Trevor Laurence
In C. S. Lewis’ The Last Battle, the final book in The Chronicles of Narnia, the story draws to a close as the company of friends journeys into Aslan’s country, where they find that old friends they thought they’d lost are already waiting for them.
Along the way, they enter a garden that seems to unfold in glory with every new step, and Lucy observes that it’s far bigger on the inside than it was on the outside. Mr. Tumnus the faun just nods knowingly: “Of course, Daughter of Eve. The further up and the further in you go, the bigger everything gets.”1
At last, Aslan appears and gives them the good news about his country: “The term is over: the holidays have begun. The dream is ended: this is the morning.”2
And as he spoke, he no longer looked to them like a lion; but the things that began to happen after that were so great and beautiful that I cannot write them. And for us this is the end of all the stories, and we can most truly say that they all lived happily ever after. But for them it was only the beginning of the real story. All their life in this world and all their adventures in Narnia had only been the cover and the title page: now at last they were beginning Chapter One of the Great Story which no one on earth has read: which goes on forever: in which every chapter is better than the one before.3
The Bible is the true Chronicle. The New Jerusalem of Revelation is Aslan’s true country.
The new heaven and new earth of Revelation 21–22 is the end of the beginning in a double sense. It is the end, the telos, the goal, the fulfillment of everything God started in Genesis—it is the purpose of all history. And it is the end of the beginning, the conclusion of but the opening act of a story of love and communion and full-hearted joy that will continue to unfold and deepen past the edges of time.
And God has given all the intoxicating details of these chapters to us for the same reason he has given everything else in the book of Revelation: because he knows it is what we need to persevere with Jesus.
Revelation is a book about conquering, but it is an upside-down conquering. Jesus the Lamb conquered by being conquered and receiving an unconquerable vindication and exaltation from God. And the church conquers the world in the same way: by patient endurance. “They have conquered [the Dragon] by the blood of the Lamb and by the word of their testimony, for they loved not their lives even unto death” (Rev 12:11).
The whole book of Revelation is God’s armory for equipping us to conquer through steadfast faith in a world of dragons and beasts and harlots and all the pressures and temptations they would use to steal our hearts.
In Revelation, Jesus unveils what we need to see in order to stand firm. He shows us the throneroom of heaven, the true shape of history, the mechanics of worldly power and demonic seduction, the certainty of judgment and vindication and the ways those have already begun to unfold in history, the blessings that we already possess as the beautified bride of the Lamb.
And in Revelation 21–22, God reaches far into the future to the very end. In these pages, he shows us the eternal destiny of those who cling to Jesus, and the one on the throne declares, “The one who conquers will have this heritage” (21:7)—this inheritance.
Revelation is a book of martyrs. It is a book about Jesus the martyr and the martyrs who die in faith with him, a book that’s designed to equip every generation of martyrs to love not their lives even to the point of death. And God knows that if his people are going to persevere in the present, we have to be armed with the hope of the future. He gives us a vision of the new creation so that we can endure any momentary hardship and press forward in the beauty of faithful witness with the certainty of never-ending joy—utterly convinced by the promise of eternal glory that no amount of temporary suffering is worth forsaking Jesus.4
The Bible is the true Chronicle, and its story is the true story that is your story—a story of glory that must envelope you, reorient you, reframe your existence, and ground you for the present in the hope of the future.
The Completion of the Cosmos
The Bible, from beginning to end, is the story of a house—a home, a temple for God’s glory to dwell in holiness with people who reflect and find their fullness in the light of his beauty.
Genesis depicts the creation of the universe as the construction of a temple: a home-building project complete with lamps in the heavens, clouds like incense, and a blue firmament that hangs like a curtain to separate God’s throne in the heavens from the earth beneath.
But the house isn’t finished. God plants a garden as a little sanctuary for his presence on earth and calls Adam, his priestly king, to fill and subdue the rest of earth. What does that mean? Beautify it, tame it, order it, adorn it—progressively stretch the bounds of the garden-sanctuary across the whole world. Adam and Eve—God’s image-bearers—are to bring creation to completion by preparing the earth in its entirety as the holy house of the God of heaven with his precious creatures of dust.
When Adam and Eve sin and are exiled and barred from God’s presence by cherubim, God works through Abraham’s family to re-create his Edenic sanctuary on earth, first in the tabernacle-tent and then in the house that is Solomon’s temple. The temple is an architectural garden with cherubim guardians woven, carved, and crafted amid ornate designs of palm trees, lily work, pomegranates, and open flowers. But it’s also a picture of the cosmos: God’s most holy throneroom separated by a sky-blue curtain, with incense clouds rising from the altar and lamps shining like the lights of the heavens.
