Revelation 21:1

3. The final glorious award the new heaven and earth, Revelation 21:1 to Revelation 22:5.

a. Visible descent of the New Jerusalem to the new earth, Revelation 21:1-4 .

1. And The old world this our present earth disappeared before the approach of the judgment throne, (Revelation 20:11.) The new celestial earth now forms the visional scene. Over its broad surface sin and pain are no more, and a sorrowless immortality reigns. But the greatest glory of the new earth is its central metropolis. It is not the old antichristic Babylon quite the reverse; nor is it even the old Jerusalem, real or mystical, for that has gone with the old earth. But it is one which comes, in complete structure, down from God himself, from above the firmament. It is made up of materials the most glorious that thought can conceive. It is lighted, not by lamp or by sun, but by the glory of the present divine Essence; and as that neither faints nor fails, there is no night, but one ever-glorious day. Into this, their divine metropolis, the nations of the saved over the universal surface bring, not trade and manufactures, but their glory and honour.

The immortal health and youth of the heavenly populations is secured by the following divine provision. In, as we may say, the city park, is the divine throne. From its front goes forth a very broad street. And through the length of the street there flows a crystalline river, with rows of trees on each side. The fruit of this tree and the waters of this river are immortalizing. And as these flow from the throne so the stream of man’s heavenly perpetuity flows from the immortal God. The description, and indeed the whole apocalypse proper, closes at Revelation 22:5.

I saw The narrative is continuous with the last preceding chapter. That is, it is a description, not, as some maintain, of the gospel state, commencing with the first advent and closing with the second; nor, especially, is it a picture of the thousand millennial years of Satan’s imprisonment, as others maintain: but it is a shadowing of the post-judgment eternal state of the blessed, the final glorification HEAVEN. For, 1. Such is the proper assumption. The writer’s order of narration must not be changed but for good assignable reason. We hold it for a fixed law, that the entire train of events of the seventh trumpet is invariably consecutive, admitting of no transposition. 2. Death exists during the millennial period; for it is not destroyed until the resurrection and judgment, Revelation 20:14. But in these chapters death does not exist, Revelation 21:4. These chapters, therefore, describe not the millennium, but the post-resurrection and post-judgment state. 3. If these two chapters are supposed to describe the millennium of Revelation 20:3-6, then the apocalyptic narrative closes very tamely with the eternal penalty of the wicked at Revelation 20:15, with no correspondent description of the eternal reward of the righteous. It possesses no well-rounded close, and a required antithesis is lost. On the contrary, the consecutive interpretation closes the apocalypse and the New Testament with a glorious termination. The Bible, which opens with the fall of man, closes with the final restoration. It finishes by leading us to, and leaving us in, glory. Where should the word of salvation leave us but in heaven?

A new heaven and a new earth A new land beneath, a new sky above. The land is seen and supposed, stretching to an indefinite extent, and capable of being, in thought, a boundless, varied plain, or even a globe.

No more sea Dusterdieck collects a curious variety of opinions as to there being no more sea in the new world. Besides those commentators who hold the sea to be a figurative term for peoples, Andreas held that the cessation of the difficulty of distant locomotion and of the necessity of navigation renders the sea needless; Beda held that the sea would be destroyed by the final conflagration; De Wette and Luthardt, that, as the old world sprang from water, the new springs from fire; Ewald, that the idea of the abolition of the sea arises from horror of the sea in the minds of the inland peoples, as the ancient Israelites, Egyptians, and Indians; Zullig, that paradise was without a sea; Volkmar, that the sea and the abyss, or “bottomless pit,” being connected, neither belong to the new state. Finally, Dusterdieck holds that St. John means simply that the sea disappeared with the rest of the old world. Heaven, earth, and sea, he thinks, departed together, and whether a new sea appeared in the new world or not is not said. Most of these opinions are consistent with each other, and we think correct. We agree with Dusterdieck, that the triad, heaven, earth, and sea, disappear together; but the special phrase, and the sea was no more, seems to indicate that it had no existence in the new state. This accords with the other views; of Ewald, as to the ancient aversion to the sea; of Andreas, that its navigation uses were no more; and of Volkmar, that sea and abyss alike belonged not to the new system.