His Perfect Love

Guest (Male): Thanks for joining us today for His Perfect Love. Today we take a tour of a holy city that will come down from heaven, and the Apostle John is our tour guide. What it's like and, more importantly, what it takes to get there is our focus today as we open Revelation chapter 21.

Is there really any point to this life if this is all there is? The bottom line is the Lord has prepared a place for us, a wonderful place called the New Heavens and New Earth, but we must take the step of faith in Christ that opens the door to us. Here is Pastor Matt VanderVen.

Matt VanderVen: Chapter 21, verse 1, please hear this this morning. He says, "Now I saw a new heaven and a new earth, for the first heaven and the first earth had passed away. Also, there was no more sea." Okay, no more ocean. There's no surfing in heaven. I know some of us love the beach and the ocean. Get your fill of it now, because there will be no more ocean.

There will be a body of water, a stream as we're going to read, that goes through the middle of the city, but there will be no more ocean as we know it today. There's also a lot we read here, like no moon or sun, things like that that we're not going to see. But what I want to draw our attention to is he starts with, "Now I saw." John's words, given by the Holy Spirit, are introducing us to this final section.

Remember the things that were, the things that are, and the things that will be. It's the only book in all of our Bible that Jesus Christ has given us not only this introduction, but He gave us the sections. He gave us how this would break out. It's the only book in the Bible that does this outline, and He is keeping to the outline in which He's given.

We have now moved into the things that are going to be, obviously, as we have already been studying in the last few chapters. So, Revelation chapter 21 begins this final section. Jesus, the Lord of the churches, if you remember going back over our time in Revelation chapter 1 through chapter 3. Then the Great Tribulation and the Satanic rebellion that's crushed from Revelation chapter 4 all the way through Revelation chapter 20, verse 15.

Now, Jesus dwelling with us in the New Heavens and the New Earth will complete the rest of this time in the book with the Lord. It's important that this new creation, heaven and earth, will appear chronologically following the millennium and the Great White Throne Judgment. It's not a picture of this present age in any way.

Keeping doctrinally and hermeneutically accurate protects us from false doctrines of people trying to say that we're already living in the millennium, or that there's a post-tribulation something after the millennium. It just protects us from all of those other doctrines by just taking the Word of God literally unless He says "like" or "as," which are clearly similes or metaphors.

So He's telling us chronologically, let's not miss this. Now I saw, and not before this point. So the Great Tribulation's come, the millennium's come, the end of the millennium's come, and now God is bringing in this. He says a new heaven and a new earth, and the idea here is very familiar to all of us that have been reading our Bibles.

If you're here and you haven't been reading these things yet, I can't wait for you to see these passages and for the Lord to illuminate them for you, because this is something that many of the prophets and even New Testament disciples spoke in great detail about. Psalm 102, verses 25 through 27, says, "Of old You laid the foundation of the earth, and the heavens are the work of Your hands. They will perish, but You will endure. Yes, all of them will grow old like a garment; like a cloak, You will change them and they will be changed. But You are the same, and Your years have no end."

God is outside of creation. Even the Old Testament prophets knew that back in Psalms. That was being declared there. Think about the power of that. We have science and we look to that. Remember the days when people thought that the sun rotates around the earth? Did you know there was a time they taught the opposite? The Bible was always right. The Bible says that the earth rotates, not the other way around.

There are also many things that talk about entropy, or this idea from a physics perspective of the earth slowing down and gradually turning slower and slower on its axis. Basically, the earth is dying, friends. That's why it doesn't make sense to build up treasures, as Jesus taught us, because it's all dying. It's all going to burn.

Yet, it wasn't until modern science that we can actually look with telescopes and different types of technology and equipment to actually compute it with computers. We can literally see the slowing down, the rotation, and the axis changing, and even predict that as time goes on, how slow it will go based on how slow it's been turning over five or six thousand years. And yet, our Bible told us that was all happening before science. Science is catching up to the Bible. God's always been right. It's His creation; of course, He is.

