Sermon Tone Analysis

Summary

Revelation 21-22 is John’s climactic vision of the new Jerusalem and new earth.

In Part 1 we looked at how Israelites thought about the concept of “temple” and how that concept led John to conflate the expectation of a new temple and see fulfillment of that expectation in a city (the new Jerusalem) and restoration of the cosmos in a new Eden.

In this episode we walk through Rev 21-22 with an eye toward discerning specific Old Testament contexts behind the content of a range of items in these chapters.

Introduction

So let’s just get into our Part 2 here of Revelation 21-22.

This is the final part—the final installment.

And again, we’re looking at these two chapters and asking ourselves, “What parts of the Old Testament are important to John as he explains a vision or as he describes something that he’s told (the content, of course, of what he’s told and shown)?

How does that dip into the Old Testament?

And how does the Old Testament provide a framework and really a place to start thinking interpretively?

Last time we shot for the broader context, just the general notion in the Prophets.

We looked at Ezekiel.

We looked at Isaiah.

We looked at Jeremiah.

We looked at Zechariah—that what the book of Revelation does with the new heaven, the new earth, and the new Jerusalem answers the expectation of a new temple with those things.

And the Old Testament does that.

The Old Testament overlaps these ideas.

And so what we see in the book of Revelation isn’t an anomaly or somehow John missing the mark.

We shouldn’t be reading the end of the book of Revelation and asking, “Well, what happened to the temple?”

The Lord is the temple.

God is the temple, as John explicitly says in these last two chapters.

So this time, we’re going to go through the chapters again and be a little more granular and look at some specific parts of both these chapters and what their Old Testament orientation is.

So to begin, I’m just going to read quickly through Revelation 21.

And then we will jump in and pick our spots as we are accustomed to doing in this series.

So Revelation 21: 1-27, I’m reading from ESV, John writes:

That’s Revelation 21.

And even as you read through that, you get a few interesting little tidbits that we may or may not say much about.

But it just popped into my head here, this whole thing about “nothing unclean will ever enter it.”

That pretty much covers a question like, “Will there be sin in the new earth?

Will there be rebellion?”

No.

The text is pretty clear.

There are other reasons, of course, to doubt the utter implausibility of that.

But there are a lot of things in this chapter like that that answer some of these nagging questions.

And just give it a close reading and some of these things become apparent.

But what becomes less apparent is where we’re going to live today, and that is, “What are the Old Testament counterparts or antecedents to this?”

What are the Old Testament counterparts or antecedents to this?

Now we already noted in the first five verses (really Revelation 21, verse 1 and verse 5) the description about the new heaven and new earth.

The former things won’t be remembered.

The new earth will remain forever in contrast to the old.

And so on and so forth.

We already talked about how Isaiah 65 and 66 were really influential in that whole description.

So I’m not going to repeat that.

I’m going to go on to the phrase “no more sea.”

This is sort of a favorite verse of mine because the sea is a very well-known chaos metaphor from the Old Testament.

Because the sea is to be feared.

It was untamable.

It was unpredictable.

It was hostile to life.

Humans can’t live in the sea.

All these things.

The Leviathan—the dragon.

All these symbols and metaphors that are operative in relation to the sea come to a climax here when John says, “Well, in the new creation, the sea is no more.”

And it doesn’t mean an overly literalistic “well, I guess there’s no salt water.”

No, that’s just ridiculous.

I think even the most literalistic bent in interpretation (I would hope) would recognize the absurdity of that approach when it comes to this one line.

But there’s so much else in the content of these verses that defy a literalistic interpretation.

And you miss the things that transcend this sort of out-of-the-box, literalistic approach.

So “no more sea…” I’m going to read a little bit from DBI, which is a resource I highly recommend, one of my most frequently recommended: The Dictionary of Biblical Imagery.

This is essential.

It’s just a one-volume reference work.

But it’s essential for Bible study, in my view.

DBI has this as part of its entry on the sea:

There are two aspects to this reversal-the defeat of evil, and the triumph of the good [ you know, it’s being described in the Apocalypse and here in Revelation].

Jeremiah 4:23–28 portrays the “un-creation” of the world that reverses the creation story of Genesis 1.

So when the sea is unleashed… The sea is sort of… At the end of Genesis 1, there’s this tension about how everything is good, but it’s not optimal.

The whole world isn’t Eden and chaos is being restrained.

Well, eventually that’s going to give way and we get this chaotic de-creation sort of language elsewhere in the Bible.

And DBI goes on to say:

2 Peter gives us a vision of complete dissolution followed by the assertion, “But according to his promise we wait for new heavens and a new earth in which righteousness dwells” (2 Pet 3:13 RSV).

Revelation 21 uses similarly imagery, drawing explicit attention to the absence of death, mourning, crying and pain [ those things are no more, because], “for the former things have passed away” [ we get that line in Revelation 21:4 and back in Isaiah in the Old Testament] (Rev 21:4; cf.

Is 33:24; 65:20) [ and everything is made new].

In the new universe there will be no more sea (Rev 21:1), a reference to the final triumph over evil and chaos, which is often pictured in the Bible as a sea monster: the dragon (Job 7:12; Ps 74:13), Leviathan (Job 40:15–24; Ps 74:13–14; 104:26; Is 27:1), Rahab (Job 9:13; Ps 89:10; Is 51:9–11) and the serpent (Job 26:13; Is 27:1).

So the line that there’s no more sea… A Jewish reader… Someone acquainted with the Old Testament, whether they were Jew or Gentile, whether they’re reading Hebrew or Aramaic or the Septuagint, they’re going to know what the sea means (what the sea is) in Old Testament thought.

And when John says the sea is no more, they understand that completely.

Again, in this place (the new restored global Eden) and everything else that has preceded, the fallenness of it all has passed away.

“No more sea” means there’s no more chaos.

There’s no more enemy.

There’s no more sin.

There’s no more death, suffering, all these things.

It’s over.

It’s over.

So with one line, just a few words, and of course focused on the sea, the Old Testament context makes it crystal clear what John is suggesting here.

The Holy City

So here we have in Isaiah a reference to the city, the new Jerusalem, as “the holy city.”

I mean, think about that.

We’re reading in Isaiah… As we saw in the previous episode, a lot of the language about temple consciousness… there were two sides of that coin.

Jerusalem and the temple were going to get destroyed because of idolatry and they’re going to be replaced.

Okay?

Well, a lot of that was from Isaiah, really Isaiah 40-66, and specifically 65-66.

Well, here we are in Isaiah 52 and the prophet is calling Jerusalem “the holy city.”

Now in real time that didn’t make much sense because Jerusalem’s going to be judged.

But nevertheless, it hints at Israel’s future, specifically Jerusalem’s future.

Everything is going to be restored.

And we get this categorical language: “There shall no more come into you the uncircumcised and the unclean.

You’re going to be a holy city.”

So the language here John uses comes from right out of the Old Testament.

We have a reference in Isaiah 61:10 we could look at.

Isaiah 62. Again, the Old Testament is John’s source book.

If you go through and you keep reading in Revelation 21 (once you hit verse 9, in fact—Revelation 21:9-22:5), all of that is going to be in some way related to what we talked about in the last episode—this expectation of the restoration of a temple and how that works out in fulfillment terms in a new city and a new creation.