Light on the Hill

James Kaddis: God is creating a priceless city, a city that is so expensive that we do not have enough money or resources in the world to build it. And yet, those will be the things that we run on. Think about that. The picture here isn't to focus on the materialism. The picture here is to focus on the fact that this is the richest city in the world, and nobody cares. They don't care about the materials. They only care about the life that they have. This is God's great reset, folks. You get it? This is what God's great reset looks like.

Guest (Male): The world is a mess. Wickedness is applauded and on the rise. Stay tuned for an encouraging edition of Light on the Hill as we look forward to a time when God takes what man has destroyed, and He destroys it all, only then to create a new and much better version that could never be destroyed again. Evil will be done away with and gone forever. Now, how does that sound? Pastor James Kaddis refers to this as God's great reset. Let's join him now in Revelation, chapter 21.

James Kaddis: Verse 18, that's where we left off. And it says this: "And the building of the wall of it was of jasper: and the city was pure gold, like unto clear glass." I just want to make something clear because so much has happened since the Garden, and when you begin to see the infrastructure of what God is doing, it makes sense. I want to encourage you, keeping in mind everything that I told you, compare what existed during the time of creation to what we see being built here.

I love it when I hear people use the word transparency because the reality of it is people don't understand what real transparency looks like. Real transparency can only be achieved when it is done God's way. There is no such thing as transparency outside of that. When you buy a home, or you have a home built, or you live in a home, what's one of the most important aspects of your home? I know what it is to me. It is privacy.

Privacy is super important. I don't want people to be able to look inside my home. It's my business. When I'm changing my clothes in my bedroom, I don't want people looking at all that. I don't want to offend people. I don't want to cause crashes on the road. I want to be able to just be to myself. I don't want people looking around. Quite frankly, you might not know this about me, but I tend to be very introverted, believe it or not. I am not an extrovert.

I am one of these guys where if you want my perfect idea of a vacation, my perfect idea of a vacation is leave me alone. That's my idea of a great vacation. I like to be alone. I don't want people looking into my life. I'm all about privacy. That's just me. That's the way I am. You would not think that based on the type of things that I do, but that's the case.

Here's the funny thing. If you go back to looking at the Garden, did you understand that everything was out in the open? Adam and Eve were walking around the Garden naked. There was no shame. They had no reason to be ashamed. Sin is what caused them to feel the need to cover themselves. So, the moment they sinned against God, the moment they transgressed against God, what happened? They needed to be covered up.

From that point on, everything was all about being covered up. It was all about privacy. It was all about the doors being closed. We talk about this. Do you understand the kind of discussions that we've had in the church? We like the idea that the amount of places that people can actually look into the church are limited. There's an advantage to only having one way in the sanctuary that people can look in.

Why? Because if an active shooter were to come in, we know what to do. There's all kinds of things we think about. The guy that oversees our security has brought up some things with us that are kind of scary if you think about it. Like, okay, I never really thought about that. But the reality of it is we use cover to our advantage. A lot of people can't look in. That's a good thing.

In heaven, do you understand that's a terrible thing? Do you understand, as we've talked about, just as we read verse 18, it completes the thoughts that we have already seen in the first 17 verses? And that's this: Heaven, this new city in heaven, is made of all material that's clear, crystal clear. So, when you look in the city, everything will be out in the open. Nothing will be hidden.

Well, guess what? That's God correcting the problem that existed in the Garden. When man chose to sin against God, everything had to be covered up. No more. There's no more no such thing. It's all out in the open. God creating a city that is crystal clear and people can see through the walls is a picture of the restoration of God. God is taking what that beautiful infrastructure was in the Garden of Eden and destroyed, and God is restoring it. He's making a city that can be seen through, very clear.

Verse 19: "And the foundations of the wall of the city were garnished with all manner of precious stones. The first foundation was jasper; the second, sapphire; the third, chalcedony; the fourth, emerald; the fifth, sardonyx; the sixth, sardius; the seventh, chrysolite; the eighth, beryl; the ninth, topaz; the tenth, chrysoprase; the eleventh, jacinth; the twelfth, amethyst."

Look at these colors. I'm guessing that these colors somewhat resemble what the foundation is going to look like. If I were to give you a description of the foundation, the foundation of this cubed building or this cubed city would look like all of these colors in a layer, just layer after layer, almost like a rainbow. But it would be completely crystal clear. So, you would see these colors even though you could see through them. It's actually a more spectacular look than anything you would see in stained glass.

