A New Heaven and a New Earth

Our thinking is so ingrained with the concepts, categories, and divisions of the world we experience: light and dark; male and female, black and white; Jew, Christian, Muslim; third-world and first-world, east and west; your ideas and my ideas, and so on.

But if we could for a moment project ourselves into the next world, the world of eternity, what would we find there?  In the Book of Revelation, we get some glimpse of the next world, and there, the divisions are much different:

The kingdom of the world has become the kingdom of our Lord and of his Christ,

and he will reign forever and ever....

The time has come for judging the dead,

and for rewarding your servants the prophets

and your saints and those who reverence your name,

both small and great---

and for destroying those who destroy the earth (Rev. 11:15-18).

For the wedding of the Lamb has come,

and his bride has made herself ready.

Fine linen, bright and clean,

was given to her to wear.

(Fine linen stands for the righteous acts of the saints)(19:7-8).

He said to me:  "It is done.  I am the Alpha and the Omega, the Beginning and the End.

To him who is thirsty, I will give to drink without cost from the spring of the water of life....

But the cowardly, the unbeliving, the vile, the murderers, the sexually immoral, those who practice magic arts, the idolaters and all liars---their place will be in the fiery lake of burning sulfur (21:6-8).

Here, we find divisions much different from those we are used to thinking about.  It is much like the world at the beginning of time----or the world we experienced in New Orleans and Mississippi during the days and weeks immediately following Hurricane Katrina.  Then, there was no "male" or "female," "Jew or Christian or Muslim," "philosopher, theologian, or washer-woman."  We were all under the same sentence of destruction; we were all rescued from the same flood; and we were all in the same shelters.  Money could not buy rescue, nor could education or "right thinking."  There, we experienced truly what heaven--or, in some cases, hell---was like. 

There were those who helped their neighbors and shared what little food and drink they had---and there were those who found weapons to use against the helpless.  There were those who swept and cleaned the shelters where we were trapped together, without food, light, or water.  And there were those who looted, robbed, and shot others.  There were those who built up; there were those who destroyed.

In the New Jerusalem, there will be no longer (artificial or natural) light and dark, for the Lamb Himself will be the Light.  There will only be those who "reverence" the light; those who do not will be "thrown out into the everlasting darkness."  There will be only those who sing the praises of God; those who cannot join the song will be in everlasting torment, in the lake of burning sulfer.  There will be only those who have received the "fine linen" and clothed themselves in "righteous acts."  The others --those who have destroyed the earth -- will burn forever.

If we can adopt these categories even in this life, I think it will help us to overcome the un-natural division of thought that separate us in this world.  Ultimately, there is only one division:  those who worship and acknowledge the Living God, and those who do not; those who receive and honor His Spirit, and those who are still saying, "We shall be as gods!" and who thereby worship the deceiver, the god of this world.