Think about Isaiah chapter 65, verses 17 and 19. "Behold, I create a new heavens and a new earth." That is pretty specific. This was 740 years before Messiah Jesus even comes to the earth. That's at least 2,700-plus years before any of the technology. Revelation wasn't written until 90 to 95 AD, so it wasn't basically rewritten. Isaiah was already writing that there would be, inspired by the Holy Spirit, "I create a new heavens and new earth, and the former shall not be remembered and come to mind. But be glad and rejoice forever in what I create, for behold, I create Jerusalem as a rejoicing and her people a joy."

Friends, it's not a blind faith. It's never been a blind faith. What about 2nd Peter chapter 3 in our New Testament, verses 12 and 13? "Looking for and hastening the coming day of God, because of which the heavens will be dissolved, being on fire. The elements will melt with fervent heat. Nevertheless, we, according to His promise, look for a new heaven and a new earth in which righteousness dwells."

God has been talking about His plan for a new heaven and a new earth for a very, very long time. Why? Because He wanted to give humanity hope that the evil and wickedness is not here to stay, but His righteousness is. The reason assigned for the appearance of the new heavens and earth is the disappearance of the first ones. As 2nd Peter 3 tells us, we're not even going to remember it.

I'm thankful I won't have those memories. The entrance of sin and death spoiled the earlier creation and became part of this rebellion. It was cursed, as we read in Genesis chapters 2 and 3. God finally deals with that curse. A new heavens and new earth is His way. The ancient Greek word here translated "new" means new in character, specifically. We sometimes think of something new as a new version of that. If I took a wineskin, it's an emulation of the previous wineskin, just made new because it's never been used.

That's not what He's saying. He's telling us in this Greek "new in character." It's not like the old character. He used a Greek word here to describe the new heavens and the new earth as not like the previous. It's new, but of character and it's fresh. This isn't just the next heaven and the next earth. This is a better heaven and a better earth replacing the old earth and the old heaven that's passed away. Please don't miss that here, because that's what He wants us to understand.

Luke chapter 21, verse 33, says heaven and earth will pass away, but Jesus said His word will live forever. In Isaiah 65, God says prophetically that He will create a new heaven and a new earth. The Hebrew word for "create" is "bara." Specifically, "bara ex nihilo." What does that mean? It means created out of nothing. He created out of nothing.

It's not like you and I, which create out of something that already exists. We can take objects, elements, and minerals, and we can bring them together. We can melt them, change their properties, and do all kinds of things with atoms, but we cannot create them. They existed, and we simply manipulate them to do different things. The very chair you're sitting on is because we took something that already existed, manipulated it, and formed it into an inanimate object.

So it's created out of nothing here. It's not refashioning of an existing material. I want to give God the glory He deserves for that. God gets the glory from "bara," and He's telling us that He's going to create this out of nothing. He's not taking any properties of this earth, any properties of this universe, any properties of the heaven and reusing them. It will all be new and better. So please have an expectation of your God that matches His expectation of how He wants to bless you.

Revelation chapter 20, verse 11, spoke about how it's going to flee or go away. At the end of chapter 20, He says that we're left in the presence of Jesus Christ and the saints alone. I love this because there's going to be no distractions. As we saw the heaven and new earth, the last thing He leads us with in verse 1 is, "also, there was no more sea."

Why does He say that? Put on your Jewish cap for a minute. What was the sea a representation of? The sea was always a representation, especially back in the day when you've got to remember people would travel on vessels. They didn't have airplanes. They would take logs or barges, tie things together, and ship materials on them. A lot of times, people spent a great deal of time on the sea.

As we all know, if you've ever gone on an expedition, there are several boats that unfortunately sank or shipwrecked. The Titanic was not clearly the first. While we may be familiar with that one, there's thousands upon thousands around the whole world. If you were a loved one, maybe a wife or a child, and you knew that your father or husband was going seafaring, you knew that there was a possibility that your loved one would not go home.

You would look at the sea as something violent. You would look at the sea as something that has its own mind, especially thinking of the pagan world living at that time. They even had names like Poseidon through some of the Greek mythology about how the ocean would destroy. It's no coincidence that it says there's no more sea. God is trying to say no longer will there be a separation. God's not going to separate from us that way. You won't lose your loved one.

