We left off at Revelation 21:5 in my last entry. Verses 6-9 are important but not about the New Earth, so I will pick it up at verse 9:
One 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. And he carried me away in the Spirit to mountain great and high, and showed me the Holy City, Jerusalem, coming down out of heaven from God.
An angel takes the writer, John, not only to a different place but also to a different time. The time that the New Earth is being set up post-judgment day. Being taken “in the Spirit” doesn’t necessarily mean “out of body” but in this case it must. John sees the “new” Jerusalem coming down like a landing space ship. It is called “the wife of the Lamb” because in Isaiah 62:4, God speaks of Jerusalem being called “Beulah”, which means married. The Church is also referred to with such a metaphor, but in this case, I think it is referring to the new Jerusalem. So what makes it Jerusalem? It is the city where the visible presence of God resides. It will probably bear no resemblance or use any material from the Old City of Jerusalem, but the old Jerusalem prefigured this city of the future.
A question I have is whether this New Jerusalem is actually something that exists in Heaven already. Is this the throne room of God that we see in all of the visions of Heaven? We can’t know this, but it seems a real possibility to me. In that case the following description, which we often attribute to Heaven, actually is a description of both Heaven and the New Jerusalem.
It shone with the glory of God and its brilliance was like that of a very precious jewel, like a jasper, clear as crystal,. It 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. There were three gates on the east, three on the north, three on the south and three on the west. The wall of the city had twelve foundations, and on them were the names of the twelve apostles of the Lamb.
If you Google “new Jerusalem” and go to “images” you will see how various artists have wrestled with this description. Did it look like a walled city of the past? If so, why? I think this describes something more like a city within a crystalline cube. It is four sided, at least at the base. The dimensioning is given in the next section. The names on the gates remind me of gates at a football stadium, especially Lambeau field which happens to have a gate named after the Oneida Indian tribe. Walls would not be needed to keep out enemies as in the past, but would walls be needed because of the mobility of this city? Something similar to the “Death Star” in Star Wars, only beautiful.
Jaspar is a stone that is not typically clear. John grasps for gems he knows. I think it looks more like a diamond. Its beauty is something that probably defies words, and it will be a big part of our eternal existence.
afterdeathsite 