When you talk about Utopias biblically, you find that there are two. There is a Utopia in the early pages of the Word of God, the Garden of Eden, and there is a Utopia at the end in the book of Revelation. The one at the beginning we have lost and can never go back to; the one in Revelation is before us, which we can enter, but the way in which we are to enter is by the cross and the resurrection of the Lord Jesus Christ.
God gave Adam a paradise in which he had useful, meaningful work to do. God could have done without Adam of course. He did not need Adam to bring the universe into existence, nor did God need Adam to do anything once God’s work of creation had been completed. But when God created Adam He understood that part of Adam’s wellbeing had to do with significant work.
So now we have this paradise, a perfect place, with a perfect man, being given perfect work to do, and with a perfect companion. And yet, as we know, through the temptation of Satan in the form of the serpent, Adam turned his back on that paradise because he turned his back on God and he sinned.
And so we come here to Revelation 21and see the presence of God again with His people. It’s a glorious scene. We then see something else. We see described the bride of the Lamb, that is, the bride of Christ. This bride is a holy bride, a bride without blemish, without stain, a bride who has been made perfect through the work of Jesus Christ, perfectly adorned for her husband. This bride is the Church, the communion of the saints.
Our Lord was raised from the dead and because He was raised, those who are united to Him in saving faith will be raised also. You know how the apostle Paul talks about it in 1 Corinthians 15, that great chapter on the resurrection. He says that “flesh and blood cannot inherit the kingdom of God, nor does the perishable inherit the imperishable” (v. 50). But at the last trumpet, all those mortals who are united to Christ by faith will put on immortality, and what is perishable will put on the imperishable.
A funeral service of the Book of Common Prayer is a very beautiful thing—both in its simplicity and in the wise way it uses Scripture. The Old Testament readings have to do with many of the psalms. There is the twenty-third as you can imagine, as well as the forty-sixth, which tells us that the Lord is our refuge and our strength.
It’s really not possible to come to this chapter at this point in the Bible, right at the end, without realizing that when John has this vision of the new Jerusalem coming down out of heaven, this is in contrast to practically all of the great themes preceding this that have to do with our normal, earthly expectations. Jerusalem is certainly contrasted with Babylon, which is mentioned just a few chapters before. Babylon stands for everything that is human in opposition to God.
When John begins to describe this in chapter 21, the thing that impresses him most about Jerusalem is that God dwells there. He writes, “I saw the Holy City,” he says, “the new Jerusalem, coming down out of heaven from God, prepared as a bride beautifully dressed for her husband. And I heard a loud voice from the throne saying, ‘Now the dwelling of God is with men, and he will live with them. They will be his people, and God himself will be with them and be their God’” (vv. 2-3).
John begins to describe some of the other details, and he talks about this great wall all the way around it. A wall would symbolize protection, and so you have an image there of our eternal security and safety. He talks about the twelve foundations. Why twelve? Well the reason is that they relate to the twelve apostles of the Lamb in verse 14. And the reference to the twelve apostles goes along with the twelve gates in the city, which represent the twelve tribes of Israel. This shows us the kind of base upon which this heavenly community is established.
The appearance of this city of God, the new Jerusalem, is in a certain sense the culminating point of the entire Bible. This is the destiny for which we were created. But unless, by the work of Christ, you are a new creature, you can take it on the authority of the Word of God that you will never enter that city. So we need to search our hearts. We need to make our calling and election sure. We need to say: “Lord Jesus Christ, am I really yours? Have you really changed me? Have I been made a new creature?
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