Isn't it funny to me, and should it be funny to you, that so many of the colors that God has created, the very colors that we see with our eyes, are being hijacked by the devil to create a picture of ugly, when God has intended for it to become a picture of good? Think about it like this, folks. The first time we are presented with the colors of the rainbow is through the picture of a rainbow.

You want to know what's spectacular about a rainbow when you see it in the sky? What's spectacular about a rainbow when you see it in the sky is the fact that it has these translucent characteristics, that when you look at a rainbow, it's not like it's blocking whatever is behind it. You can see through the rainbow because of the crystal effect that the rain has when it comes down and the effect of the sun on the moisture that you're looking at, on the humidity that creates the picture of the rainbow.

What has the world done with those colors? The world has turned them into solid colors that cover and seek to change everything, and it creates an ugliness about it. Why? Because it does what the devil has always intended to do with the things that God has made beautiful. It takes the things that God has made beautiful and it utilizes it its own specific way, his own specific way, to make it ugly.

And that's exactly what we're seeing here. What we're reading in the Book of Revelation is God taking this new city and constructing something with materials that we view as precious, materials we view as priceless, and making them the building materials for the city that we live in. When was the last time you stopped to stare at your foundation of your home or wherever you live?

When was the last time you were ever tempted to grab a chisel and start hammering away at your foundation so you could have a piece of it and take it to market to sell? People would laugh at you, wouldn't they? I dare you to go to a swap meet and try to sell pieces of your concrete foundation. Go ahead. Let's see if you'll sell that. You're not going to do that anywhere. "Hey, I've got this very expensive." In heaven, you guys understand that what we call valuable will be nothing.

It's like the guy that decides he wants to take everything that's in his name and materialize it into gold so that he can take it with him to heaven. He dies. He goes to heaven. He takes all the gold with him. What do the angels say? "Oh, you bought more tar for the streets." It's not so valuable anymore, is it? That's part of the infrastructure that God designed for you to have so that you could do what really is valuable, and that's live, so that you could experience life, so that you could do the things that God has called you to do, so you could be the person with meaning and purpose.

It's pretty powerful when you think about the picture that's being created here. Guys, look at the significance of this. Verse 21: "And the twelve gates were twelve pearls; every several gate was of one pearl: and the street of the city was pure gold, as it were transparent glass." Everything about the city's transparent. You understand the picture behind the transparent city is that you can see through the very materials that the city was created with that were designed to be priceless materials.

You get the idea that when you start to look at the construct of the city and everything around it, it's all made of precious material. Do you realize that I have read several commentators that actually have the gall and the nerve to say that the pearly gates has to be some metaphorical description of something that is different because this gate that has this massive pearl that's bigger than anything we could possibly imagine is impossible because we've never even seen an oyster that could create such a pearl.

It doesn't exist on earth. Well, guess what? We're not describing this earth. We're describing a new heaven and a new earth, and we're describing God's holy city. So, you can say whatever you want to say, but what is impossible to you is very possible to God. I think it's really cool. By the way, we're going to get into the so-called scientist that can't think to save their lives because they're not real scientists. They're just actually a bunch of really angry people in just a minute.

But look, do you guys understand what's happening? Pure gold, pure gold lining up the streets. If you think about it, to line up the streets of a city as big as the one that we described last week, there's not enough gold on this earth if you multiplied it 50 times over. It doesn't exist. We don't have it. So, think about how common it's going to be in this time. It's just going to be whatever it is.

My dad used to tell me something when I was a kid that he was very correct about. He was very right. He would say this with his very strong Middle Eastern accent when I was destructive. Kids are destructive. I'm learning that very quickly. When I was destructive with things that he would buy or we'd scratch something very quickly or whatever, he would say, "You don't know the value of what you have." He would say that to me all the time. Or he would oftentimes say, "You don't know the value of the dollar."

Well, my dad was right. I didn't understand the value of the things that I had. I didn't recognize how hard it was for my dad to give us the type of home that we had, where we had our own bedrooms and we lived a very, very comfortable, I would say beyond comfortable life. We didn't know what it felt like to struggle. And we lived in a house where we were loved deeply and loved greatly.

But the one thing, the one thing that I can tell you that I loved more than anything reflecting back on my childhood was that we were living a relatively mid-upper mid lifestyle and we didn't care. It was, well great, we get to live here and all this. But it was let's go do the fun stuff. Let's go play. Let's interact. Let's have fun. Let's be a family. Those were the things that we thought as children. Why? Because children don't get caught up in the materialistic side of things.

