Dennis Tuuri

# Sermon Transcript: “The Last City”
**Revelation 21:1-11**

Sermon text for today is Revelation 21:1-11. Our sermon topic is the last city. Please stand.

Revelation 21, beginning at the beginning of the chapter:

“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. Then I, John, saw the holy city, New Jerusalem, coming down out of heaven from God, prepared as a bride adorned for her husband.

And I heard a loud voice from heaven saying, ‘Behold, the tabernacle of God is with men, and he will dwell with them and they shall be his people. God himself will be with them and be their God. And God will wipe away every tear from their eyes. There shall be no more death nor sorrow nor crying. There shall be no more pain, for the former things have passed away.’ Then he who sat on the throne said, ‘Behold, I make all things new.

And he said to me, ‘Write, for these words are true and faithful.’ And he said to me, ‘It is done. I am the Alpha and the Omega, the beginning and the end. I will give of the fountain of the water of life freely to him who thirsts. He who overcomes shall inherit all things, and I will be his God, and he shall be my son.’ But the cowardly, unbelieving, abominable, murderers, sexually immoral, sorcerers, idolaters, and all liars shall have their part in the lake which burns with fire and brimstone, which is the second death.

Then one of the seven angels who had the seven bowls filled with the seven last plagues came to me and talked with me, saying, ‘Come, I will show you the bride, the Lamb’s wife.’ And he carried me away in the Spirit to a great and high mountain, and showed me the great city, the holy Jerusalem, descending out of heaven from God, having the glory of God. Her light was like a most precious stone, like a jasper stone, clear as crystal.”

Let’s pray.

Lord God, we thank you for this description of the last city, and we pray that you would enable us, Father, to think of the cities we live in and to pray for them that they might reflect the beautiful substance of the final eschatological city. We thank you, Lord God, for the progression of history. We thank you for your scriptures, interpreting the history of our world to us. Bless us, Lord God, that we might repent today again before you, that we might be more powerful as a result of that repentance to carry the brilliance of your light into our cities and transform them. In Jesus’ name we pray.

Amen. Please be seated.

—

**Tale of Two Cities**

That’s in a way what the Bible is all about. That’s a simple summation. At least from the fall onward, what we have is a tale of two cities. The history of the world is essentially a history of two cities. Last week we looked at the first city and looked at all the implications of fallen man establishing that city and all the problems with it, all the disasters that we see running through cities throughout the last 6,000 years of human history.

We see those same things, and we see them in our day and age as well. There’s a city, and it’s a city built initially by Cain and his descendants. It’s sinful, and it’s racked with sin. Although it also has great cultural progression that goes on, just like our cities today. On the other hand, at the end of the Bible, what we’re looking at today is the last city. So the first and the last. And the last city is what God is about.

He’s about establishing a city. God is a city planner. He is a God who moves us from a garden at the beginning of the Bible to a city at the end of the Bible. Now, the city reflects the garden. It’s kind of a garden city. Earlier in the book of Revelation, it talks about a river running in the middle of it, that there are trees on either side bearing fruit, and uses language very similar to Psalm 1. It also takes us back, of course, to the creation of the Garden of Eden, which also has rivers coming out of it, also has trees bearing fruit, et cetera.

So the garden theme is developed and advanced. That’s very significant, of course, for how we understand our world. Cities aren’t bad. Cities are God’s idea. Cities are what God wants. He is a city planner, and he develops the eschatological city over the course of 6,000 years. That becomes eventually the only city left standing. The last city standing is the eschatological city, the New Jerusalem, which we just read a description of.

So that’s what we want to do—talk about that today. The idea here is we chose in this Lenten season to preach several sermons on cities and to have an emphasis on seeking God for our cities, but also applying Jeremiah 29 to seek the peace of the city where God has placed us. And so, how do we do that?

