33-Chapter 1. The New Heaven And The New Earth
Chapter 1. The New Heaven And The New Earth The eternal ideas are God’s, the changeable thoughts concerning them are man’s. Bettex.
“And I saw a new heaven and a new earth: for the first heaven and the first earth are passed away; and the sea is no more. And I saw the holy city, new Jerusalem, coming down out of heaven from God, made ready as a bride adorned for her husband. And I heard a great voice out of the throne saying, Behold, the tabernacle of God is with men, and he shall dwell with them, and they shall be his people, and God himself shall be their God” (Revelation 21:1-3; Isaiah 65:17). A new world will emerge from the flames of the old; in place of the fragile world of dust, a new creation formed of heavenly luminous matter; in place of the theatre of sin, a super-world of holy perfection; in place of formation and disappearance, eternal abiding and progress. “But we wait for a new heaven and a new earth in which righteousness dwells” (2 Peter 3:13). This is the heavenly, final expectation of Christian faith.
We consider it here in a fivefold double connexion: old and new world, heaven and earth, eternity and time, spiritual body and (in)visibility, eternal world and symbolism.
[1] Old And New World The new world will not be without connexion with the old world. The coming earth is not “another” but a “new” one. Otherwise it could not be called a “new earth.” No, if John sees a new “heaven” and a new “earth, “ this proves that even in eternity the distinction between our planet and the heavenly places will in some fashion continue. With all transformation and transfiguration, even in that perfecting the new plan of the universe will in some way correspond to the old.
Doubtless the material also will be built in, even if in a manner still completely incomprehensible to us at present. 76 God does not forsake the work of His hands. Furthermore, He will never give over His glorious material to Satan, his arch-enemy, to possess and destroy. With the new creation of heaven and earth it is very similar to the new creation of the individual soul. In Christ the individual is “a new creature; the old is gone; behold, all is become new” (2 Corinthians 5:17). And yet it is the same man with the same ego and the same soul. “He” has become new (comp. Revelation 21:4-5). Thus will God burn with fire His universal material, resolve it into its basic elements, split its atoms, free it from all restrictions, transform all things, and thus He will build the stones of the old structure into the new one according to a new plan. It is as if a piece of dirty coal were shut in a retort, by great heat made fluid as gas, and then afterwards crystallized again into a glorious diamond. Thus God will not annihilate but “change” (Psalms 102:26), not reject but redeem, not destroy but set in order, not abolish but create anew, not ruin but transfigure.
Footnote 76: For our chief evidence comp. “The Coming Spiritual Body: its necessity, its actuality,” pp. 106-109.
[2] Heaven And Earth Not the earth only but also heaven will have part in the redemption. The offering on Golgotha extends its influence into universal history. The salvation of mankind is only onepart of the world-embracing counsels of God. It stands indeed at the centre but does not occupy the whole circle. The “heavenly things” also will be cleansed through Christ’s sacrifice of Himself (Hebrews 9:23). A ‘cleansing” of the heavenly places is required if on no other ground than that they have been the dwelling of fallen spirits (Ephesians 6:12; Ephesians 2:2), and because Satan, their chief, has for ages had access to the highest regions of the heavenly world (Job 1:6; Job 2:1; 1 Kings 22:19-23; Revelation 12:7-9; comp. Job 15:15; Isaiah 24:23).
It has indeed pleased the Most High to crystallize the eternal thoughts of His redeeming love in us men—so that, without the history of the salvation of mankind there would have been no history of salvation at all (Romans 8:19), for Christ, the world’s Redeemer has accomplished His redeeming work as Son of man. But things in heaven and in the universe are bound up with the redemption of man, things that surpass our whole present powers of thought and that in the Word of God are mentioned only in hints. Here we bow before the infinite and confess our ignorance.
Yet this one thing we see even now; the history of salvation has relation to humanity and to the universe at the same time. Its central sun is God, revealed in Christ His Son; its radiance passes throughout mankind; but single rays reach out into the wide spaces of the, for us, infinite universe. But as consequently the Divine humanity of the Redeemer is the fundamental principle of all salvation in heaven and on earth, the earth, this dwelling place of mankind, will become the “dwelling place” of the Godhead, the capital of the universe of the Lord of all, and thereby the centre of the entire universe. The throne of God, which as yet is in the heaven (Psalms 103:19), will then be on the earth, and the earth, the “footstool” of His throne will become itself the throne (Matthew 5:34-35). The heavenly Jerusalem descends to the earth (Revelation 21:10); the other side becomes this side; eternity transfigures time; and this earth, the chief scene of the redemption, becomes the Residence of the universal kingdom of God. “The throne of God and of the Lamb shall be in it” (Revelation 22:3). Not only to heaven will the perfected come (John 14:2-3), but the heaven will come to the earth; indeed, the new earth will itself be heaven; for where the throne of God is, there is heaven.