And if a child does get caught up in materialistic side, it was because in my age, we were trading Garbage Pail Kid cards or baseball cards or something like that. Things that didn't even matter. The point behind what I'm trying to say is the mind of a kid is spectacular in that it really doesn't realize the value of what they have. They don't realize the value of what they have because they're focusing on things that they deem to be more valuable, like their relationships, like being accepted, being loved, the types of things that we were created to be thinking through.

Think about the significance of something like that. God is creating a priceless city, a city that is so expensive that we do not have enough money or resources in the world to build it. And yet, those will be the things that we run on. Think about that. The picture here isn't to focus on the materialism. The picture here is to focus on the fact that this is the richest city in the world and nobody cares.

They don't care about the materials. They only care about the life that they have. This is God's great reset, folks. You get it? This is what God's great reset looks like. Look what it goes on to say. I love this. It says, verse 22: "And I saw no temple therein: for the Lord God Almighty and the Lamb are the temple of it." Now, we spent some time talking about the significance of God being the temple there and why it's really important and what that all means.

But again, the picture here is we're removing the materialistic bent. We're removing the focus on all the things that represent wealth and opulence because wealth and opulence during this time will be common. It'll be nothing. Everybody has it. So what? Big deal. God being the temple is significant. If you've not heard the last couple of studies that I've done through the Book of Revelation, you need to go back and listen to it because I talk about why the temple being God is significant and why it's important that there is no temple in this city.

Verse 23: "And the city had no need of the sun, neither of the moon, to shine in it: for the glory of God did lighten it, and the Lamb is the light thereof." It's really funny because I think about the people that take this verse and they oftentimes take this verse and they couple it up with the creation account, and they freak out over the fact that there won't be sun, but there'll be light in the city and how does that work?

Well, first of all, wake up for just one second and recognize we're talking about a new heaven and a new earth. So, if there's a new heaven and a new earth, you don't need the systems that existed in order to maintain it that you do in the old heaven and the old earth. Number one. Number two, people say, "Well, this is just like the problem that you have in Revelation. Explain it to me." I've had someone tell me this recently, supposedly a smart scientist, supposedly a brilliant scientist that understands physics, understands special relativity, all these discussions. Supposedly, he has a super brain.

I showed him how lame his super brain was in literally 30 seconds. Because his question was this: "This is like the problem that you have in Genesis. God created light. He did it right away. But yet, he didn't create the sun until four days later. How in the world did that work?" Okay, you have the nerve to ask me that question and actually expect me to believe that you're smart? You have the nerve to ask me that question and expect me to believe you have a scientific level of brilliance requisite to do research that's worth a dime?

What are you talking about? Can I ask you a question? If I walk up to the light switch in this room right now and I turn it off, is there any light in the room? No, there's no light in the room. Does it mean that light doesn't exist? "Well, that's a room." Okay, let me ask you a question. Let's say I get in a spaceship, and I somehow can manage to travel at the speed of light, and I leave this galaxy, and I'm in the middle of space somewhere, and I'm not anywhere near a sun, because there's millions of them.

There's millions of suns, more than what you can count. As a matter of fact, God said it. In the Word, He says, "Try to count the stars." And He laughs. You can't do it. Everybody thought, "Oh, you could easily count the stars. It's easy." Until Hubble, and then you realize, oh wow, we can't count them. There's more than what we can count. Okay, so you're in the middle of space. It's as dark as can be. You're nowhere near a sun.

Does it mean light doesn't exist? "Well, I don't want to talk about this." You don't want to talk about this because as dumb as you appear in this conversation, you're smart enough to recognize that there's a distinct difference between the sun and light. When God says He created light, He didn't say He created the sun. He created light. The sun, with its characteristics, produces light. But what you understand in the spectrum scientifically of what is made up of light is something God created well beforehand.

So, instead of saying that God is a dummy and there's a contradiction in Scripture, maybe you recognize that what God did would fall in line with what you call scientific because God is the Creator of everything that science was designed to understand and learn. Understand? So, the idea behind God being the light source that exists in heaven speaks of a permanence that can no longer be corrupted or destroyed.

Understand, when we sinned against God, we corrupted and we destroyed the very earth that we live in. We literally just trashed it. It was gone. God says, "I become the source of that light now." By the way, it's interesting if you really examine the language of this verse that we just read. It would also imply that the light that you see from the moon is not one that emanates from the moon. It's reflective. Which means light is something that is relative depending upon what the source is.