Well, I think we have to do it, number one, by understanding the nature of fallen men and the cities they built. You’ve got to know where you’re at if you’re going to get to a destination, right? You’ve got to know where you’re starting. If you go to MapQuest, which I guess probably nobody does anymore, but you have to put in the start address. Then you’ve got to put in an ending address, right? So the starting address is that first city and the ending address is the last city. So we have to know what our cities are like, and we have to have a heavenly vision, which what we get in worship through God’s word interpretation of events.

Our cities are frequently like that description of the city that Cain and Enoch built, and that Lamech sort of symbolized. And as I said last week, that city also ultimately eventuates in the Tower of Babel. It’s the same principles at work. And in the context for our text today, the other city contrasted with this New Jerusalem that’s destroyed in chapter 18—you remember what it’s called? It’s Babylon. And in the Bible, Babylon and Babel are the same. They’re really the same.

So the fallen city of man, beginning with the city that Cain and Enoch built, then as they developed the Tower of Babel, and the city that Nimrod then built, Babylon—that city is the city of fallen men in various forms, development, and maturation. And at the end of the age, what’s described for us is the end of everything, and the end of everything is the destruction of that city Babylon and the formation—or the full maturation, I guess I should say—of the last city Jerusalem.

—

**Two Purposes for Today**

So there are two purposes for today. One is to look at the characteristics of that last city. Really, for two purposes. One is to cause us to repent. For instance, we’ll talk in a little while about holiness. The first thing we’re told about the New Jerusalem is it’s the holy city, right? The holy city. And so the aspects of who we are that aren’t holy—whatever that means in the Bible—we want to repent for our lack of holiness, because that’s what we take as part of God’s city builders and city planners into the cities in which we live.

If we can’t show them holiness and work and develop holiness in the cities, then we’ve failed in our task. So one is personal repentance. That’s what Lent’s about. But two, we want to transform our cities. For instance, here in Oregon City, we want to pray that Oregon City can use this very section of Scripture and other sections in Revelation to pray that Oregon City look like those attributes of New Jerusalem, because that’s God’s intent.

God’s intent is that we move away from first city and transform into last city. So that’s kind of the purpose of looking at cities and specifically beginning with the first city and now moving to the last city.

We know where we’re at. We know where we’re going to. And as a result, we know how to get there—if we know where we’re coming from, where we’re going to, and our role in all of that.

—

**God’s Will on Earth**

This is really as simple as praying the Lord’s Prayer. In the Lord’s Prayer, we pray that God’s will might be done on earth as it is in heaven. So we have a picture of the heavenly Jerusalem, and we have a picture of it coming down over the earth. And that’s the answer to our prayers—that God’s will might be done on earth as it is in heaven.

And we don’t pray that just happen at the end of time, do we? No, of course not. We’re praying that might be the trajectory of our lives. That might be the content of our lives—that God’s will might be done more and more here on earth as it is in heaven. So we get a heavenly perspective on what cities are supposed to be and will be ultimately.

And we pray for that. And then we work to that end as we leave this place today. As we go back into our cities, into our communities, we seek transformation in light of first city moving into and being transformed into the last city.

—

**Old Jerusalem and New Jerusalem**

Now, in this text, we need to do a couple of things. First, I want to talk about New Jerusalem. This phrase that’s used—the holy city, New Jerusalem—is what our text says. And so that means there was an old Jerusalem, and it means there’s a new Jerusalem.

This is significant. When we get to the book of Revelation, what we’re looking at are some of the major themes of the Bible. In terms of the New Jerusalem, this is referenced three or four times in the New Testament, and it implies that there was an old Jerusalem. In point of fact, in the book of Revelation, the city that I mentioned earlier, Babylon, is the old Jerusalem. The description of Babylon there really is talking about Jerusalem.

Most of the book of Revelation, I believe, is talking about the destruction of the city of Jerusalem, culminating in the events of AD 70—that is, the destruction of the old city Babylon/Jerusalem. And then we have the New Jerusalem. Very significant.