[3] Eternity And Time
Eternity is more than mere endless time. No only as to its continuance but also in content it is essentially different from everything temporal. It stands to time not in a purely temporal relationship so that it exists solely “before,” “during,” and “after” time, but in a creative, quickening, and transfiguring relationship. All time is at once “from” eternity, “in” eternity, and “to” eternity.
1. Eternity is the origin of time, for time originates from God: “from him are all things (Romans 11:36).
2. Eternity is the background of time; for the “visible is temporal, but the invisible is eternal” (2 Corinthians 4:18).
3. Eternity is the abyss of time; for everything eternal is without exception inexplicable. What “endlessness” is can no time-born creature conceive.
4. Eternity is the substance of time; for everything temporal has its stability only in the eternal (Colossians 1:17). In Him we live and move and exist (Acts 17:28).
5. Eternity gives meaning to all time; for everything visible is interpenetrated by the invisible and is therefore a drapery and likeness of the eternal.
6. Eternity is the goal of all time; because for the Creator are all His works created. They are not only “from” Him, but “for “ Him, and “unto” Him (Colossians 1:16; Romans 11:36). “Out of the invisible arises what shall come to pass in the visible; but when it has come to pass it flows again into the invisible” (Bengel)
7. Eternity is the transfiguration of time. Scripture knows nothing of the cessation of time. 77 On the contrary it speaks of aeons upon aeons, of ages upon ages, and so divides endless eternity into an inconceivable sequence of ever-rolling stretches and epochs of time. Thus the contrast is not “eternity and time” but “eternal and temporal.” Eternity is not the negation of time but, on the contrary, the substantial form of time; the sequence of one thing after another remains in force in eternity also. It is only the limitations of time which are absent, its restricting narrowness, its unreliable changeableness, its vanishing evanescence. Why should God destroy His arrangement, the law of time, which He called into existence before all sin, even as it came to pass, “In the beginning God created”? Why should He not further transfigure His law of time in eternity, and cause it to unfold more largely and gloriously in heavenly sabbaths and mighty Jubilees? Why should a time-less eternity be more glorious than a time-full eternity? No, it is God who is the Eternal in the sense of time-less. He is above time, the absolutely free. He is the Ruler, the beginning and the end, the Alpha and the Omega, the first and the last. Time-less eternity is therefore God’s alone, the time-full He has granted to His creatures.
Footnote 77: Not even in Revelation 10:6. For when it is said there that “there shall be no more time,” the word “time” is used in the sense of respite, delay, deferment: “from now there shall be no further respite; but when the seventh angel shall sound, then shall the mystery of God be completed”; much as we say, “I have no more time now.” There is no question at all of the abolition of time in itself. Still later in the Revelation it mentions “days” (12:6), “months” (13:5), and “years” (20:2,3,4,5). So Bengel, Zahn, Lange, Menge, Darby. [So also R.V. Time is a necessary accompaniment of finitude, for no finite being can conceive infinity; hence time can never cease for the creature, though never needed by the Creator. Trans.] [4] Spiritual Body and (In)-Visibility
1. Corporeality. In eternity there will be “material.” “Embodiment is the end of all the ways of God.” Holy Scripture knows nothing of a spaceless, timeless, non-material heaven; no pallid, anaemic Beyond for the soul, no mental structure of mere thoughts and ideas, but a blissful resurrection life in renewed bodies of light, a holy transfiguration in a materially transfigured universe. Truly we can now speak of this inconceivable eternal “material” only in pictures and parables; but it is itself more than mere allegory, it is an actual, existing, spiritually embodied Reality. Therefore the employment in the Bible of precious stones as symbols of the heavenly Jerusalem (Revelation 21:18-21); therefore it speaks of the tree of life, the river of crystal, of the harps of the psalm-singers and the palms of victory of the over-comers. Hence alone the justification of its symbolic portrayal of the glory of heaven. For “in that which is said of God’s splendour and light, of paradise and the heavenly garden, of a blessed feast and of heavenly music there lies more than only a ‘spiritual’ sense. The earthly nature is a promise pointing towards an accomplishment.