The temple enacts God’s commitment to live in holiness among his people, but it is also a pledge of what the universe will one day be. It confirms God’s undying purpose to fill up the whole cosmic creation with his glory as the temple of the Lord.
When Jesus came to earth to live, die, rise, and ascend to heaven as king, he came as someone greater than Solomon. With his blood, he cleansed a sinful people so that we could be filled up with the Spirit as the house of God. He built God’s temple, a garden-sanctuary for the Lord, when he sanctified his people and poured out the Spirit of glory on his church.
And this second Solomon is the Last Adam, who sends his church into the world—progressively expanding his garden-temple throughout the world, doing what the first Adam never did, subduing the earth as the dwelling place of God and man even as sin and death still war against God and infect creation.
Since he stepped into the world, Jesus has been building God’s house, and the return of Christ will be the completion of the temple of God—the resurrection, renewal, and glorification of the whole cosmos as a holy home for the Lord of glory. Revelation 21 and 22 are brimming with descriptions drawn from the garden of Eden and the temple. Why? Because the new heaven and the new earth is the final fulfillment of creation toward which every other sanctuary pointed.
But it would be a mistake to envision the new creation as merely a recovery of Eden and the temple, because the new creation surpasses them, brings them to effulgent maturity.
Eden had a garden plot, precious stones in the outlying lands, a river that watered the ground, and a tree of life that Adam’s sin prevented him from enjoying. The New Jerusalem is a garden-city that encompasses the whole creation. It’s not surrounded by precious stones; it’s built from them—gold, gems, and jewels. Its river flows from God’s throne with the water of life, quenching the existential thirst of God’s people and filling their hearts in grace. And on both banks of the river, there’s an orchard of trees of life bearing fruit in every season and offering healing to all the nations of the earth.
In the same way, the temple stood atop Mt. Zion, lit up by lamps signifying God’s shining presence. The Lord resided in the perfectly cubic holy of holies, and the high priest alone—marked with a nameplate on his forehead—could enter once a year. But in the New Jerusalem, the heavenly city descends atop an earthly mountain, uniting heaven and earth as the dwelling place of God. There’s no need of lamp or sun. Those were just symbolic lights. God’s city is lit up by the light of God himself—the truest light, the original light. The whole city is a cube because the whole city is the holy of holies, suffused with the unmediated glory-presence of God. And every citizen of that blessed city is marked with God’s name on the very flesh of their foreheads to minister like the high priest before the Lord’s face—not one day out of the year but every day across the horizon of time.
The renewal of heaven and earth heals the corruption of sin and death and completes the whole universe as the house for communion that God created it to be. And that is good news, because the healing of the cosmos to make it the temple of God includes the healing of every dimension of human existence.
The New Jerusalem is the healing of shame. No longer do God’s people bear the marks, visible and invisible, of what we’ve done and what has been done to us. The city is prepared as a bride, kosmeo-ed (made up, ornamented, adorned) by Jesus for Jesus—resplendent in beauty and affirmed in love as the eternal object of her groom’s pure affection.
The New Jerusalem is the healing of sorrow. God won’t just snap his fingers and make the sadness disappear—he’ll wipe away every tear from every eye. To wipe away a tear is to acknowledge the pain, see the grief, and physically comfort with a tender touch. In the personal gift of communion with the infinite God, the Lord will address our sorrows and turn death and loss backward in resurrection life. And if there are any tears in that new world, they will only be the tears of overwhelmed delight in the presence of all-encompassing beauty. “Death shall be no more, neither shall there be mourning, nor crying, nor pain anymore” (21:4). The new creation will be a world of unbroken joy.
The New Jerusalem is the healing of ethnic division. All throughout the Old Testament, God promises Israel, “I will be your God, and you will be my people” (cf. Exod 6:7). But John hears the voice from the throne saying God “will dwell with them, and they will be his peoples” (21:3). Why? Because all the peoples of the earth—every nation under heaven—will be united as one city, made even more beautiful by the diversity that is bound together in love and worship of the Lamb.
And there’s another passing detail: the gates of the city are made of pearls. Pearls are nowhere to be found in Old Testament descriptions of the temple—so why are they here? Because pearls are the jewels of the sea. Throughout the Bible, the nations are depicted as the sea threatening to overtake the land of Israel. But King Jesus makes jewels from the sea and builds the Gentiles together with Israel into a gemstone-temple for God.
The New Jerusalem is the healing of dissatisfaction, as saints drink deeply from the river of life and delight in the beauty of God.
It is the healing of insecurity. The city rests as God’s beloved, and its gates are never shut because there’s no danger that can threaten her or animate her fear.
It is the healing of alienation. The bride enjoys the intimacy with her husband of which every earthly intimacy is but a shadow—knowing and being known, possessing and being possessed, giving and being given, seeing and being seen before God’s very face.
