Waiting for A New World

This sermon was preached for Capital Pres Fairfax on December 29, 2024  as a part of our Advent series “Waiting with Hope.” Advent is a season of waiting, but it is also a season of hope and light, of warmth in the midst of longing. We will spend the five Sundays in December this year looking to Scripture’s sure promises as a solid foundation for our hope in Christ’s return, and the restoration of all things which he will bring. This week we focused on Revelation 21:1-4. A recording of this sermon will be available on Spotify and Apple Podcasts. 

Then I saw a new heaven and a new earth, for the first heaven and the first earth had passed away, and the sea was no more. And I saw the holy city, new Jerusalem, coming down out of heaven from God, prepared as a bride adorned for her husband. And I heard a loud voice from the throne saying, “Behold, the dwelling place of God is with man. He will dwell with them, and they will be his people, and God himself will be with them as their God. He will wipe away every tear from their eyes, and death shall be no more, neither shall there be mourning, nor crying, nor pain anymore, for the former things have passed away.” 

Hoping for something 

What are you hoping for in the New Year? Hoping to lose weight? To get good grades? To put yourself out there and find “the one”? Kick bad habits, advance your career? We’re all hoping for something because we know things aren’t the way they’re supposed to be. Even if everything in your life is going exactly how you want it to, you’re hoping nothing will change. That’s a recognition of the fragility of the world; we’re hoping for permanence and security. We’re all hoping for something—that’s our first point this morning. 

It’s worth stating that outright because it can be easy to forget, especially when we get so wrapped up in the busyness of the present. Perhaps you’ve heard of the “Eisenhower matrix”? A task-management strategy credited to President Eisenhower and popularized by the book Seven Habits of Highly Effective People. It helps you organize all the things on your to-do list based on two criteria: urgency and importance. There’s a lot of things in life that are urgent, and a lot of other things that are important—and often, these two criteria don’t overlap. 

Let me give you an example. It is really important to have deep, authentic friendships, where you get to spend time sitting down face-to-face with someone in honest conversation. But sometimes, you have to interrupt that conversation because the dinner you ate isn’t sitting right with you and you have to go to the bathroom. Investing in friendship is important; going to the bathroom is urgent. Here’s another example. Maybe God has blessed you with a great passion and ability to sing, or play an instrument, or create art—and it’s important to you that you set aside time to feed that passion. But God has also blessed you with a spouse and children and the responsibility to provide food and clothing and shelter, and he’s also blessed you with a boring desk job that has nothing to do with your passion but pays the bills. Using the talent God gave you is important, but so is providing for your family, and feeding your kids will always be more urgent than feeding your passion. 

Why bring all this up? In a place as busy as Northern Virginia, it is all too easy to fill every hour of the day addressing the urgent while neglecting the important. And where does “hope” fall? Squarely in the “important” category. Hope is desperately important, and not at all urgent. The tyranny of the urgent can quickly shrink our hopes to small, achievable things we can control—small chores we can check off our “to-do list”—and even then, how often do we fail to achieve them? 

When we push back against the urgent and really meditate on the important, our hopes grow far beyond our own control. We start hoping for things like peace in our family, peace in our world, elimination of cancer and even all diseases. If we’re really honest and let ourselves dream, we hope for the end of all conflict and suffering and injustice everywhere. We long for paradise, for a new world, for a “happily ever after.” 

There’s a danger in letting our hopes fly as high as they want to go. It can also be easy to lose hope altogether and become cynical. Reality sets in, things get painful, and it’s easier to just settle for chasing the urgent. One of the most famous Christmas stories gives us the perfect example, Ebenezer Scrooge. A bitter old man, obsessed with his wealth, spiteful and hopeless. How did he get to be that way? A combination of two very ordinary, relatable things: family tragedy and an over investment in his career. Gradually, Ebenezer lost sight of everything that was important. It required a supernatural intervention to wake him up, something that reoriented his whole understanding of his past, present, and future. And it was especially that Ghost of Christmas future that alerted him to the danger of where he was headed. 

Friends, how many of us feel like a Scrooge today? How many of us have gotten lost chasing the urgent and have given up on hope? You need to know that cynicism is deeply un-Christian; if you identify as a cynical person, you’re actually choosing an identity out of step with your faith because the gospel of Jesus Christ forces us to reckon with our hopes. Jesus makes us admit that we really are hoping for something. 

Our passage today is the ultimate antidote to cynicism. The Book of Revelation is a bit like the ghosts appearing to Scrooge. This is a supernatural intervention which reorients our understanding of the past, present, and especially the future. And here in Revelation 21, Jesus shows us that we’re hoping for something good. 