Understand? It's more scientific than a lot of people want to even think or imagine. But it's a pretty powerful picture that's being drawn here. Wait until you see the next verse. So, the city had no need of sun. "And the nations," watch this, "and the nations of them which are saved shall walk in the light of it: and the kings of the earth do bring their glory and honour into it."

Go back to Genesis, chapter 11. Watch what happened. Genesis chapter 11 was their new flavor of globalism. It was the very first time we began to see their picture of it. What does the Bible tell us? The Bible says that God looked at what these people could do in the fact that they had one language, and there was nothing that was in their head that they were incapable of doing.

So, what did God do? God had mercy upon them, and instead of destroying the world, what did He do? He confused them and caused them to speak other languages. That was the end of globalism and the beginning of nationalism as we know it. I don't spend a lot of time talking about it because we haven't touched that portion to talk about it. But that's when we began to see the birth of the nations.

And the existence of all nations in its own perverted way has tried to go back to the mechanism of globalism for the purpose of rebellion against God and accomplishing sin. Funny how that works. But do you understand that if Christ isn't in the middle of it, we might stop the so-called new world order for a short period of time, but the flavor of nationalism that will exist in every country around the world will be one that will be centered around satanism in one way or another.

You know the nationalism that exists within the United States is centered around satanism. The greatest form of satanism that it centers around right now in this very moment is abortion. By the time we get to the end of this year, we will have murdered 1.6 million babies, all in the name of nationalism. "Let's give it back to the states." Don't get me wrong. I think nationalism can be a very, very good thing.

But when you see the flavor of nationalism being applied when there is no redemption tied to it, no matter how righteous it might appear, it's always going to have an unrighteous avenue. Don't get me wrong. I think President Trump will go down as probably one of the best presidents we've ever had in the United States of America, but he's not the answer to mankind. The answer to mankind is Christ.

So, when you look at the end, when you look at the end game and what God is doing here in Revelation, He's taking those nations that contributed to the degradation of our world, and those nations now will honor God and will contribute to the condition that exists that is never to be broken again. It's a pretty powerful story. The Bible tells us that the nations rage. They plot in vain. That's what the Bible tells us. We're not going to see any of that in the Book of Revelation anymore. Now, the nations will praise God as they were designed to do, and we will live and exist as a world where we will not see any of that anymore. That's a pretty heavy picture that's being drawn. I love that.

Guest (Male): Pastor James, there are many questions people have about heaven. Here's one: Is heaven boring? Will we miss something we have on earth that isn't in heaven?

James Kaddis: Well, first of all, heaven is undoubtedly not boring. It never will be boring. And I think that that's very, very important to understand because heaven is a place where if you think of the most enjoyable, the greatest, the thing that you can do on this earth, the thing that brings you the most pleasure, that is the bottom of the barrel in heaven. As a matter of fact, we see descriptions of heaven where the streets are in essence paved of gold.

Think about it like this: Tar, which is literally valueless but serves a function, serves a practical function, is now being associated with gold. That is what we walk on in heaven. So, the Apostle Paul tells us that the human language cannot legally, effectively describe what exists in heaven. So, will there be boredom in heaven? Absolutely not. A lot of people oftentimes conflate the things that are said about heaven with some kind of a redundancy, meaning you're just going to keep saying the same thing for eternity. But it is absolutely not that. I think that God is the Creator of all that is interesting and beautiful and entertaining. It's going to be amazing.

Guest (Male): Well said. Thanks, Pastor James. As we're going through Revelation, this is a great time to mention Pastor James's new book entitled, The Last Book. It will share what you need to know about Revelation, the Rapture, and the end times. This guide to Revelation is part one of two, and you can order it today at LightontheHillRadio.com or at Amazon. Now, let's finish up our study in Revelation, chapter 21.

James Kaddis: So, it had no sun. The nations of them which are saved shall walk in the light of it, and the kings of the earth do bring their glory and honor to it. Verse 25: "And the gates of it shall not be shut at all by day: for there shall be no night there." No more darkness. No need for gates to actually produce the same function that they used to.

Remember, we talked about this last week, that the city of heaven is built upon the foundation of the apostles, and the gatekeeping function of it all sits on the world of the nation of Israel. Think about the beautiful picture that that brings. In other words, the kingdom of heaven, the picture of this beautiful city, is sustained by the people of God. The people become the foundation.

The people become the gateway. It's no longer about the material. It's no longer about the opulence. It's no longer about what you have. It's about taking all that exists around you and using it as a tool that causes you to stay focused on the Creator. I think it's a beautiful picture that's being drawn here.