There is an inherent optimism in young people that older people find both amusing and disturbing at the same time. It amuses us because we remember when we had all kinds of hopes, dreams, and plans for life – many of which were not realistic. But we are also disturbed when we see young folks launching out into the world because we know what they don’t: life is filled with failures and disappointments. There is no way to understand this part of life apart from the wisdom that comes only through experience. Unfortunately, each generation has to go through this painful cycle of discovery.
In our culture we call the desire for the good life the “American Dream.” But every culture has its own vision of living life to the fullest. One of the reasons we have civilization at all is this goal of a happy life. All of the great civilizations in history, including our own, came into being as an attempt to capture and then preserve the dream of “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.” All of the forces of history run in this direction.
Secularists believe that this desire for a better life is the result of the relentless progress of evolution. But people with a Biblical world-view have a different explanation for human endeavor. All people are haunted by the collective memory of Eden. And our search for a perfect life in this world – the dream of a Utopia – is a vain attempt to return to Eden.
To really understand the human condition we have to understand the Biblical doctrine of the Fall. Sin has introduced a curse of corruption and death, even on the Creation itself, which brings frustration, or vanity, to human life. Vanity is pointless activity that leads to frustration. People are born, they struggle for that good and happy life, and then they die. This seemingly endless, and ultimately hopeless, cycle is the reality that permeates all philosophical and religious thought and is even expressed in the book of Ecclesiastes. But can this cycle be broken? Is there anything new under the sun?
Everyone wants to have hope that things can and will get better. We even want to have hope beyond the grave. The book of Revelation is designed to give us hope. The Apostle John is given a vision of the future and he sees a new world coming into view.
I. The End takes us back to the Beginning.
The Bible begins with the creation of the present heavens and earth, and the Bible ends with the passing of this creation and the beginning of a new creation. Revelation 21-22 reminds us of Genesis 1-3 and these sections of Scripture provide us with the perfect bookends to God’s story. The Bible is one contiguous story and we must understand Scripture this way or we will miss the proverbial forest for all the trees.
Some scholars have said that the Bible contains one mega-narrative, or storyline, that is filled in with many meta-narratives, or smaller stories. But the smaller stories always contribute to the larger story. The story-arc, or mega-narrative, of the Bible is Creation to New Creation. In Genesis we see the beginning of the world that we know. The first Creation and the Fall of Man are the foundation of the rest of the Biblical story.
The first few chapters of the Bible have been in modern times seriously questioned, criticized, and largely abandoned as an explanation for the origin and condition of the world. The book of Revelation has also historically been on the fringe of the Biblical canon and mostly considered an impossible puzzle to solve. If the first chapters of the Bible are rejected outright, and the last chapters of the Bible remain mysterious, then it is no wonder our modern generation remains ignorant of the message of the Bible.
However, if we compare the first chapters of Genesis with the last chapters of Revelation we begin to see an integrated picture emerge:
• In Genesis God creates the heavens and the earth. In Revelation this first heaven and earth pass away and there is a new heavens and earth.
• In Genesis God made everything good but man fell into sin. Sin introduced a curse of frustration and death. In Revelation this curse is lifted. All of the unhappy effects of sin are gone forever!
• In Genesis, before man sinned, God walked with man in fellowship. Sin caused a separation and alienation. But in Revelation the dwelling of God is with men again! The alienation has been completely removed.
• Perhaps the most important connection between Genesis and Revelation is the Tree of Life. The Tree of Life was there in Eden, but when man ate from the forbidden Tree, the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil, the way back to the Tree of Life was blocked. But in Revelation the Tree of Life reappears and is prominent in the New Creation. Even the leaves of the Tree of Life have healing power! We will have full access to the very source of eternal life.
And so we have come full-circle. What was broken by man’s sin God has restored. This does not mean that God is simply restoring the original state that was in Eden. We can never go back to that as if the Fall never happened. But actually, the world to come is much better and more glorious than Eden ever was or could have been. Redemption is actually more than just fixing what was old.
The newness of life in the New Creation includes some continuity with the old. Our text does not say “I make all new things,” but “I make all things new.”
But new wine must be put into new wineskins because the newness of the New cannot be contained by what is old. The eternal, spiritual life of the New Creation is far more powerful and dynamic than the old. That is why the first has to pass away before the New can come. As long as the Old is in place the New cannot come because the Old cannot contain the dynamic life and power of what is New.
When we go from Genesis directly to Revelation it becomes clear that God is committed to defeating evil. Evil is everything opposed to God and His purpose. God promised that the Serpent’s head would be crushed. This crushing of the Serpent’s head represents the ultimate demise of evil in all its forms, including the actual defeat of Satan. Satan’s head was crushed at Calvary, yet it seems that the final victory is yet to be realized and will not be a reality until the New Creation takes over. Even now we still wrestle against Satan and his spiritual forces of wickedness.
It is dangerous to think that the final victory has been achieved because we will begin to think that we do not have to continue to wrestle with evil. But we do have to continue to resist the Devil. The Bible wants us to be assured that the victory will be complete, which keeps us fighting instead of giving up or living in denial.