While these cities have place references and there are historical cities—Babylon, Jerusalem, et cetera—God’s talking about something else. And when he talks about something else, referring to sinful Jerusalem as Babylon, he’s reminding us, he’s telling us, he’s making these verses very applicable to us. If they’re just talking about two places in the Middle East someplace, well, that’s interesting and we can learn some stuff. But what he’s talking about are our cities.

And the best of cities can go apostate and can go from being more of a picture of New Jerusalem and become Babylon. Okay, so when we read this reference to New Jerusalem, it helps universalize this text to us. Its application is far-reaching. It involves every city. And actually, within every city—the scriptures say that our citizenship is in heaven, right? As Christians, and it says that the heavenly Jerusalem is the mother of all of us in Galatians.

So in our cities that we dwell in, we are actually there as people whose citizenship is already in New Jerusalem. So the two cities are already being played out in the context of where we live and what we do. So it universalizes the understanding of it, and it helps us to see that within our cities they can be predominantly New Jerusalem or predominantly Babylonian. That’s not our job to figure out. But what we are supposed to do is take this message of what citizens of the New Jerusalem are supposed to be like, based on the description, and try to achieve that in our lives. Try to have that be our goal for ourselves personally, as we interact in our cities.

And then secondly, we can pray for, seek to understand the cities in which we live, and then engage in them in a move to transform them into aspects of the New Jerusalem.

—

**A Previous New Jerusalem**

Now the other thing that’s interesting here is that there was already a new Jerusalem. So what do I mean by that?

In the Old Testament, there was Jerusalem, and then there was the time of exile. The northern and southern kingdoms go into exile. Jerusalem is destroyed, carted off into captivity. And then God sends along—by the way, carted off into captivity in Babylon. So interesting. But then God sends along an emperor of Persia named Cyrus.

And let me read you a couple of verses about Cyrus.

In Isaiah 44:28, we read God says of Cyrus, “He is my shepherd. He shall perform all my pleasures, saying to Jerusalem, ‘You shall be built,’ and to the temple, ‘Your foundation shall be laid.’” And we know that’s just what happened, right? So Nehemiah was empowered to go back and rebuild the temple and then the city as well. And the temple is the basis for the city. But in any event, Cyrus’s job was to build the New Jerusalem or to facilitate that. It’s essentially what’s going on here.

In Isaiah 45:13, “I have raised him up in righteousness and I will direct all his ways. He shall build my city and let my exiles go free, not for price or reward,” says the Lord of Hosts.

So in the Bible, God has already built a New Jerusalem when he brings the exiles back, and he uses a guy named Cyrus to do it. If we wanted to take the time, and it would take a lot of time, but we could look at the events of the rebuilding—or the building—of New Jerusalem under Cyrus and Nehemiah and those guys. We could look at those historical events as they’re portrayed for us in the Bible and compare them to what’s happening in the book of Revelation, as the greater Cyrus, the Lord Jesus Christ, has died, is raised up, ascends to the right hand of the Father, and builds his city.

The context for the city building—that is, the manifestation of the city that we see here—is earlier, a couple of chapters earlier from here. Jesus goes forth to conquer, right? And he’s got the gospel coming out of his mouth. He’s got the Word of God, and the Word of God is going to conquer. He’s ascended, and he sends a church out into the world to preach the gospel.

And it’s like warfare on the old city, Babylon, and it’s creating the New city, the New Jerusalem. So that’s the context for what’s happening here. And we can look at that and look at Jesus as the greater Cyrus. Cyrus makes a proclamation. Jesus makes a proclamation. Cyrus then empowers people to go and build the city. Jesus empowers people to go and build this New Jerusalem, which becomes manifest at the end of time.

And we can walk right through the description of these things. We could look at the prophecies of Ezekiel relative to the city and the destruction of Babylon and see it match up very much with what we have here in the book of Revelation and the historical events of Cyrus and Nehemiah.

