Sermon Tone Analysis

*A Picture of Eternity: Heaven on Earth*

*April 18, 1999     Isaiah 65:17-25*

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*Introduction:*

         

We learned last Sunday about the great error of mankind to attempt to defy God’s command to fill the earth when they collaborated to stay in Shinar and build a city and a tower going up to the heavens to make a name for themselves and stay together.

Man has been trying to recreate paradise under his own power ever since he was thrown out of Eden.

A desire for Utopia is a natural impulse of our humanity.

It was what we were created for.

No generation passes without some charismatic leader setting up a Shangri-la, an Atlantis, a Sunny Brook Farm, or a Walden II with the dream of recreating paradise.

The Shakers tried it.

Disney tried it.

The Mormons tried it.

But just like Babel, they grossly miscalculated God who confused their language to stop their plans and as a divine boot to scatter them over the earth in obedience to his command until such time as God himself would purge sin from us and recreate it all.

God’s ultimate plan is the city.

In Genesis 11 he did not want them all in one city because it would foster a proliferation of evil.

But the eternal plan is one perfect city when he is done refining his creation and purging us of sin.

Today, I want us to take a look at this new city, a picture of eternity.

This passage was intended to be an encouragement to urban builders on their way back to Jerusalem.

God reminds them, and us, that the eternal city is also under construction.

We will live there forever as believers.

There will a new heaven and a new earth in a New Age.

Of all the half-truths perpetrated by the New Age Movement, none is a greater falsehood that the name itself.

The New Age is a time that can come only by the power and grace of God.

Without him, the idea of a New Age is just another fantasy concocted in finite minds out of a theological hodge-podge of assumptions about human goodness, evolutionary theory, and Eastern reincarnation.

As with all utopian dreams built out of the figments of human imagination, the New Age Movement will disappear like the Tower of Babel.

Isaiah’s vision of the true New Age, however will not die.

As the culmination of God’s redemptive plan for his creation, its reality is a continuation of his promises.

If one of his promises had failed, we would have reason to doubt Isaiah’s vision of the coming New Order and the true New Age.

But with the assurance that not one of God’s promises has ever failed, we can foresee the reality of Isaiah’s vision through eyes of faith.

Sound reason, then, backs up Isaiah’s farsighted view of the future.

Following the same line of logical reasoning with which the prophet assured Israel of its deliverance, Isaiah would remind us that the same omnipotent God who created the universe has the power to recreate what he had already made.

He will embark on a new creation as spectacular as his first creative days.

Beginning with the physical environment of the heavens and the earth, which groan under the weight of sin, he will do the new thing with such glorious splendor that the memories of the old heavens and the old earth will fade into forgetfulness.

He will resuscitate his heavens and his earth with a beauty unsurpassed.

Isaiah’s idealistic vision of God’s New Age does not stand alone.

Every quality of life prophesied by the prophet is repeated and reaffirmed in the book of Revelation.

*Some of the key components of the city God is building are as follows:*

 

The sins and fallenness of the past will not be remembered (17)

People will rejoice in the beauty of God’s creation (18)

People will enjoy one another (18)

There will be no more tears or weeping (19)

Life spans will be a hundred years or more (20)

Public health for children and aged (20)

There will be housing for all (21)

Private property will be owned, built upon, lived in, and farmed without taxes or        servitude (21-22)

There will be food for all (22)

Labor will be productive (23)

Families will be joyful (23)

Family support systems will be in place (23)

God’s presence will ensure instant, two-way and responsive communication (24)

The symbol of peace shall prevail in the New Age (25)

There will be an absence of violence (25)

Even the “Law of the Jungle” among animals will be transformed into a covenant of reconciliation and peace (25)

 

The kingdom will be spiritual in nature.

The kingdom will be ethical in nature.

The kingdom will bring great social and economic changes.

The kingdom will have political effects.

The kingdom will have religious effects.