However, the victory is not ours to achieve. God will defeat evil and any victory we have will come from the Lord. The battle is the Lord’s! The War has already been won, but God will finish what He started.
John sees the final destruction of all evil – the enemies of God and His people. The crescendo is that God will dwell with His people forever. God has never deserted humanity, though there have been times when it might look that way.
Revelation is the language of hope. The language must be symbolic because it describes things outside of human experience. But the images in Revelation are designed to fuel our hope and expectation, even if our curiosity is sometimes unfulfilled.
In Genesis Paradise was lost. In Revelation Paradise is regained. In between Genesis and Revelation is the progressive unfolding of God’s plan of renewal.
II. The God who creates also renews.
God’s ability to renew is tied to His power to create. It seems that the first creation was made to showcase God’s ability to bring renewal. Even angels long to look into these things pertaining to salvation.
There are a couple of times in the Bible that the question “is anything too hard for the Lord?” or the statement “for nothing is impossible with God” were uttered. The first time was to Abraham and Sarah when they were told they would have a son in their old age. The second time was by the angel Gabriel after announcing to Mary that she would bear a son while still a virgin. God can make an old, barren woman give birth. God can make a virgin conceive. And God can give birth to a new world. Nothing is too hard for the Lord! The Bible is to showing us this truth so we will also believe in what God can do. When speaking about God’s promise to Abraham, Paul affirms God’s ability to fulfill His promise because He is the God “who gives life to the dead and calls into existence the things that do not exist” (Romans 4:17). The New Creation actually began when God called Abraham. The God who made the world from nothing would bless the world through an old man and his barren wife! God worked this way to show us that the New Creation can only be traced back to Him just as the first creation came into existence by His Word and will.
Some works can be accomplished by God alone. Only God can create something from nothing. It is often said that men have creative abilities and that this is part of the Divine image in man. I believe in the Divine image in man, but man’s creativity and God’s ability to create are not the same. God had the ability to call something into existence that previously did not exist. God made everything from nothing. Can you do that?
We can reshape and reform some of the things that God has made, but we cannot will something into creation that did not previously exist. God is Creator. We are not. And yet we often live under the illusion that we can create our own destiny.
It should be obvious that if creation is a work only God can accomplish then the renewal of that creation, or a New Creation, is also a work only God can accomplish. Salvation belongs to the Lord. We cannot save ourselves. We cannot renew the world and make a New Creation.
This means that our hope must be in God alone. We have to reject any man-made plan to renew the world, save mankind from extinction, or create Utopia. If there is one thing we learn from human history it is that men have failed to renew the world. There has been no philosophy or form of government that has created a perfect world. Even our great scientific discoveries have failed to solve all our problems, and have actually created many new and terrifying possibilities, including nuclear holocaust. And there has never been a cure for death. One of the great efforts has been to try to get men and nations to stop killing one another. None of the world’s great religions or moral teachers have changed the hearts of men. Something more is needed than just a law, a religion, government, philosophy, or morality. We have tried all of these things throughout human history and the new world has not been created.
It should be sufficiently demonstrated by now that men cannot create a new world order. If our hope cannot be in man then we must look for hope in God.
Specifically, our hope is in the person and work of Christ. Jesus Himself is the firstborn of God’s New Creation. We can see the renewing work of Christ in three, distinct actions:
1. Incarnation. God became a man, the Creator becoming a part of the creation, in order to renew all of creation, including men. If men are going to be renewed this renewal had to take place through a man, just as sin and death had originally entered the world through a man.
2. Atonement. It was sin that brought the curse of death and alienation from God. Sin is the problem and this has to be addressed. God cannot simply pretend that sin never happened. And so by offering Himself as a vicarious sacrifice Christ has effectively taken sin away. The cause of our alienation from God has been removed and He is now free to bless us in Christ.
3. Resurrection. Death, the great enemy, has been defeated. The resurrection of Christ is a preview of things to come. Someday all the dead will be raised and death itself will be ended.
The resurrection of Christ is itself the promise and guarantee of the New Creation. Him the heavens must receive until the time comes for the renewal of all things (Acts 3.21). And so we wait for His appearing the second time and the fullness of the New Creation. God’s New Creation had to involve the work of Christ in His incarnation, atoning death, and resurrection. Our hope is in Jesus Christ.
We should make it clear that our hope is not in the world accepting Christ’s moral teaching. It has been popular to speak of Christ as another great moral teacher and all we have to do to have a new world is just obey the Sermon on the Mount. The trouble with this is that the world has never listened to the great moral teachers. Jesus did not come to bring us another moral law. God already gave us the Law of Moses to prove that Law cannot save us. And so what we could not do for ourselves God has done through Jesus Christ. The God who created the world will renew the world.
III. The New Creation is already here.
John saw the new heavens and the new earth – the fullness of the New Creation. But the New Creation has already invaded. The New Creation invaded the night a baby was born to a virgin in Bethlehem. What John saw in Revelation was not the beginning of the New Creation but its fullness. This might cause some confusion because the Old World still seems to dominate all that we see and experience. We cannot ignore these realities.