So the point of that is that what we’re reading here is in part the way God works in history. It’s not just a description of the last city and the culmination of all things. But this whole book of Revelation is showing us how God has worked before and how God works in history.

Revelation has specific historical references in it. The text we’re reading today—the specific historical reference is the consummation of all things, the return of the Lord Jesus Christ, the merging of heaven and earth, when there’ll be no glassy sea, right? The sea is the firmament. It doesn’t mean there won’t be a sea on earth. It means that the sea—the boundary between heaven and earth, the firmament which looks like the glassy sea from heaven—that’ll be done away with because heaven and earth come together. This is a historical truth. This is what’s going to happen at the end of time.

And earlier in the book, much of what’s being described happens with God’s judgment in Jerusalem in AD 70 and then with the preaching of the gospel in that first-century church and what happens to it. So those are real historical events being alluded to in the book of Revelation. But these historical events are the way God works. He doesn’t do this just as a history lesson. He does this to inform us how he’s working now.

So in a very real sense, while New Jerusalem is going to be consummated at some point in time, it’s being built now through the gospel being proclaimed, people being conquered. At the end of the book of Revelation—not the very last verses, but just before that—we read that the Spirit and the bride say, “Come.” And the one who hears this book says, “Come.” And those who come are those who are thirsty to drink from the water of life. Who are they? They’re those who are outside of the New Jerusalem. They’re being summoned to come to New Jerusalem and to drink that water.

That’s what we do. We call people into the city of God, into citizenship in heaven, to be participants in the New Jerusalem—the eschatological final city, which will eventually be fully manifested, but which is being manifested now in time and history in small ways. So the text before us is a description of the goal, the culmination, what will actually happen. But it’s also a description of what’s real now.

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**Seven Characteristics of the Eschatological City**

Okay. What’s real now? And as we go through some of these characteristics, we’ll see that.

So now we’re going to talk about seven specific characteristics. And there are other ways we could break this text up, but I’m looking at seven specific characteristics of the eschatological, the last city. Okay? And the purpose of looking at this is in part that we might repent and be built up in who we are as citizens of the New Jerusalem, that we might shake off some more dust from Babylon.

And secondly, that we might be God’s people sent into the Babylons, the Enoch cities of our day and age, to transform them into things that reflect the eschatological last city. So I hope that makes sense. That’s the purpose of this—these two-fold aspects.

When we get to the end of the service today, we’re going to sing “The Son of God Forth to War,” right? That’s who we are. We’re in Jesus, and we’re like lining up with Jesus, going forth conquering and to conquer on the white horse, and we’re like him. We’re in him. And when we leave here, having repented of our sins, been made stronger by God as Christian soldiers, we’ll preach the gospel. We’ll talk about the implications of what Jesus has done for our cities, for our lives personally, and will be those that are used by the Lord God to transform our cities into stronger and stronger models of New Jerusalem by getting rid of Babylon.

All right.

—

**1. Holy and Adorned**

Number one. The first aspect of the city: she’s holy and adorned.

“Then I, John, saw the holy city, New Jerusalem, coming down out of heaven from God, prepared as a bride adorned for her husband.”

So the first thing is she’s holy and adorned. And there’s a sense in which both those things are true—that the holiness is the adorning of the bride. They’re kind of lumped together here. We could say some other things about this verse. It’s important to recognize that the initiative in this is God’s. He’s doing this ultimately. He’s the one who’s using us. It’s not our initiative ultimately. It’s the Lord God. He’s sovereign. It’s coming down out of heaven. It’s linked to our prayers that we pray every Lord’s day—that God’s will be done on earth as in heaven.

But notice this first aspect of holiness. So the new city, the eschatological city, is a city of holiness. It’s the holy city. What’s holiness?

