Sunday, May 06, 2007

The New Heaven and the New Earth

[This message was shared this weekend with the people of Friendship Lutheran Church.]

Revelation 21:1-6
The morning my great-grandmother died, when I was eight years old, my mother woke me with the news.

My great-grandmother, as some of you know, was a woman of deep faith in Jesus Christ. Often, when I walked into the living room of her house across the street from the home of my early boyhood, I found her reading her well-worn Bible. She frequently took time to talk with me about God, about Christ’s death and resurrection, and about what life beyond the grave is like for those who turn from sin and trust in Jesus Christ as their King. Knowing that, I could picture it all when my mother said of my great-grandmother that morning, “She’s walking the streets of gold right now, Mark.”

All who follow the risen Jesus Christ live each day with the sure promise that, as Jesus told His friend Martha just before He brought her brother Lazarus back from the dead: “I am the resurrection and the life. Those who believe in me, even though they die, will live, and everyone who lives and believes in me will never die.”

The follower of Christ isn’t exempted from the pains and difficulties of this life. But the hope of eternity with Christ does give us the power to face each day’s challenges.

This same hope also can give us the courage to do the right thing even at great risk. On Saturday, along with other members of the Clermont County OSU Alumni Association, my wife, son, and I went on a tour of local sites associated with the Underground Railroad. That was the pre-Civil War movement that helped slaves escape from bondage in the South and from the threat of being taken back into slavery while traveling in the North under the provisions of the Fugitive Slave Act. The "railroad" helped these escapees then get to freedom in Canada.

The Underground Railroad was founded by committed Christians who believed that slavery was wrong and that even if it meant imprisonment or death for them, the risks were worthwhile. They were undaunted by the prospect of imprisonment or death because the hope of eternity with Christ was strong within them. They no doubt would have agreed with the the first century preacher Paul, who writes in the New Testament, “I consider that the sufferings of this present time are not worth comparing with the glory about to be revealed to us.”

Baptist pastor L. Joseph Rosas says that our Bible lesson for today underscores the Christian’s hope for eternity in three different ways. I want to talk about those three glimpses into our hope for eternity. But first, a little background.

Like all of the lessons we’ve explored this Easter season, today’s comes to us from the New Testament book of Revelation. In it, the apostle John records a series of visions and experiences given to him by the resurrected Jesus.

In the section of Revelation just before our lesson, you can read about a series of stern judgments rendered against what John calls Babylon. John wrote Revelation in about 90AD. Centuries before--centuries before the birth of Jesus--the ancient Israelites were held in captivity by a terrible empire, Babylon. In John’s own time, the Roman Empire, which exiled him to the island of Patmos because of his faith in Christ and which persecuted many other followers of Christ, was seen as a kind of Babylon. But for John, Babylon represents a worldview that ignores God’s command and God’s call to love Him and to love others. It’s a world of selfishness, greed, and violence that opposes God and that God will one day bring to an end.

Now, the three ways in which our Bible lesson for today underscores the Christian’s hope for eternity.

On the heels of describing the judgment of Babylon, John tells his readers that irrespective of all the bad in our world or in our lives, God is up to something new. Using imagery reminiscent of phrasing in the Old Testament book of Isaiah, written some seven-hundred years before the birth of Jesus, God shows John that in Christ, He is doing a new thing. John writes in our lesson: “Then I saw a new heaven and a new earth; for the first heaven and the first earth had passed away, and the sea was no more.”

One day, life on this sin-imprisoned planet will end. But God will replace it with a new heaven and a new earth inhabited by all who have trusted in Jesus Christ.

Sin, with all its devastating effects on our relationships today and the death that it brings, will disappear. That’s represented in our lesson by the disappearance of the sea. To ancient Jews and early Christians, the sea was a frightening, foreboding place, where sea monsters dwelt and chaos prevailed.

We see this picture of the sea in the first of the two creation accounts that begin the book of Genesis. There, we're told that God's Spirit moved over deep waters, a stormy, chaotic, and forebody place. When God moves over the water though, order and peace and a new creation comes about.

