing for heaven will maintain the vigor of your spiritual service. Those Christians who run slow, those Christians who work little, those Christians who make a minimal effort at serving God demonstrate little regard for eternal things. Many of them work very hard at earthly things and very little at eternal things. Why? Because they in their minds have designed that the prize to be gained here is more worthy of their effort than the prize to be gained there. What a deception. You see, fervency in service, diligence in service, faithfulness in service is related to anticipation of heavenly benefit. I ask myself that constantly...what is the heavenly benefit of my life? What will be the heavenly benefit of that endeavor? What does it matter for eternity?
Furthermore, a true and vivid longing for heaven honors God above everything else because when your heart is in heaven it is because He is there and He is the supreme One. And a true devotion and longing for heaven also repays God's goodness. You say, "In what sense?" Well, when we set our affections on things above, in a sense we have given back to God what He has given us because His heart is always set on us, and certainly ours should be set on Him.
So when you want to find an evidence of genuine salvation in someone's life and when you want to find a motive or incentive to the highest excellence of Christian virtue, and when you're looking for someone who has true joy, someone who can stand against temptation, someone who maintains the vigor and diligence of spiritual service, someone who honors God above everything else and someone who wants to repay God for His goodness, you're going to find somebody whose heart is in heaven. The noblest of all Christians, the godliest of all saints, the most virtuest of all believers are going to be heavenly minded and they're going to life in the life of eternity.
So when we talk about heaven in our study of the book of Revelation, having come to chapters 21 and 22, we're not just talking about pie in the sky, we're talking about something that has immense implications for how we live our lives. And, frankly, we're talking about something that should bring great conviction. It does disturb me, I confess, that every single seat in this church isn't filled and people pressing against the doors on the outside. It should be enough to announce we're going to talk about heaven that every believer would be here, if he had to paddle his own boat. In some places in our world even today that would be the case where people have suffered much and where they love God much.
And so, as we come to the closing two chapters of the book of Revelation after all these months and even several years of study, we come now to the subject of heaven. And my prayer is it will rekindle the fires in every heart, the fires of preoccupation with the land of glory which awaits us.
Let's get some foundational data first, okay? Heaven is referred to 550 times or so in Scripture. Heaven is referred to 54 times in the book of Revelation. The Old Testament Hebrew word is shamayim, it means the heights. The New Testament word is ouranos from which we get the planet Uranus. It means that which is elevated, that which is lifted up, that which is raised up. Heaven is the raised up place, the heights.
Scripture simply delineates three heavens. In 2 Corinthians 12:2 it says Paul was taken up into the third heaven, that's the heaven where God dwells, that's the third heaven. The first heaven is the atmospheric heaven, that's the atmosphere around the earth, that's the air we breathe. The second heaven is the stratospheric heaven, that's the heaven of the heavenly bodies, the planets, the stars, the moons and everything else. And when you've gone through the atmospheric heavens and you've gone through the stratospheric heavens and come to the last heaven, it's the heaven of God, it's the divine heaven, the abode of God and angels and saints.
And people have asked throughout the centuries: where is it? Where is it? We believe it's a place because there are some people there who actually have bodies. Is that not true? Like Enoch who talk a walk one day and walked right up to heaven. And the prophet Elijah who went to heaven in a chariot. And the Lord Jesus Christ who is there in a glorified body. And there's going to be a lot more people there in their glorified bodies because Jesus said in John 14 He went to prepare a place for us and some day He'll come and bring us there. And when He does bring us, according to 1 Thessalonians, our body is going to be transformed, we're going to get a new body to go into that heavenly place. It's a place.
You say, "Isn't it just sort of a spiritual consciousness?" No, it's a place. It's a place where the spiritual and the transcendent glorified bodies of the saints will dwell with the glorified Christ and the holy angels.
Now exactly where it is is not given, we just know one...one detail, it's up, that's all we know. You say, "How do you know it's up?" Because that's what the Bible says. In Revelation, for example, chapter 4 verse 1, "After these things," John writes, "and behold standing open in heaven, I looked and saw the door and the first voice I heard like the sound of a trumpet speaking with me said, Come up here." So, from where John was standing, heaven was up. In 2 Corinthians chapter 12 verses 1 to 4 Paul says he was caught up into the third heaven. It's up.
Now I know the next question: how far up? Well, we've got to get through the atmospheric heaven and we've got to get through the stratospheric heaven, although we could conclude that heaven is in a completely different dimension, and thus is very near. I'll say more about that. But let's just assume that we go through the atmospheric heaven and the stratospheric heaven to get to the up where the true heaven is. The moon is 211,463 miles, you could walk to it in 27 years if you could walk 24 miles a day, it's not that far. Now if we could just crank up your speed a little bit to like 186,000 miles per second, you could get to the moon in a second and a half, which is really the better way to go if you're going to take the trip. At that speed you could reach Jupiter in 35 minutes and 11 seconds cause it's only 367 million miles away. And if you could go 186,000 miles per second you could get to Saturn in 7...in one hour and 11 seconds cause it's only 790 million miles away. Now remember, you've got to go 186,000 miles a second to get there in a hour and 11 seconds.
But you see, when you've gotten to Saturn and you've gone beyond, and you've even gotten to Pluto which is in to the billions of miles away, when you've arrived at the very extremity of what we know is our solar system, you haven't even gotten out of the front yard. You're still at the very, very beginning of the stratospheric heaven because Alpha Centauri which is a star is 20 billion light years away, the North Star...420 billion miles away, I should say...the North Star, 400 billion. And then a star Betelgeuse, 880 quad drillion miles away. And by the way, it's big. They have discovered it has a 200 million mile diameter. And you want to know something? When you get there, you're still in our galaxy and there are billions of galaxies.
And they say that our galaxy probably has a diameter of 100,000 light years, that's going at the rate of 186,000 miles a second for a year. And when you've gotten through our galaxy there are billions more. So when we say "up," it is up.
You say, "Well, it must take a long time to get there." Luke 23:43 Jesus said to the thief on the cross, "In 100,000 light years you'll be with Me in Paradise." Is that what He said? He said what? .... Isn't that amazing? And the Apostle Paul said, "Absent from the body, (snap), present with the Lord." Second Corinthians 5:8, "Far better to depart and be with Christ." Oh in a sense it's outside the created order as we know it, it's in a different dimension than time and space and so it's a little facetious to assume that it's miles away, but you understand that the great heaven of God is way beyond the created world and yet we can be there in a split second. In fact, when the Rapture comes it's going to happen in a twinkling of an eye, that doesn't mean a blink, that's different. Twinkling means the light...the time it takes for light to refract off your pupil.
And what do we know about heaven? Well only what the Bible says. Ezekiel tried, we give him credit, tried to explain it in chapter 1. I'm not going to read it to you because it's...you can read it yourself. He talked about storms and he talked about fire flashing and jewels and metal and glowing metal and living creatures and bronze and spinning wheels inside of wheels. From verse 4 down through 28 he gave his best effort at describing the indescribable.
And Paul went there and came back in 2 Corinthians 12. And sad to say, the Lord didn't let him tell about it because he says he was not allowed to describe it.
So Ezekiel is giving us a description that's very hard to comprehend...shining, brilliant, blazing, glorious light and jewels. Paul doesn't even get to tell us what he saw. So the best look at it is here in John's revelation. We're going to get the best glimpse of heaven anywhere in Scripture here in chapter 21 verse 1 down through chapter 22 verse 5. This is a monumental text of Scripture then because it describes for us our future home.
&nb