God Will Live with Them

An old man sits on a rocky island in the sea, far from home. The waves crash below him. And in front of his eyes, the whole sky is changing. The old world is passing away. Something new is coming down.

The man is John, a follower of Jesus. Near the end of the first century, the Roman authorities have sent him to Patmos, a small, rocky island in the Aegean Sea, because of his witness to Jesus. The churches he loves on the mainland are under pressure. Some believers have been killed. And on the Lord's day, John is given a series of visions, which he writes down in the book we call Revelation. It is full of strange and powerful pictures: thrones and trumpets, beasts and battles, a Lamb and a dragon. But near the very end, the visions grow quiet and bright.

“And I saw a new heaven and a new earth: for the first heaven and the first earth were passed away; and there was no more sea.” For people in John's time, the sea often stood for chaos and danger, and for John on Patmos, it was the very thing that kept him apart from the people he loved. In the new creation it is gone. “And I John saw the holy city, new Jerusalem, coming down from God out of heaven, prepared as a bride adorned for her husband.” Not people climbing up to heaven, but heaven's city coming down, beautiful and ready, like a bride on her wedding day.

Then John hears a loud voice from the throne. “Behold, the tabernacle of God is with men, and he will dwell with them, and they shall be his people, and God himself shall be with them, and be their God.” The tabernacle was the tent where God lived among Israel in the desert. Now God's home is not in a tent or a temple. It is with people, all of them. And then come some of the gentlest words in the whole Bible. “And God shall wipe away all tears from their eyes; and there shall be no more death, neither sorrow, nor crying, neither shall there be any more pain: for the former things are passed away.”

Think about what is on that list. Death, gone. Sorrow, gone. Crying, gone. Pain, gone. Every hospital, every funeral, every lonely night, every hurt. And God does not just make them stop. He wipes the tears away himself, the way a parent wipes a child's face. Then the one sitting on the throne speaks. “Behold, I make all things new.” Not all new things, as if he throws the old world away, but all things new. The same world, healed and remade. And he tells John, write this down, for these words are true and faithful.

When was this written? Around the year one hundred and eighty, Irenaeus, the bishop of Lyon, wrote that John's vision was seen not long before his own lifetime, towards the end of the reign of the emperor Domitian. Domitian ruled Rome from eighty-one to ninety-six AD. So most historians place Revelation in the nineties of the first century, when John was an old man.

God will live with them. You can read it in Revelation chapter twenty-one, verses one to five. At Christmas, Christians celebrate Immanuel, God with us, the Word who became flesh and, as John's gospel says, pitched his tent among us. Revelation shows where that story is going: a day when God's home is with his people for ever, and every tear is wiped away. So here is a question to carry with you. God promises to wipe away every tear. What tears are you looking forward to God wiping away?