Thought of God the Creator loomed in the minds of Jesus' first disciples during one of the most famous Biblical incidents. The disciples were riding on a boat on the Sea of Galilee. A storm suddenly came up and even the seasoned fishermen among them were terrified. Meanwhile, Jesus slept like a baby in a crib. The disciples shook Jesus awake. "Lord," they said, "don't you care if we all drown." Jesus stood up, looked to the sea, and said, literally, "Be muzzled!" "Who is this," the disciples wondered, "that even the wind and the sea obey Him?" It was really, a rhetorical question. Only one Person Who could do that: the One Who did the very same thing at the beginning of time.

In addition to being a place of sin and death in the minds of the ancient Israelites and first Christians, it also divided peoples, putting oceans between them.

No wonder then that in the vision of the new heaven and the new earth that John saw, the sea was no more.

But in the new creation God will give, nothing will separate us from God or each other. And we believe that God is in the process, even now, even today, as we pay heed to His Word and worship Him together, of doing this new thing. God is in the process of making all who believe in Christ part of that new creation!

Next, in our lesson, John writes, “And I saw the holy city, the new Jerusalem, coming down out of heaven from God, prepared as a bride adorned for her husband. And I heard a loud voice from the throne saying, “See, the home of God is among mortals. He will dwell with them as their God; they will be his peoples, and God himself will be with them; he will wipe every tear from their eyes. Death will be no more; mourning and crying and pain will be no more, for the first things have passed away.”

When Jesus was crucified, you remember, He was on a cross between two thieves. One joined the crowds in mocking Jesus. The other though could see that in Jesus, a sinless Savior was giving His life for the world. “Jesus,” he asked, “remember me when you come into your kingdom.” Jesus answered this man, who was demonstrating faith in the most unlikely of circumstances, “Today you will be with me in paradise.” Heaven is a real place, the destination of all who follow Christ. That's the second way our lesson underscores the Christian's hope for eternity.

Then John writes this, at the command of God Himself: “And the one who was seated on the throne said, ‘See, I am making all things new.’ Also he said, ‘Write this, for these words are trustworthy and true.’ Then he said to me, ‘It is done! I am the Alpha and the Omega, the beginning and the end. To the thirsty I will give water as a gift from the spring of the water of life.’”

Pastor Bill Hybels has noted in many places that all of us are born with a longing for “it,” even though we hardly know what “it” is. It’s a void within us that some try to fill with all sorts of things--food, hobbies, money, sex, drugs, alcohol, power, popularity, prestige, fitness. In their place, each of these things can be good. But when we try to use any of them to fill the void within us, we’re still empty.

After trying to find it in a lifetime of dissipate living and partying, Saint Augustine finally found “it” in the God we meet in Jesus Christ. That’s why he once confessed to Christ, “Thou hast made us for thyself, O Lord, and our hearts are restless until they find their rest in thee.”

Jesus Christ is “it,” the One Who fills the God-shaped hole in our lives. In Christ, God and His new creation have already invaded our world. Christians, in fact, live in an “already-not-yet” reality. We already are part of God’s new creation; that new creation isn’t yet fully realized. But we’ve seen what it looks like in Jesus: It’s a kingdom to which all people, no matter what their race, nationality, or gender, or their past sins, are welcome. Christ is a never-ending spring that refreshes us now when times are hard and will fill us with life forever.

Yet it’s sometimes hard to see that new kingdom of God’s, isn’t it? How do we see it? The late Belgian priest Henri Nouwen, who deliberately militated against his own pride and self-absorption by working in Christian communities that served the mentally retarded and toward the end of his life, AIDS victims, wrote a book in which he talked about some friends of his who were trapeze artists, the Flying Roudellas.

They told Nouwen about the special relationship between the flyer and the catcher on the trapeze. The flyer is the artist who lets go. The catcher catches. While the flyer soars above the crowd, there comes a point when he must let go. He arcs through the air, his job being to remain as still as possible and wait for the strong hands of the catcher to grab him midair. One of the Roudellas told Henri Nouwen, “The flyer must never try to catch the catcher.” The flyer has to wait in absolute trust. The catcher will catch him, but until that moment, the flyer must wait.

We see God’s Kingdom whenever we let Christ catch us:
  • Catch us when we turn from sin and turn to Him.
  • Catch us when we reject worshiping ourselves and instead, trust in Him.
  • Catch us when life hurts us so badly that there's nothing left to do but let Him love us.
In Jesus Christ...
  • God is doing a new thing;
  • He prepares a place in heaven for us; and
  • He makes us new.
If that’s sometimes hard for us to see as we live our lives each day, be still and let Christ catch you.

He always will.

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