The Joining Together of
Heaven and Earth (Revelation 21:9-11)
Sunday, May 12, 2013
As I thought about ways for us to
hear and understand Revelation 21-22 and to do so in a way that might build us
up as we follow Christ and represent him in the world, the idea of reversal
stuck out in my mind. Specifically, I
appreciated the way several Bible scholars developed the theme of reversal
relating to Genesis 11 and Revelation 21:2, 9-10.
As I reread Revelation these verses,
2 and 9-1o, pay very close to the direction of the movement. Who is initiating things? Who is the giver and who is the receiver?
“I saw the Holy City, the new Jerusalem, coming
down out of heaven from God, prepared as a bride beautifully dressed for her
husband.
“One of 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 a
mountain great and high, and showed me the Holy City, Jerusalem, coming down
out of heaven from God.”
Hold in your mind these verses. If you have your Bible, keep Revelation 21
marked.
Now, look at Genesis 11:1-9:
‘Now the whole world had one
language and a common speech. 2 As people moved eastward, they found a plain in
Shinar and settled there.
3
They said to each other, ‘Come, let’s make bricks and bake them
thoroughly.’ They used brick instead of
stone, and tar for mortar. 4 Then they said, ‘Come, let us build ourselves a
city, with a tower that reaches to the heavens, so that we may make a name for
ourselves; otherwise we will be scattered over the face of the whole earth.’
5
But the Lord came down to see the city and the tower the people were building.
6 The Lord said, ‘If as one people speaking the same language they have begun
to do this, then nothing they plan to do will be impossible for them. 7 Come,
let us go down and confuse their language so they will not understand each
other.’
8
So the Lord scattered them from there over all the earth, and they stopped
building the city. 9 That is why it was called Babel—because there the Lord
confused the language of the whole world. From there the Lord scattered them
over the face of the whole earth.”
In both the Genesis and Revelation
accounts, we’re paying special attention to who initiates the actions. We’re watching to see the direction and the motivation.
In Genesis, the people have stopped
migrating and settled down in the plains of Shinar where the begin work on a
tower that will reach to the Heavens.
They plan to build a city. “Come,
they say, let us build for ourselves a city … so that we may make a name for
ourselves” (v.4).
Building is a good thing. We were created to be creative. Made in the image of God, the ultimate
creator, we are made to make things. However,
God had a method and the new city the people were growing at Shinar was
directly the opposite of God’s instructions.
Genesis 9, right after the flood,
God tells Noah’s family to be fruitful and multiply and increase in number on
the earth (v. 1a, 7). The instructions
given immediately after Noah comes out of the ark permanently re-establish
humans God’s special creation who may rule over the earth and eat animals for
food and exist in a relationship with God.
God sets it up all the while knowing humans will continue to sin (Gen.
8:21). At the end of the Noah saga, we
see that his descendants have indeed “spread out over the earth” (10:32).
However, the next move, the
gathering and building at Shinar, shows a group of people who were in direct
opposition to God. He said, spread
out. They said, let us build ‘otherwise,
we will be scattered.’ The direction of
the action was upward. Humanity wanted
to become God, or like God, through human achievement. We think this is all new because we live in
the computer age. Genesis 1-11 is the
recounting of stories told orally for centuries before they we written. This comes from prehistoric times. Even then, they thought they could achieve
the things God wanted to give. They
would blatantly disobey God if need be.
The absolutely would not live in faithful dependence. Nothing has changed from the very dawn of
civilization until now.
The initiative was on the human
side, rejecting the plan of God. The
action was done by humans reaching up when God said the spread out. The motivation was to be self-sufficient and
independent of God instead of living in faith and living in relationship with
God.
Atheism – the notion that there is
no god – is a worldview that permeates every thought in someone’s life. There is no innocent concluding that God does
not exist and thus I will strive to be a good person. People do that. I am friends with a lot of people who take
this approach in life. It does not work
for two reasons. One God does
exist.
There is a lot of evidence, but the
best is the resurrection. Historians who
specialize in studies of Israel from 30BC-100AD have to deal with the invention
of the church. Some of these scholars
are committed naturalists who have determined that the dead do not rise. But even those most insistent that Jesus did
not rise still, assessing the available data, acknowledge with certainty that
the very first Christians believed to the point of death that the resurrection
happened. If they believed this, then
why?