It is the healing of injustice. The sea is no more. The oppressive raging of enemies and opposition to God is no more, and nothing detestable, false, or predatory will enter and mar the joyful shalom of God’s city again.
It is the healing of every disease of body and mind, as saints are resurrected in glory to live with God and in God, freed from the curse of death and its disintegration. The brokenness born from disordered DNA, aging, and tragedy will be restored. Eyes that couldn’t see will behold. Legs that couldn’t walk will dance. And for some saints who lived as witnesses through intense developmental disabilities, the first words they’re ever able to form will be in a chorus of praise to the Lamb who loved the weak and told the children, “Come to me” (Mark 10:14).
It is the healing of human culture, as kings and nations offer their glories to God in worship. It is the healing of human agency, as all the misdirected aims of idolatry are channeled into priestly service and royal reigning in worshipful love.
It is even the healing of memory. The prophets promised that the new creation would mean that the “former things shall not be remembered or come into mind” (Isa 65:17). The hard memories will no longer plague, intrude, berate, and keep wounds open. To the extent that such memories persist, my hunch is that even they will be transformed in the presence of God into occasions of worship: to marvel at his sustaining grace, his abundant forgiveness, his unfailing capacity to work glory even from our darkest moments.
John hears the voice of God thunder, “Behold, I am making all things new” (21:5), and that includes everything in heaven and on earth and in you, as well. It is the completion of all creation before the face of God.
The Culmination of Christmas
During Advent, the church has historically utilized the weeks leading up to the celebration of Christmas—Jesus’ first coming—as a season to anticipate and long for his second coming. And that’s because the two advents of Christ are inextricably related: what Jesus began in the mission of his incarnation will be brought to fulfillment when he returns in glory.
Everything we celebrate in Christmas is incomplete on its own. We need God’s future to truly rejoice in God’s past. Everything we celebrate in Christmas pulls us into the promise that, in Christ, God will finish what he’s started, that the victory of Jesus’ resurrection will usher in the resurrection of the world.
John makes that very point in the way he tells the story. He has intentionally crafted the narrative of Revelation 21–22 with parallels that take readers back to the first chapter of John’s Gospel. Why? Because the new creation is the culmination of Christmas. It is the final goal toward which Jesus’ entire life was directed.
In the incarnation, John told us, Jesus shone as the light of God penetrating the darkness, the first dawn of a new creation breaking into a world shrouded in death. And in the New Jerusalem, there is no need of sun or moon or light of lamp because the glory of God is its light and the Lamb is its lamp. The light of God’s presence has risen in full and shines upon a people made new.
John 1 told us that when the light broke in at Jesus’ birth, the darkness couldn’t overcome it. And in Christ’s bridal city, “there will be no night there” (21:25)—all darkness and shadow extinguished with the eternally joyful light of God’s face in Jesus.
The heavens have always been declaring the glory of God. In the Bible, days move from evening to morning, from darkness to light with the rising of the sun from the east and its westward motion through the heavens. That is a creational drama of the redemptive movement of history: darkness giving way to the glory of God returning from the east and moving westward into his temple’s most holy place. But in the new Jerusalem, the creational drama will be obsolete because the sun of God’s glory will have risen in Jesus to banish all darkness forever.
John 1 told us that “in him was life” (v. 4), and in the new creation Jesus possesses the book of life, gives the river of life, offers the tree of life because the Christ who is the God of life embraced and overcame death to welcome the dying into the unending life of God.
John 1 told us that, to all who believed in Jesus’ name, he gave the right to become children of God. And in the New Jerusalem we see those who believed the name marked out with God’s family name to serve as priests in his presence. We see sinners installed as sons and daughters of the living God—royal heirs!—and given thrones to reign as kings beside the Lamb for all time.
John 1 told us that “the Word became flesh and tabernacled among us” (v. 14), and he uses the exact same word at the end of Revelation: “Behold, the tabernacle of God is with man. He will tabernacle with them, and they will be his people, and God himself will be with them as their God” (21:3). Jesus comes enfleshed as God’s holy temple to purify the entire creation as a holy house—to make creatures of flesh his temple of glory, to restore humanity into the presence of the one whose light is life and whose fellowship is joy.
John 1 told us that no one has seen God, but Jesus came to make him known, revealing his glory as the only Son from the Father. In the New Jerusalem, the whole city shines with divine splendor, “having the glory of God, its radiance like a most rare jewel” (21:11), and the servants who worship God “will see his face” (22:4). In the incarnation, Jesus comes to reveal God’s glory to people who are incapable of laying eyes upon the Father so that one day he can saturate them with God’s glory and bless them with the dynamic love of unending communion face-to-face with the Lord who dwells in unapproachable light.