Well, we have some thoughts of holiness that are common. One is that it means this idea of not being unholy. So we don’t do bad things. We’re good morally, right? We try not to do the things that we are ashamed of and would do in the darkness rather than in the light. So God calls us to personal holiness. And there are some of you, perhaps a number of you here today, who know that there are things in your life that are not holy—that really are unholy.

And what you need to do today is to repent of those things. In this season of Lent, you want to make renewed commitments. You don’t just want to feel bad about it. It’s easy enough to feel bad about what you do. You do it, you feel bad when you do it anyway. But the idea of Lent is to repent for those sins of a lack of personal holiness, and to transform yourself—to be transformed by the Holy Spirit—to commit yourself to new levels of holiness.

So when you walk out the doors, you’re not just saying, “Well, I felt bad,” you know? But you say, “I’m going to do better by the power and grace of God. And I’m going to talk to my wife or I’m going to talk to my husband. I’m going to talk to my friends. I’m going to talk to my community group and ask them to keep me accountable for being more holy.”

Now, this is the lead characteristic of the city of God here as opposed to the city of men. And we saw in the description of the city of men last week absolute unholiness, right? And one of the things that Christians are supposedly talked to too much about is sex. But the Bible talks a lot about it. And what we saw in the city of man last week with Lamech was sexual sin—two wives instead of one, right? And as a result of that, oppression, murder, anger, et cetera.

So if nothing else, and actually in the description of the New Jerusalem that’s given to us in Revelation 21, it lists some people that are excluded from it, culminating in liars, but it lists those who are sexually immoral. If you want a list of the unholiness that’s being talked about here that we need to repent of, you can just look at the list of people who are excluded from the city of God. Let’s see where is it. I have it here somewhere. Okay. Yeah, it’s in verse 8. I read this:

“But the cowardly, unbelieving, abominable—people whose actions or attitudes stink, that’s what the word means—murderers, remember, slander is murder. Sexually immoral, sorcerers, idolaters, and all liars shall have their part in the lake which burns with fire and brimstone, which is the second death.”

Holiness is not engaging in those activities. By the way, notice the way it culminates in lying. Lying is unholy. Absolutely unholy.

In Psalm 32, we have a list of the three kinds of words that are used for sin in the Old Testament: “Blessed is he whose transgression is forgiven.” So when you lie, it’s a transgression, okay? Or when you rob, you’ve trespassed God’s law that says don’t do that. “Your transgression is forgiven.” “Whose sin is covered.” Sin here doesn’t mean transgression. It means a state of impurity or unholiness that results from your violation of God’s law, okay? And our sin, our impurity, has to be covered through the atoning blood of Christ, okay?

And then third: “Blessed is the man to whom the Lord does not impute iniquity.” What does that mean? Iniquity means you’re liable for punishment. So you steal something from somebody or you slander somebody, right? You’ve transgressed the law. You’ve created unholiness or impurity in the context of your being. And you’ve made yourself liable for punishment.

And what happens when you have an attitude of being liable for punishment? That’s what Cain did. That’s why he built the first city. He knew he was liable for punishment. He was afraid. He was paranoid, right?

And what happens is if we confess our sins, all those things are dealt with, right? The transgression itself is dealt with. The shame and impurity is dealt with. And the guilt and the resulting dread of God’s punishment upon us is taken away. That’s what it says in the Bible over and over again—these three aspects of sin. What we say is a single word of sin, and all those things are dealt with through the cross of the Lord Jesus Christ.

Now, what’s interesting to me, and why I’m looking at this verse in Psalm 32, is so it’s got this three-fold designation, right? This is what sin is, and you can move away from that through confession and actually not just get rid of those things, but you’re blessed. You move into blessedness through confession and repentance, turning away from those things.

“Blessed is the man, as I said, to whom the Lord does not impute iniquity. And here’s the last clause of these two verses: ‘And in whose spirit there is no deceit.’”

You see, ultimately the sin that’s focused on at the end of this list is deceit. And it’s primarily the deceit of not confessing what you’ve really done. It’s that kind of deceit. But the point here is that lying is a radical violation of our call to be holy. Deceit is. Sexual immorality is, okay? Slandering is, because it’s like murder.