Quite unbiblical, therefore, is the doctrine drawn from Grecian philosophy, and especially Plato, of an ideal state containing no bodily element. “Biblical eschatology knows nothing of this fleshless spiritualizing. From belief in creation and Easter it carries in itself the grand certainty of a transfigured new creation of this visible world ... God is a God who formed the bodily, the earthly, the visible ... He did not create simply a kingdom of ideas, of souls of flame and immortal spirits, but He constructed a world with colour and form. The bodily and earthly does not come from the abyss but is originally glorious and good ... Therefore Nature itself may go joyfully forward to meet an eternal Easter .... The very act of Christ becoming flesh shows how deeply God is concerned with the earth, but this is proved above all by the bodily resurrection of the Redeemer.”
It has been justly said that “as Judaism applied the Messianic prophecies almost exclusively to this world, so did Alexandrian Hellenism apply them (also almost exclusively) to the life beyond. But with Paul we find full emphasis on this life and full emphasis on that life harmoniously conjoined.” According to the Scripture the body is not a “prison” for the soul, not a house of correction for fallen spirits, but it forms part of the essential nature of man (2 Corinthians 5:3-4). Therefore Scripture does not teach a redemption from the body but of the body (Romans 8:23). Therefore also the bodily resurrection of the Lord Jesus (1 Corinthians 15:1-58). What inconsistence therefore on the part of so many, on the one hand, to believe in a Christ who rose with flesh and bones (Luke 24:39-43) and who ate and drank (Acts 10:41), yet, on the other hand, to conceive of the whole heavenly nature as only symbolic and allegorical. No, Jesus, risen bodily from the dead, is the King of this new world (Matthew 28:18-20). Therefore it must correspond to Him, who ascended bodily to heaven (Acts 1:9-11),and to His own people, who are to be transfigured in body to the likeness of His body (Php 3:21).
2. (In)-Visibility. But “materiality” is not by itself equal to visibility. Visibility is not of the essence of materiality, but depends entirely on our eyes. So little is visibility an essential condition of earthly material that the latter can at any time lose it and at any time resume it without so much as one of its basic characteristics being lost. Thus at—202 degrees of cold “invisible” air will change into a cerulean fluid and beyond this into a block of crystal. So by heat the “visible” can be made invisible and by cold the “invisible” can be made visible. Therefore the material itself is neither “visible “ nor “invisible.”
“Visibleness” is of course a very narrow conception. Of all the millions of colours (compare the ultra-violet ray) we “see” in a ray of light extremely few, just as we “hear” only a few of all the millions of sounds. “The Lord God can magically paint around us the most glorious pictures; we do not see them unless they move between 400 and 800 billions of vibrations of the aether. He can encompass this earth with the finest music; we hear it not if the vibrations of air produced exceed 75,000 per second. How unintelligent therefore to object: ‘No man has ever seen heaven or the angels,’ as if their non-existence or non-materiality were in any wise thereby proved, and not much rather merely the fact that, as regards an angel we men are simply ‘blind’ and ‘deaf.’ No, all ‘visibility’ and ‘invisibility’ depends entirely upon our vision, but this upon the will of God” (Betex). But yet more: all visibility is simply a lower condition of the material. Cold and benumbling is its “death;” the crippling of all the powers of earthly material. At—328 degrees of cold not even the strongest acids are able to corrode metals. Only the heat, that makes the material invisible, also makes it strong and free and intensifies its life energy. Therefore also the warming of the material on being treated chemically, until it becomes heated, until indeed it is fluid and gaseous. Thus then it is a plain scientific fact in nature that precisely the higher conditions of earthly material are invisible. The Bible says the same of heavenly material, and it is being shown how here also modern natural science comes ever nearer to the Biblical presentation of the world, and not, as the uninformed assert, departs more and more from it. And were we simply to assume that the angels and things of the invisible had a body of “aether,” then the most modern physics, such as Rontgen rays or radio, must admit “not only that such a creation remains completely invisible to us, but also that it and its angels could roam, flow, and fly through our earth and our bodies without our observing it.” And yet, heavenly material is still more than merely aether or invisible earthly material. It is essentially higher, more perfect and more heavenly. It is glorified material, ruled throughout by spirit; it is super-worldly, super-earthly, exalted above all conception (see 2 Corinthians 12:4). Its invisibility does not depend on the degrees of heat and the blindness of our imperfect eyes, but on its essential nature, and above all on the incapacity for sight of our fallen souls. Only in eternity will our eyes be opened. Then first shall we know even as we have been known (1 Corinthians 13:9-13). But then we shall know perfectly, and this seeing will be the true “seeing,” this hearing the true “hearing.” To a glorified body the spiritual body will be “visible.”