Christmas finds its culmination in the consummation of creation. Jesus was born to shout “It is finished” upon the cross. And Jesus’ return is met with a voice from the throne—“It is done”—when the bridal city descends from heaven. Christ’s second coming will bring to fruition every blessing of new creation that his first coming was designed to secure.
So in this Advent season, delight in the gift of Christmas, and let the accomplishments of Christ’s incarnation draw your hope to the certain future he promises you, when the restoration and newness and life he came in the manger to bring will break upon you in full in a cosmos resurrected as the temple of the living God.
The Model on the Mountain
After the exodus, the Lord called Moses up onto Mount Sinai, and there he showed him the pattern—the model—of the tabernacle. Moses was to receive the heavenly vision of God’s dwelling place, and then craftsmen who were filled with the Spirit of God and wisdom were to make that house a reality on earth.
The same thing happens in Revelation 21: an angel calls John up to a great, high mountain and shows him the New Jerusalem descending from heaven to earth. What John sees is the new creation that is coming, but just like what Moses saw at Sinai, it is a mountaintop model of the holy dwelling place that the church is to build up and become on earth while we wait. Every saint—from the greatest to the least—is a Spirit-filled craftsman who is called to grow in wisdom to take part in beautifying the temple of God in the world.
And the New Jerusalem provides the pattern.
The bridal city shines with glory of God, and the church is to live before God’s face so that, transformed from one degree of glory to another, we increasingly shine with the light of God amid the darkness—reflecting his jewelled character in every facet of life.
The city is built on the twelve foundations of the Lamb’s apostles, and the church is to ground her faith, hope, love, her witness and worship, on the bedrock of the gospel of Jesus’ death and resurrection, which is the only truly stable foundation.
The city’s gates are open, welcoming the nations to bring their glory in worship of the one true King, and the church is to live as a hospitable herald who welcomes sinners from every culture to find their lives by giving them up to Jesus.
The city is guarded by angels, and nothing unclean ever enters, and the church is to guard the holiness of God’s garden, repenting of and driving away every tarnishing sin and refusing to grant entry to any intruder who won’t bow before the Lamb.
The city is populated with priests and kings, and the church is to offer every feature of life as an offering of worship to God and an exercise of kingship that witnesses to the royal city that’s on its way.
And the city is a community of abundance and unwavering love from God and among his people.
In recent years, Canada has enacted a law called “Medical Assistance in Dying” that allows citizens essentially to request euthanasia. Increasingly, though, stories are coming out about persons in poverty, especially those with costly disabilities, who are unable to support themselves and are opting to die under this new law instead, and reports are emerging that loneliness and isolation are serving as key motivators of sufferers’ decisions to end their lives.
But the church is called to be a place where the poor find provision, where needs are met with openhanded generosity and justice, where the lonely find a family in which to truly belong. In God’s city, the beaten down and forgotten find a never-ending love from God that takes material shape in the tangible life of a community. In a world where people are longing to die, the church offers healing to the nations in a gospel that restores us to God and in a community of love that begins to unwind the brokenness of life under the shadow of death. That kind of community is a taste of heaven on earth.
Fullness and Feasting
The new creation is a world of fullness, complete with food and drink. The house of God is an eternal Edenic banquet—a mountain-city with the water of life from God’s river, the tree of life growing with twelve kinds of fruit. And the new creation has broken into the old in the weekly worship of the church, where the saints begin the feast even now.
When Jesus went up on Golgotha, his mountain, he hung on a wooden cross like fruit on a tree, and when they pierced his side, out flowed water mingled with blood. The cross of death became the tree of life; the thirsting Savior became the spring of living water.
And at his table of bread and wine, he feeds us with the fruit of his tree and the river from his side to sustain us in hope, to grow us up as his garden, to empower our faithful endurance until we feast on the food of God’s new Eden in his presence forever.
Trevor Laurence is the Executive Director of the Cateclesia Institute and the author of Cursing with God: The Imprecatory Psalms and the Ethics of Christian Prayer (Baylor University Press, 2022).
Image: Bamberg Apocalypse Folio 55r, The New Jerusalem
- C. S. Lewis, The Last Battle, The Chronicles of Narnia (New York: Scholastic, 1956), 207.[↩]
- Lewis, The Last Battle, 210.[↩]
- Lewis, The Last Battle, 210–11.[↩]
- In my overall study of the book of Revelation, and in so much of the material that follows, I have been supremely helped by Peter Leithart, Revelation 1–11, ITC (New York: Bloomsbury T&T Clark, 2018); Revelation 12–22, ITC (New York: Bloomsbury T&T Clark, 2018).[↩]