So if you want to know what holiness is, which is to characterize the city and the inhabitants of the city, one way to do it is to look at the sorts of things we’re not supposed to do. And that’s fine.

Now, there are some other definitions, though, that would help us get a little broader than just kind of a sense of personal holiness. We’re told in Leviticus—quoted in the New Testament, but in Leviticus 19—we’re told to be holy, for God is holy. And it goes on to say two things. Can’t get into it, but Leviticus 19 is laid out very carefully in a literary structure. And the first section is a little clump of a couple of verses there. And what it says is, “Be holy, for I am holy.” And then it says do two things. One, reverence your parents. And two, keep my Sabbaths. That’s holiness, okay?

At the head of the list—now the whole chapter has 70 commands about holiness, but at the head of it, in the initial stages of it, it talks about our relationship to God in community, specifically to people who are in hierarchical authorities in our lives. And it says that holiness means having a proper reverence. It’s a strong word. It means to worship. Now, clearly it doesn’t want you to be idolatrous with your parents or with authorities, but to reverence—have a strong attitude of respect and love—for your authorities. That’s holiness according to the Bible.

So it goes outside of just, you know, sexual purity. It gets into our relationship to culture and community. And ultimately, holiness in its basic meaning of the word means to be totally consecrated to God. That’s what the word means. Basically, to be set aside to, to be sanctified—to be holy—means to be totally dedicated to God, okay? Everything is about who you’re sanctified to, okay?

And so ultimately this holiness—the first attribute of the city of God in the New Jerusalem—is a calling for us to be totally consecrated in all that we do. So that we don’t have these little moments or slices out of our life, big or small, where other factors are what we’re really following apart from our commitment to be disciples and followers of the Lord Jesus Christ.

Holiness means we’re consecrated. Every one of us today has the ability to, or has the call from God, I think, to repent for aspects of unholiness in our lives. You know, “Prone to wander, Lord, I feel it.” You know, while we live before the final coming, we have an Adamic nature that stays with us, and that nature calls us to unholiness. And so holiness is this first attribute, and it’s exceedingly significant, and it’s something that we should attend to. And this is the beginning of repentance for us—a lack of total consecration to God, specifically lined out in Leviticus 19 in reference to parents, in reference to the greater authority of God in regulating our time.

Our time, right? Our time is what indicates whether we’re holy or not. So holiness is the first attribute that adorns us, right? We’re a bride adorned for her husband when we do that. So it means consecrated.

—

**2. The Presence of God**

The second aspect is the presence of God. At least the aspects that I’m drawing out here, okay.

So we go down to verse 3 and we read: “I heard a loud voice from heaven saying, ‘Behold, the tabernacle of God is with men, and he will dwell with them.’”

He will dwell with us. The second aspect—these are not maybe you’re expecting something different, but if you look at these—are the significant aspects of who we are. This is what Jesus came to accomplish for us. And who we are: people that dwell with the presence of God in us, okay?

Okay. In our midst now—you know, holiness is obviously something we’re called to do now, not to wait till the eschaton, not to wait till Jesus returns and the New Jerusalem happens ultimately. John 14:21 says the same thing about God’s presence:

“He who has my commandments and keeps them. It is he who loves me. He who loves me will be loved by my Father. I will love him and manifest myself to him.”

He will be present with us. He loves us. Love desires presence. If you say you love somebody and don’t ever want to be around them, that ain’t love. Something else going on. Love manifests itself in a desire to be with someone. And Jesus says, “I’ll be with you.” The last thing he says at the end of the great commission: “Lo, I am with you always.”

So we don’t wait for the end of time, for the New Jerusalem to come at the return of Jesus, to think about the presence of God. It’s a present reality. It’s a present reality because the New Jerusalem has already begun, okay?