But we can also not deny that something New has come. Solomon’s old question “is there anything new under the sun” is answered in the Gospel with a resounding affirmative!
The Gospel calls us to participate in God’s purpose now. The New Creation has invaded and created a beachhead, much like the Allies did in the Normandy invasion of Nazi-occupied Europe during the Second World War. When the Allies hit the beaches that day there was a terrible resistance from the enemy forces. But once the beachhead was secured, the end of the war was soon to follow as the invading forces advanced relentlessly toward their goal. In the same way the Kingdom of God has landed and is advancing.
When Jesus began to preach publicly He proclaimed that the Kingdom of God had come. To prove His point, Jesus performed many miraculous signs that all pointed to the reality of this Kingdom. Someone has referred to the miracles of Jesus as previews of coming attractions. In the Kingdom we would expect all of the effects of man’s sin to be removed and Satan’s Kingdom to be removed. Those things have not happened yet, but Jesus gave us a sneak peak of the future world. Jesus did not preach that the Kingdom of God would come in the future, but that it was breaking in now and that we should repent and enter it in anticipation of its fullness in the future. We are caught between the Now and the Not Yet of the Kingdom of God.
The present reality of the Kingdom and our hope for the consummation of God’s reign is perfectly captured by the writer of the hymn This is My Father’s World:
This is my Father's world.
O let me ne'er forget
That though the wrong seems oft so strong,
God is the ruler yet.
This is my Father's world: the battle is not done:
Jesus Who died shall be satisfied,
And earth and Heaven be one.
There is more to come, but we enter the Kingdom now. The New Creation begins for us personally when we are born again. Jesus said we cannot enter the Kingdom unless we are born again. The Holy Spirit is the agent of the New Creation just as the Spirit of God once hovered over the watery chaos of the first creation. “Therefore, if anyone is in Christ, he is a new creation. The old has passed away; behold, the new has come” (2 Corinthians 5:17). Paul speaks as if this Newness of life were already a reality. I must realize that God making things right begins with Him making me right! Much of what we call the Christian life is me coming to realize that I have been made new in Christ and living according to the New Creation. The Old Order is obsolete and what really counts with God today is a New Creation (Gal. 6.15).
But remember we still live in the tension between the Old and the New Creation.
We still have the Flesh and we still live in a fallen world that is ruled by the Devil. And so the believer is a microcosm of this tension between the Old Order and the New Order. We are experiencing, along with the Creation, the birth-pangs of the New Creation (Rom. 8.22-23).
Our “Great Commission” is to begin to exploit that beachhead that the Kingdom of God has made and live in the power of the New Creation remembering that if we “walk by the Spirit, you will not gratify the desires of the flesh (Gal. 5:16). We already have tasted of the powers of the world to come through the presence of the Holy Spirit. We will not be everything now that we will be in the world to come. Now these earthly tabernacles, otherwise known as our bodies, frustrate us because they are tied to that Old Order. But do not have a defeatist attitude. There is a principle of New Life in you, through the Holy Spirit, that is more powerful than the Old nature. Even now believers have the ability, through the Spirit, to live in victory over the world, the flesh, and the Devil.
And obtaining this victory is not an optional process reserved for the spiritual elite. Every believer much begin to cut loose from the world and the Old Order and begin to live in the New Creation.
We perfect holiness and subdue the desires of the Flesh so that we can fit into the New Creation when this world finally passes away.
We have to be made new because God is making everything else new! He has made us new ahead of time. You must become compatible with the New Creation or you will be excluded from it. In Revelation John sees many people who are excluded from God’s New World. These are people who continued in their love of this present, evil world.
If we are going to have a place in the World to Come we have to at some point lose our affection for this world. Our main goal has to be to make it into the World to come, not to make it in this World. If we were going to leave our country and live in another country, we would no doubt make some preparations. We would learn the culture of the country to which we are going. We would familiarize ourselves with its language and customs so that we will be good citizens of our new home. In the same way the saints of God are becoming familiar with the culture of the World to Come. When this world passes away we will not grieve because we will be welcomed into our true home.
In The Chronicles of Narnia, when the old Narnia passes away and they find themselves in a new world, it is Jewel the unicorn who realizes what has happened and declares “I have come home at last! This is my real country! I belong here. This is the land I have been looking for all my life, though I never knew it till now...Come further up, come further in!”
Perhaps this New World is quite clear to us now, yet Monday morning comes and we have to go out into this present, evil world. And this world has a way of creating a kind of fog in our minds that hides the World to Come. This world and all of its demands, what Jesus called the worries of this life, can come rushing at us like wild animals. And it becomes our duty each day to push aside the things of this temporal world order so that we can get a glimpse, no matter how fleeting it may be, of the New Creation God is about to unveil.
“I make all things new!” We already know the end of the story. And since God has already revealed His purpose to us it is our business to know what it is and get involved in it. We have no right to make our own agenda. If we try to hang on to this World, not only will we lose everything here, we will also forfeit the world to come. But if we let go of this world, which we cannot keep anyway, we can take hold of the New Creation.
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