by John McClean
(Photo: Yosef (jossy) Futsum on Unsplash)
In the previous post I argued that our society has lost a sense of direction and purpose. We have rejected telos. Yet we need it, and God gives it to us. We need to know the purpose of ourselves and the world. We see it at the end of history.
The last scene in the Bible opens with a wonderful announcement. The one seated on the throne says, “the old order of things has passed away … I am making all things new” (Rev 21:4-5). That assumes something has gone wrong with the world: good order disordered, blessing replaced by curse, sin seeming to triumph, the dominion of the evil one, the shadow of death, a groaning world.
The message of Revelation is that God has done something about that. He sent his Son Jesus, who lived as we should have, died the death we deserved, and rose in triumph over death and evil. Early in the book he announces “I died, and behold I am alive forevermore, and I have the keys of Death and Hades” (Rev 1:18). In the closing chapters we hear what that means not just for us as individuals, but for the whole of creation. There is a new creation.
This is not demolition and removal, not scrapping the old and starting again. It’s renewal, restoration, redemption. The old order will blossom into the new because of Jesus. Think of a failed building project: the architect drew up great plans, the builder got as far as the foundation and first storey, then ran out of money. The site sat for months, years. Weeds grow, timber soaks and sags, metal rusts. It’s not just unfinished, it’s ruined. Then someone buys it, gets to work, fixes it up, puts in new timbers. This does not just bring it back to half-built, but completes the job. Now we see what it was always meant to be. The architect’s purpose is realised. That’s new creation: the world God made, put back as it should be and, better, brought to be what it was always meant to become. It reaches its telos.
The new creation?
So what is the new creation? Revelation describes a temple city. A city means people (Rev 21:2). God always determined to save a people of his own; he chose Jerusalem as his city, and there will be a new Jerusalem, “they will be his people, and God himself will be their God” (Rev 21:3). It’s pictured like a bride beautiful for her husband, with walls and gates laid out magnificently, full of glory and beauty (Rev 21:2, 9, 11).
The city is an interesting shape: a cube, measuring 12,000 stadia — about 2,200 kilometres — long, wide and high. That is wide enough to just about cover the whole Mediterranean, the world of John and his readers. It is also five times higher than the orbit of the International Space Station (which sits at around 400 km)! It is a scale that is unimaginable for us, let alone for first-century readers. The vast city holds an innumerable crowd.
There’s only one other cube described in the Bible: the Holy of Holies, where God’s presence was focused at the centre of the temple above the ark of the covenant. Only the high priest could only enter once a year, with elaborate sacrifice. The new Jerusalem will be a vast holy of holies (Rev 21:3; 22:22). There will be no temple because there will no longer be any need for a symbolic representation of God’s presence. The city is the temple, penetrated with God’s glory, the place where his people know him and worship him. That is what creation was always meant to be. Genesis uses temple language for Eden too, with Adam as a priest serving in a garden sanctuary. Now it is not just Adam and Eve in a garden, but a vast city of all God’s people, enjoying his presence.
it will be a healed creation too. Sin and evil will be gone; sinners will be excluded (21:8); the tree of life will be for the healing of the nations, and there will no longer be any curse (22:2-3). At the moment sin infiltrates everything, like the red dust that gets into your clothes and your car as you drive through central Australia. Sin is everywhere, in everything, until what’s abnormal starts to feel normal. In the new creation that will be gone. There will be no awful evil to destroy, no trivial frustration to interrupt, everything will be good and fully devoted to God.
And it will be life. There will be “no more death” (21:4). The water of life will flow from the throne of God and the Lamb (22:1). This sounds like the river Ezekiel saw flowing from the temple, turning the Dead Sea fresh and filled with fish, with trees on its banks bearing leaves that don’t wither and fruit that does not fail (Ezek 47:1-12). In the new creation the blessing of life with God will stream through the city.
All of that will be wonderful. The creation will reach its telos because it will be filled with God’s presence. The next and final post in this series will look at what that means for us and the world.
[This is the second post in a three-post series. View post 1 and post 3.]