The kingdom will be physical in its effects.

Following are some of the pictures we will look at in God’s eternal photo album:

 

*I.

The Promise of His Coming*

*II.

The Millennium and the Pre-Flood World*

*III.

Earthly Changes During the Tribulation*

*IV.

Restoration of Eden-like Conditions in the New Earth*

*V.

The Hell of Fire*

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*Adapted from Biblical Eschatology and Modern Science, Part IV, by Henry M. Morris (BSac—V125  #500—Oct 68—291)*

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*I.

The Promise of His Coming*

* *

As the first world order was destroyed by water (2 Pet 3:6), so the present world order will be destroyed by fire (2 Pet 3:10).

The world order includes both the earth and the heavens (atmosphere) - all considered as an ordered system.

Those materials were not destroyed at the Flood, and neither will they be destroyed in the future fiery destruction, but the ordered system of the earth and its inhabitants will be destroyed.

“Nevertheless we, according to his promise, look for new heavens and a new earth, where righteousness dwells” (2 Pet 3:13).

God has not forgotten this “promise of his coming” as suggested by the latter-day scoffers (2 Pet 3:3); His seeming delay in its fulfillment is only because of His “long-suffering toward us” (2 Pet 3:9).

This promise of new heaven and a new earth is first mentioned explicitly by Isaiah.

In Isaiah 65:17, God says He will “create new heavens and a new earth,” and in Isaiah 66:22, He speaks of the “new heavens and new earth which I will make.”

Just as God “created and made” the heavens and the earth of the first world (Gen 2:3), so He will “create and make” the final world, “which shall remain.”

Aspects of both His creative power and His organizing and ordering wisdom will again to be employed in that day.

The actual emplacement of the New World is, of course, gloriously described in Revelation 21:1, where John sees it as having displaced “the first heaven and the first earth.”

This seems at first a slight contradiction of Peter, who had said the first world perished in the Flood.

Perhaps, as we shall see, this “first atmosphere and land system” will have been substantially restored prior to its final purging at this time.

In any case, the “passing away” of that world (Matt 24:35; Rev 20:11) is to be, according to Revelation 20:2-11, preceded by the millennium, the thousand-year reign of Christ over the earth.

But the millennium will be preceded by the great tribulation (Matt 24:21,29-30; Rev 19:16), which is to be climaxed by the glorious return of the Lord Jesus to establish His kingdom.

And the great tribulation is to be preceded by the Lord’s promised coming for His own (John 14:3; 1 Thess 4:13 - 5:10; Rev 3:10), to “catch them up” to meet Him in the air.

And our anticipated rapture will be preceded by nothing.

It will happen suddenly.

Despite the scoffers who make fun of His promise, we most surely are “looking forward to such things” (2 Pet 3:14).

All of this must be included in the “day of the Lord,” which shortly will arrive as a thief in the night” (2 Pet 3:10).

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*II.

The Millennium and the Pre-Flood World*

 

There are many wonderful descriptions in the Bible of conditions in the millennial earth, and these often are hard to distinguish from conditions promised for the new earth (note, especially, the prophetic intermingling of the two in Isaiah 65:17-25).

This is a well-known characteristic of prophecy, which often unites the near and far fulfillment in one grand vision, with the first a type of the second.

The millennium, glorious though it will be, is yet only a type, a prior yet partial fulfillment, of the grand and eternal reality in the distance.

God will not fail to accomplish His purpose in creation, though the promise seems long delayed.

The world was created to last forever (Ps 148:1-6; 104:5, etc), and thus even the global destruction by the historic Flood and the future fire must be merely agents of preparation, renovation, and purging, rather than instruments of annihilation.

The Fall of man and God’s resulting curse on his dominion in the long view merely enable God to be revealed as Redeemer as well as Creator.

And He, “by the mouth of all his holy prophets since the world began,” has been promising the “times of restoration of all things” (Luke 1:70; Acts 3:21).