“IN THE END, GOD…”

Here is John’s unforgettable expression of the deep Christian conviction that at the end we meet not an event, but a person. In John’s visions, God speaks only twice, both times declaring himself the beginning and the end (Rev. 1:8; 21:6). John, like Paul, sees that at history’s end, God will be “all in all” (1 Cor. 15:28). We will need nothing but God.

“There was no longer any sea” (1). Driven back at creation, the sea symbolized chaos in the Hebrew Scriptures (e.g., Psa. 89:9). In John’s vision, the sea was the terrible depth from which evil arose (Rev. 13:1). In this new era, chaos and evil will have no source—not simply distant, evil will not exist. No death, sorrow, crying (4); the old order passes away. All that now robs life of vibrancy and joy will be absent from the transcendent reality to which God is leading history. No murderers, fornicators, idolaters (8); righteousness and justice will prevail in God’s future. John’s imagery does not mean that people who may have been guilty of these failings will not be allowed in (cf. 1 Cor. 6:10,11), but rather that evil of any kind cannot exist.

Here is fulfilled Jesus’ own powerful self-imagery of “a spring of water welling up to eternal life” (John 4:14). Here, God makes all things new. Creation is not abandoned—creation is redeemed. God does not make all new things—God makes “all things new” (5, KJV). The new city is in continuity with the old. The bride of John’s earlier vision (now both City and bride in 2) comes adorned with all the good things the saints have done. In John’s apocalypse, place and person merge. There at the end of time we meet God.

What will not be in God’s new place? What will be in God’s new place?