[5] The Eternal World and Symbolism But even with the spiritual body it is not the bodily element but the spiritual that is the principal thing. It is a spiritual body because it is controlled entirely by the spirit. Even in eternal nature the spirit is the essence. In germ it was already so in earthly nature. Every external object includes two characteristics, the one from time, the other from eternity; the one is revealed, the other concealed, and yet it is the concealed that constitutes the essence of the revealed.
Only thus does symbolism arise. All the figurative language of the Bible, all the parables of the Lord Jesus, and in general all picturing and comparing in the human spirit, have their roots in this alone, that the visible is a silhouette of the invisible, a clothing of ideas, a representation of the otherwise imperceptible. Symbolism therefore is the perception of ideas in material forms, a sort of “Jacob’s ladder” between heaven and earth. But this is to say at the same time that everything visible is more than a symbol. It is a house of the eternal. “The eternal resides therein.” “The earth is full of heaven” (Plato). The eternal is not only the meaning but also the essence of the temporal, its spring, its root, its condition, its “soul.” The heavenly ideas are “the melodies of things” (Carlyle), and the things themselves are “veiled” figures of their own future. But then only the eternal nature can be the true nature. There above is the essential, here below the reflection; there above the supreme, here below the shadow; there above the original, here below the likeness; not the reverse. The inward meaning of all the world is what is behind and above all perceptibility. “The originals of things are in the heavens.” There is the true eating, the true drinking, the true seeing, the true hearing. There is the true temple, the true altar, the true paradise, the true throne. What we call such here below, though actual in itself, in comparison is only a poor coarse fragment. Here below there is noting that has not its origin there above.
Nevertheless those “trees” of life will be quite other than all the rough, material trees of this earth. Nevertheless that “river” will be quite other than all the waters and rivers of this side. Nevertheless that “transparent gold” (Revelation 21:18) will be quite other than all the gold here in the palaces of kings.
Yet some sort of a relationship exists; and even if we do not perceive what this is, 78 but only know that the heavenly is the original of the earthly and the earthly the prophecy of the heavenly, nevertheless this one thing stands unchangeably firm, that there above we shall live in a reality which is far more real than the most real things of earth, in a higher physical world of nature of which our present world is but a poor shadowy picture, in a kingdom of truth and of the heavens, which all things earthly yet resemble as does a shadow the substantial body.
Footnote 78: More exact knowledge lies beyond our power of perception. The eternal world is totaliter aliter, entirely different. Comp. 2 Corinthians 12:4. But precisely the perfection of the heavenly implies the perfection of the symbol. In the earthly the symbol is only piece-meal. The spirit does not permeate. the material is not plastic. It is not interpenetrated, not completely controlled, not spirit-permeated enough. The eternal ideas are only partially perceptible. The earthly both unveils and veils them. Not so the eternal. There the spirit rules unrestrained. There it forms the material, there it interpenetrates its essence; there it determines its measure, its form, its nature. There it brings itself to unlimited and perfect expression, and thereby makes the bodily a heavenly resemblance of the spiritual.
Therefore is symbolism eternal. Indeed, therefore, it is only in eternity that it really exists. Everything earlier was only a nascent, a destroyed, or an expectant symbol. But now for the first time the spiritual is perfectly seen in the bodily. Now the essential in Nature is perceived right through everything. Now the whole redeemed universe of God is a materially transfigured clothing of His Spirit’s eternal power.
Therefore also in eternity, with all the materiality of the heavenly things, the symbolic in them is the chief feature. While holding fast the reality of the spirit-body of the things heavenly, yet the chief emphasis is to be laid upon the figurativeness of the speech. Even the heavenly Jerusalem, though an “actual” city ... indeed, the first city that can properly be called a “city” ... is nevertheless at the same time a spirit-embodied symbol of the glorified, perfected life.