Hoping for Something Good

If your greatest hope is the weekend, or retirement, or marriage, or having children, you are setting your hopes on something far too low. Those are all good things, but they’re not important enough—and your heart knows it. Our passage cuts to the heart of the matter. We are hoping in nothing less than the healing of the whole world—New Creation, New Heavens and New Earth, New Jerusalem.  

Do you see that in our passage? You might be thinking “Patrick, I see a whole lot in this passage and none of it makes sense!” Cosmological reset, disappearance of the oceans, cities falling from the sky—what is going on here? It’s helpful to remember what it is we’re reading here before we understand how we’re supposed to read it. We don’t want to read poetry like a newspaper, we don’t want to read fantasy like a textbook. In the same way, we need to make sure we understand what kind of writing our passage is before we can rightly understand it. 

The Book of Revelation is a letter written by the apostle John to seven churches spread across modern day Turkey. It was written to encourage these young churches as they faced severe persecution and wondered “When is Jesus going to bring this to an end?” Jesus answers their question by giving John a vision to explain what is happening in the world from God’s perspective and pointing ahead to the end of the story he’s writing. So as we read this letter, we need to remember, John is writing prophetic poetry. The imagery he uses is poetic shorthand for big ideas and (most likely) not literal description. The way to understand what this imagery means is by zooming out and reading the rest of the Bible, that’s where he’s pulling these pictures from. 

Let’s quickly unpack three of these pictures First, what is New Heavens and New Earth? The last chapters of Isaiah anticipate a future where the world will be perfectly ordered and God’s people will be totally safe. Even nature will be reordered to work the way God intended it to work at first. Most importantly, this will be a world where God and man dwell together—and that is the deepest longing of our hearts, whether we know it or not. Genesis 1-2 tells us we were created to be in the presence of God united in a loving, personal relationship. Revelation 21 tells us that Jesus will one day bring that about. 

Second, what does it mean that there will be no more sea? All throughout the Bible, the sea represents chaos, death, opposition of God. The sea is where humans don’t belong. In Genesis 1, God separates the waters to establish ordered creation, restraining the sea. Fast forward a few chapters to the story of Noah, and flood waters serve as a “creation reset” to bring judgment against sin. The Psalms and the Book of Jonah show the sea as a chaotic force opposing God, which God conquers. Here in Revelation, the beast of the sea opposes God and God ultimately defeats it. So this isn’t really saying the oceans will dry up and they’ll be no more fish in New Creation. Rather, the apostle John is using poetic shorthand to describe a perfectly safe world fully under the rule of God. 

Third, what is New Jerusalem? Notice how John combines the imagery of a city and a bride. This is both a place and a people. Old Testament prophets used Jerusalem as a symbol for all of God’s people, and after the destruction of Jerusalem by the Babylonians in the sixth century BC, the prophets were told to anticipate a new “city”, a redefining of the people of God not based on geography but on faith. Revelation describes this new people of God as comprising people of every tribe, nation, and tongue who call Jesus Lord. In our passage, we see God bringing this rescued people down from heaven to live in the New Creation in perfect relationship with him and each other. 

So then, this New Creation order is the fulfillment of every deep human longing—all the things you value perfectly achieved. If you value diversity, this will be a kingdom spanning nationalities and languages from every era of human history—and every culture will be fully redeemed, with every beautiful aspect shining forth and every broken aspect healed. If you value justice, this is a kingdom where justice has been perfectly executed, and more than that, where God has written his law on every human heart so injustice will cease to exist. If you value security and safety, this will be a kingdom whose gates never need to be closed because there are no enemies left to threaten it. If you value permanence, this will be a kingdom where there is no rising or setting of the sun because God will be its everlasting, permanent light. If you value family, you will be forever at home with your Heavenly Father, and your eldest brother Jesus, and all your brothers and sisters in Christ. 

Friends, this is what it means to hope for something good, something better than anything you could possibly imagine. That’s Christian hope. 

Hoping for something real 

If you’re like me, you might fee cynicism creeping back in the room. Don’t raise your hand, but how many of us are starting to think “This is a fairy tale ending, this is too good to be true”?That brings us to our final, and maybe our most important point: we are hoping for something real.  

This might all sound too good to be true, but you could say the same thing about the gospel, the resurrection of Jesus Christ. Except that the resurrection of Jesus is true! Let’s take a minute to evaluate the historicity of our faith. Christianity isn’t primarily about ideas or philosophies, it is about events, and those events have immeasurable significance. The famous author and professor C.S. Lewis wrote an essay titled “Myth Became Fact” where he says…

“The heart of Christianity is a myth which is also a fact. The old myth of the Dying God, without ceasing to be myth, comes down from the heaven of legend and imagination to the earth of history. It happens—at a particular date, in a particular place, followed by definable historical consequences. We pass from a Balder or an Osiris, dying nobody knows when or where, to a historical Person crucified (it is all in order) under Pontius Pilate. By becoming fact it does not cease to be myth: that is the miracle.” 

