Jaw-dropping Jewels about Jesus
Rarely does Jesus, God the Son, do exactly what we expect of Him. It seems odd that He so frequently surprises us, given that He never changes. Hebrews 13:8 makes this absolute statement: “Jesus the same yesterday, and today, and forever.” Still, though He is blessedly consistent in His goodness, Jesus does unforeseen things. Even when He does what is expected, He does not always do it in the way that we anticipate. Let us join with Jesus on a jaw-dropping journey. (I will be using this opening paragraph for each of the brief messages in this series. The following material will change daily.)
“The Revelation of Jesus Christ” (1:1) includes a fascinating description of the “new Jerusalem”: “And I John saw the holy city, new Jerusalem, coming down from God out of heaven, prepared as a bride adorned for her husband” (21:2). The details are intriguing. This city is not a merely reconstructed Jerusalem, for the “first earth [was] passed away” (21:1), including the original Jerusalem. We should recall that in Revelation 11:8 Jerusalem is called “the great city, which spiritually is called Sodom and Egypt”; in other words, it too was controlled by evil and had to be destroyed. When John is writing about the “new Jerusalem,” he uses a slightly different Greek word to distinguish it from the city that we know and that remains in the world’s headlines. We should also note that this “new Jerusalem” is not to be confused with heaven, the immediate and present abode of God; this “holy city” is “coming down from God out of heaven” (literally in the Greek, “out of heaven from God”). Thus, it is not heaven itself but is a special place prepared by God and is therefore an extension of the current heaven. One scholar describes it as a “descending-from-heaven kind of city,” as is indicated by the expression “coming down.” The description never says that the new city becomes part of the “new earth”; the picture is of the new city suspended over earth. We should remember that John was limited in his understanding of anything non-terrestrial and in his vocabulary to describe something completely separate from human experience at that time. What he describes, though, is grand and glorious – beyond our full understanding and words, too.