The other thing that God wants us to understand is it won't be a place of evil. What they would have thought of as evil even at John's day. Please remind me where John was writing this. On the island of Patmos, which is a dot in the middle of the sea. You don't think as he's writing this that he's looking out over all of the sea and going, "Wow, this is all going to be gone"?

We already read in the book of Revelation that the beast comes out of the sea. Do you see how that idea has been carried throughout Revelation? So God says no more of it. You don't ever have to worry about that again, friends. The earth is made up of somewhere between 70 to 74% of sea today. Did you know that almost 85% of our oxygen comes from the plankton in the sea? It's not the trees.

I love trees for carbon dioxide exchange, but at the end of the day, there is far more oxygen air exchange from the plankton within the water. When God is telling you that there's no more sea, what does that tell you about the glorified body and how and why I believe it will be different? Not only because Jesus could walk through walls, but in a glorified body, physics changes.

Matter is something created within creation and is only limited by creation. When you're outside of creation, matter has no place. Most of the constructs that even our top scientists are figuring out require an element of this physical universe to make sense. When we abstract that and put a new heavens and new earth where I don't know if there'll be the same gravitational system, time certainly doesn't exist because we're outside of time at that point.

Everything that we think we understand, even our top minds, is changed. It is gone. Our engineering is going to change. God makes a perfect cube. Think of volume. I know I have engineers in here this morning, and you design bridges and buildings and all kinds of things. Think about structurally how important your foundations are and how you make sure there's a certain depth and width to the footers. And then you make sure how the building is attached to that based on wind and snow load.

We just saw in the last few weeks there was a design that was recently done in another country, and we watched a bridge fall directly into the water. Physics and engineering matter. When you look at creation as we understand it, it's going to change because now outside of creation, we're going to occupy all that cube. It's not just 1,500 miles in one direction, width and height, but there's volume. We don't even think that way today.

That means our bodies are going to be different. Why else do I say that? Because right now we use a flesh-blood system. It's all based on a pump called your heart. It circulates oxygen through your whole body. What happens if you're too cold? You have something called hypothermia. When we start to understand this, we really get the depth of what God is communicating to us.

This is just amazing because what God is trying to tell us is just how fragile in some ways the human body is. You put our earth closer to the sun than where it is today, and we burn up. You move the earth just slightly away from where the sun is today, and we all die and freeze. Our bodies can't handle it. It's not designed for that. You being in an ocean for more than 60 minutes, if you even survive at that point because of hypothermia, everything slows down.

The point is, when God's telling us here that there's not going to be a sea, there's not going to be plankton that way. You and I, where we use our respiratory system for air exchange, it's all going to change. We don't need the carbon dioxide to oxygen exchange that we need now. We're not going to be limited. That makes sense because Jesus Christ could appear to somebody on a road in His glorified body. He could appear another place. He could appear to 500 different people, and yet nobody saw Him walking to each place.

He could appear in a room of apostles gathered together because one of them in there needed just a little encouragement in his faith. What makes you think if that's His glorified body that you and I aren't going to have the same glorified body? Is He not the firstfruits of the resurrection? He tied the glorified body to the resurrection.

We get the same resurrection because He says if I'm able to do it for Me, I can certainly do it for you. That's the guarantee; that's the inheritance. So He's going to resurrect us on our last breath here on this earth, closing of the eyes and opening them into the eternity, and we're going to have glorified bodies.

He even wrote so much about that in 1st Corinthians chapter 15 of how this corruption has got to put on incorruption and this mortality has got to put on immortality. He tried to explain it in ways that we in human terms could understand. The systems and bodies must be different based on this. Breathing must be different. We have to all acknowledge that here if we acknowledge science and how the human anatomy and physiology works.

Guest (Male): Pastor Matt VanderVen on His Perfect Love. Thanks for taking part in today's study of Revelation, a book that comes with a blessing attached to those that read and study it. If you were blessed and encouraged by the Lord, we'd like to know. Email us while it's fresh on your mind at our website, hisperfectlove.org. Be sure to include your prayer requests.

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There is much more to come in Revelation. Don't miss a moment of the journey here on His Perfect Love with Pastor Matt.