Every other world religion either abandons its historical contingency to focus on the ideas or it claims historicity but collapses under scrutiny. Christianity is uniquely falsifiable. No historian questions that Jesus was a real person who was crucified. No historian denies that there are an overwhelming number of early, reliable sources that claim Jesus rose. When looking at the manuscriptival evidence, we can be literally twice as certain about the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus than we can be about the life and death of Julius Caesar.¹ 

So how can we trust this account about the New Heavens and New Earth? Because the rest of the story is true, and because we get it from a reliable source—the One who goes ahead of us to prepare a place for us. 

But that’s not all! Not only can we look outside of the Bible for evidence, we can also look inside the Bible. Consider all the prophesies made about Jesus which he fulfilled in his first coming. We talked about many of these leading up to Christmas. Jesus is the one born of a virgin and called Emmanuel (Isa 7-9). Jesus is descended from the line of David (2 Sam 7) and is a prophet like Moses promised in Deut 18. Jesus perfectly matches the description of the suffering servant (Isa 53). Jesus is God become man, pierced for our transgressions to cleanse us from our sin (Zech 11-12). Those same prophets made more promises of an even grater deliverance brought by this messiah. If they were right about Jesus’ first coming, we have good reason to trust what they say about his second coming. 

Jesus knows our hearts are tempted toward cynicism, he knows this sounds too good to be true when we’re blinded by our immediate surroundings, so to give us even more assurance, he speaks directly to our fear with a promise. Read the very next verse in Revelation 21, verse 5… 

And he who was seated on the throne said, “Behold, I am making all things new.” Also he said, “Write this down, for these words are trustworthy and true.”

Friends, this is not just a bedtime story. Your faith is not a fairy tale, it is grounded in real historical events and looks ahead to future events, promised by the God who cannot lie and will not leave you. We are hoping for something real. 

So what does that mean for you and me today? Let me leave you with just one suggestion. This is the season of “New Year’s Resolutions,” setting goals, preparing for something new, putting your best foot forward—prioritizing the important over the urgent, right? How many people here are good at keeping their New Years Resolutions? I’m awesome at keeping my resolutions. I made a resolution when I was ten years old to never make another new years resolutions, and I’ve kept it for almost twenty years now. 

But what if instead of making New Year’s Resolutions this year, we all committed to some New Creation Resolutions? What would it look like to set goals in preparation for the New Heavens and New Earth, so that when Jesus brings us into that new world as his bride, we’re ready for it? I’ll let you discuss what that might look like with your friends or community group—maybe it looks like joining a CG in the new year. 

We’re all hoping for something. Jesus promises us that we’re waiting for something good, the healing of the whole world. And we can be confident that we’re hoping for something real. Don’t let cynicism win this week. Let’s commit to waiting with hope. 

 * * * 

¹ The resurrection of Jesus is one of the most well-attested events in ancient history. Fifteen independent sources point to the historicity of Jesus and his death, and many of them also point to his resurrection. According to typical standards for historical research, “two or more independent reports are often sufficient to trace an ancient saying to the person in question.” Gary Habermas, On the Resurrection, Volume 1: Evidences (Nashville, TN: B&H Academic, 2024), 290. 

For comparison, Julius Caesar’s Gallic Wars depends on five key sources and modern versions of the work rely on only twelve manuscripts, the oldest of which dates to the ninth century. Darrell L. Bock, “Sources for Caesar and Jesus Compared” Gospel Coalition, (June 11, 2015) https://www.thegospelcoalition.org/article/sources-for-caesar-and-jesus-compared/ Bock writes, “Two of the most important sources for the emperor’s life, however, Suetonius and Plutarch, write in the early second century. That’s more than 100 years after the time of Caesar…Around 12 manuscripts are essential for determining the wording of Caesar’s account. The oldest manuscript is from the ninth century—a full 900 years removed from the actual events. The list extends to manuscripts from the 12th century. Cicero’s speeches have an even older pedigree. They have about 15 manuscripts ranging from AD 400 to 800. Sallust’s account has around 20 manuscripts from the 10th and 11th centuries. Plutarch’s Lives is also mostly divided across six key manuscripts that range from the 10th and 11th centuries. Suetonius’s manuscript is dated AD 820.”

This falls far short of the New Testament. There are more than one hundred copies of individual New Testament books or portions of them which date to the second and third centuries. Craig L. Blomberg, Can We Still Believe the Bible? (Grand Rapids, MI: BrazosPress, 2014), 27.