Revelation 21:2

21:2 And I saw the holy city, new Jerusalem, coming down out of heaven from God, like a bride adorned for her husband.

Here, again, is a dream of the Jews which never died--the dream of the restoration of Jerusalem, the holy city. Once again it has a double background.

(i) It has a background which is essentially Greek. One of the great contributions to the world's philosophical thought was Plato's doctrine of ideas or forms. He taught that in the invisible world there existed the perfect form or idea of everything upon earth, and that all things on earth were imperfect copies of the heavenly realities. If that be so, there is a heavenly Jerusalem of which the earthly Jerusalem is an imperfect copy. That is what Paul is thinking of when he speaks of the Jerusalem that is above ( Galatians 4:26 ), and also what is in the mind of the writer to the Hebrews when he speaks of the heavenly Jerusalem ( Hebrews 12:22 ).

That way of thought left its mark on Jewish visions between the Testaments. We read that in the Messianic Age the Jerusalem which is invisible will appear ( 2 Esdras 7:26 ). The writer of 2 Esdras was, he says, given a vision of it in so far as it was possible for human eyes to bear the sight of the heavenly glory ( 2 Esdras 10:44-59 ). In 2Baruch it is said that God made the heavenly Jerusalem before he made Paradise, that Adam saw it before he sinned, that it was shown in a vision to Abraham, that Moses saw it on Mount Sinai, and that it is now present with God ( Baruch 4:2-6 ).

This conception of preexisting forms may seem strange. But at the back of it is the great truth that the ideal actually exists. It further means that God is the source of all ideals. The ideal is a challenge, which, even if it is not worked out in this world, can still be worked out in the world to come.