Why believe something that was completely
unexpected and completely without precedent?
What could cause so many to give their lives to a movement that was so
thoroughly different from their own previous worldview? Historians have scrambled to explain this phenomenon,
often just ignoring Occam’s Razor and taking the most obvious route. The church was born because the Resurrection
of Jesus really did happen. Any other
explanation for the rise of Christianity requires the historian to throw out
probability and to make ridiculous statements about mass hallucinations that
sustained to the point that people accepted the cross rather than reject
Jesus.
The resurrection happened. Who but God could do that? If God then, is real and has called the world
to himself through Jesus, his own appearing in human form, then any worldview
that denies God is not just opting for indifference. God is God and thus has claim on us. To reject that claim is to be in
rebellion.
For that reason, a second reason that atheism
fails as a worldview is that it is a worldview in direct opposition to
God. The builders of the tower of Babel
thought they could achieve the things only God can do. They failed because God exists and to act as
if God does not exist is to be against Him.
There is no sideline in this. God
is real. God chose to come to the world
through Israel and then through Israel God came in person, in Jesus. Either one is a Christ-follower, or one is
alienated from God and destined for frustration.
How does Revelation 21 show God’s undoing of the
tower of Babel rebellion. In Revelation
21, God is the actor. John is in Heaven
because God has summoned him. John had
gone to prison because he had been trying to obey God by spreading the Gospel
throughout the Roman Empire. He try to
reach up to Heaven. He reached out to
the world in Jesus’ name. He only went
to Heaven when God initiated that action.
He’s experiencing things that exceed our sensory
abilities. Words like “up” and “down”
may or may not accurately describe the spatial considerations of Heaven and
Earth when seen from God’s perspective.
But those are the words John had and his descriptions do help us
understand our own standing and what is appropriate and good for humans in
relating to God.
Unlike the humans rejecting God and acting on
their own initiative, John and his friends in the early church lived at God’s
initiative. He was in prison and then in
a vision he went to Heaven by God’s power.
He does not see humans going “up to Heaven,” as we so often see. Look again at Revelations 21:2 and 10. The holy city came down.
The New Jerusalem was the bride of Christ. We won’t spend significant time deeply
exploring all the imagery John used to depict the holy city in these last two
chapters of the Bible. Worthwhile as that would be, it requires a
whole additional talk.
Know this.
John intends his readers – us – to see our future, our eternity. We will be together with all who have
followed Jesus in a place where there is no grief. No fear.
No injury. No death. The city’s gates are always open. God is present bodily. I love my relationship with God the Spirit,
but I long for the closeness of the Father and the Son. And that is what we are promised. As sure as Jesus rose from the grave and Christianity
is the way to God – he did and it is – the promises of Revelation 21-22 will
come to fruition.
It is a city and a garden. It is worship and vocation. It is joy and it is unending.
Recall that the people who built Babel incited
their rebellion against God for two reasons.
They aspired to exalt themselves and they feared isolation. “Let us build or else we will be
scattered.” Their efforts resulted in
them being brought low and forcefully scattered.
Now Revelation 21: “I did not see a temple in the city, because
the Lord God Almighty and the Lamb are its temple. 23 The city does not need
the sun or the moon to shine on it, for the glory of God gives it light, and
the Lamb is its lamp. 24 The nations will walk by its light, and the kings of
the earth will bring their splendor into it. 25 On no day will its gates ever be
shut, for there will be no night there. 26 The glory and honor of the nations
will be brought into it. 27 Nothing impure will ever enter it, nor will anyone
who does what is shameful or deceitful, but only those whose names are written
in the Lamb’s book of life.”
All that has been scattered is gathered in
Jesus’ city and all people are one people in His name. The kings of the nations come, forgetting
their own glory and giving all glory to the Lord. And we are there too.
Until the day comes when we are called there, we
live here. We catch a glimpse of the
gathering of that holy city whenever we let God be God. We let God determine who’s in and who’s out.
We do our best to love everyone as much as Jesus loves them. And we go out in His name. Spreading out, we see Him over and over in
the people we meet in the world. And we
carry the good news of His salvation to those who have not heard. We’ll be finally gathered when God decides it
is time to bring Heaven to Earth.
His timing is perfect and our lives
are blessed when we do things his way.
AMEN
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