Week 50 - Ezekiel 45-48, Revelation 21 (Dec. 10-16)
Notes
EZEKIEL 47:1-12: THE RIVER FROM THE TEMPLE
One clearly allegorical aspect of Ezekiel’s Temple vision is the River described here as flowing from the threshold of the Temple, reaching significant depth, and then dumping into the Dead Sea. Ezekiel’s vision is so fantastic that this river can make the Dead Sea fresh (47:8). The Dead Sea is 1,300 feet below sea level, the lowest point on earth, and has a high mineral content resulting from the fact that it has no outlet. The Dead Sea maintains a salinity of 26-35% compared to 18% for the Great Salt Lake in Utah, and 3.5% for the average ocean salinity. This prophecy can be confidently read as reaching to the messianic age when life springs forth from Jerusalem and God’s blessings overflow from the temple to refresh and awaken a lost world. This imagery of a life-giving river is returned to in the final chapter of the Bible:
Then the angel showed me the river of the water of life, as clear as crystal,flowing from the throne of God and of the Lamb down the middle of the great street of the city. On each side of the river stood the tree of life, bearing twelve crops of fruit, yielding its fruit every month. And the leaves of the tree are for the healing of the nations. (Revelation 22:1-2)
Revelation 20: The imagery of new heaven and new earth
“as with all symbolism, these are signposts pointing into the unknown future; and at every point John is saying, 'It's like this, but much, much more so. The new heaven and new earth will be new in a new way; newness itself will be renewed, so that instead of a mere transition within ongoing human life, what God has planned will be the renewal of all things. 'Look, he said, 'I am making all things new?
All things: here we have the new heaven, the new earth, the new Jerusalem, the new Temple (which is the same thing as the new Jerusalem; as we shall see, there is no temple in the city because the whole city is the new temple), and, not least, the new people, people who have woken up to find themselves beyond the reach of death, tears, and pain. "The first things have passed away?
So many Christians have read John's book expecting that the final scene will be a picture of heaven that they fail completely to see the full glory of what he is saying. Plato was wrong. It isn't a matter - it wasn't ever a matter - of 'heaven' being the perfect world to which we shall (perhaps) go one day, and 'earth' being the shabby, second-rate temporary dwelling from which we shall be glad to depart for good. As we have seen throughout the book, 'earth' is a glorious part of God's glorious creation, and 'heaven', though God's own abode, is also the place where the 'sea' stands as a reminder of the power of evil, so much so that at one point there is 'war in heaven'.
God's two-level world needs renewing in both its elements. But when that is done, we are left not with a new heaven only, but a new heaven and a new earth - and they are joined together completely and forever. The word 'dwell' in verse 3 is crucial, because the word John uses conjures up the idea of God 'dwelling' in the Temple in Jerusalem, revealing his glory in the midst of his people. This is what John's gospel says about Jesus: the Word became flesh and lived, 'dwelt, pitched his tent, 'tabernacled', in our midst, and we gazed upon his glory.
What God did in Jesus, coming to an unknowing world and an unwelcoming people, he is doing on a cosmic scale. He is coming to live, forever, in our midst, a healing, comforting, celebrating presence. And the idea of 'incarnation', so long a key topic in our thinking about Jesus, is revealed as the key topic in our thinking about God's future for the world. Heaven and earth were joined together in Jesus; heaven and earth will one day be joined fully and forever. Paul says exactly the same thing in Ephesians 1.10. That is why the closing scene in the Bible is not a vision of human beings going up to heaven, as in so much popular imagination, nor even of Jesus himself coming down to earth, but of the new Jerusalem itself coming down from heaven to earth
The new world, in other words, will be like the present one in the sense of its being a world full of beauty, power, delight, tenderness, and glory. In this new world, for instance, the temple, which was properly there in heaven as well as on earth
(11.19), will be abolished (21.22); not because it was a stupid idea for God to dwell among his people, but because the Temple was the advance model of God's great hidden plan for the whole cosmos, now at last to be realized. The new world will be like the present one, but without all those features, particularly death, tears, and everything that causes them, which make the present world what it is.”
NT Wright, Revelation for Everyone, 190
Revelation 20: The “Dimensions” of Heaven
On the other hand, we have the extraordinary measurements of the city. (The angel measures this heavenly city, as John was told to measure the heavenly temple in 11.1; this time, we find out what the measurements were, as in the original vision of Ezekiel 40—48 which lies behind a great deal of John's vision at this point.) As verse 16 makes clear, the city is not only vast in terms of its footprint - fifteen hundred miles each way, roughly the same number of square miles as the Roman empire. (That, of course, may be part of the point.) It is also fifteen hundred miles high. John, of course, has no thought of what kind of buildings would occupy this extraordinary structure; he is constructing a symbolic universe, not an architect's design. The city will be an enormous, perfect cube ... because that is the shape of the holy of holies at the heart of the ancient Temple in Jerusalem (1 Kings 6.20). The whole city has become God's dwelling place, God's temple. Or, more exactly, the very center of God's temple, the holy of holies, the place where God dwells forever.
That is why the city 'has the glory of God' (verse 11). That doesn't just mean that it's a wonderful thing to look at, though that is dearly true as well. It means that God's glory, God's own glorious presence, is there, gleaming from every stone and jewel and shining from the pure gold of the street. And it is why, too, the city comes 'down out of heaven from God': this great new reality, the place of God's dwelling on earth, can never be something that humans make (that takes us back to Babylon, to Babel!), but remains always and forever the gift of God's love and grace.
NT Wright, Revelation for Everyone, 194