And we’re to pray for the transformation of the fallen cities we live in, that they’d reflect the beauty of the New Jerusalem. And part of that means that we pray that the presence of God—first of all, holiness would be in our cities. So we work against unholiness. And secondly, that these cities would understand and rejoice in the presence of God with them.

Remember Cain, what does he do? He goes away from the presence of God, right? That’s his whole gig. He’s going away. He’s getting away from God. People move to cities sometimes because they want to get away from God. Want to run away. And we’re called in those cities to say God is manifest to his people that dwell in his new city, even though they live specifically in the modern day Babylon.

So the presence of God. Now think about that. Think about it in your life. You know what is our Christianity all about? Is it a list of things that we’re supposed to do, that we check the boxes of? Is that what it is? Well, there are things we’re supposed to do. And there’s nothing wrong with checking the boxes. But if that’s what we think being a citizen of heaven is about, we got it a little backwards, right?

Because what we are—those who have the presence of God dwelling with us through the Holy Spirit—who indwells right now. We should experience that. This is not some kind of objective truth that’s not experiential. Of course it should be experienced. There should be times in each of our lives when we recognize, and maybe lots of times, when we know we’re in the presence of God and he loves us, and Jesus is with us through the Spirit, and we tell him, “Praise God, right? We lift our hands to him. We sing. God’s presence is manifested to us.

Now, frequently that’s in relationship to the scriptures, right? You read the scriptures and you hear God’s voice speaking to you in the present through those scriptures—unlike any other book that can speak to you in the present, ongoing. The word of God comes to you through the scriptures. Or it can be the presence of God and the encouraging statements of another person, right? The presence of God is manifested to you when someone brings you the power of the Holy Spirit in encouraging you, or maybe even rebuking you.

God’s presence means when you’re sinning, it’s a little different kind of presence. The point is people talking to you, or it could just as well be simply the manifestation of a sense of assurance that God is with us right now. I mean, it’s significant, right? It’s one of these lead characteristics of what the New Jerusalem is about. If God’s not in the New Jerusalem, it’s not much of a city, right? Might have a lot of diversions and stuff, but what we want, what our souls long and thirst for, is God himself.

And the promise in the New Jerusalem is that he will be present with us. And we receive some of that. Not, you know, it’s by faith, not by sight, but we have some of that now. And so we seek—it’s proper to seek the presence of God in our lives, to acknowledge it, to say, “Oh, yeah, that’s what it’s about. I forgot. I was just doing a bunch of stuff and I was checking the boxes and I was just doing what I was supposed to do, but I didn’t really meditate, talk to God, and recognize his presence with me.”

So presence is the second characteristic I wanted to focus on here. And as I said, it’s an ongoing thing, just like the New Jerusalem is. It’s present now, but it’s also going to be consummated at the end of time when God will be with us in the way he’s not now. And it says that he will dwell with them, okay?

Now, it’s interesting too, by the way—not to make too big a deal out of it—but it also means that God dwells with us corporately. So in the worship service, when we sing praises to God, when we hear his word preached, when we pray, we should have a sense of the presence of God here dwelling with us corporately.

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**3. God’s People**

And then next it says—and this is our third aspect—”They shall be his people,” okay? So that’s different, right? The presence of God is good, but this language, “They shall be his people,” means we’re part of God’s family. We’re his peeps, right? We’re part of a community that really represents his family. He’s God. He’s present with us. But he also says that we have this community relationship to him. We’re his people.

We’ve been adopted into his family, right? We have a relationship with God that isn’t just an acknowledgement of his presence, but it’s tighter than that. It’s more beautiful than that. It’s more significant than just that. It is this idea that what we have is the presence of God, but also we have sonship. We’re united to Christ. We’re his people because Jesus is his people, and we’re part of the family of God.

So when we come together, we see each other, and there should be a growing sense throughout history of a church becoming more and more a family. And so if that’s not the case, what does it mean? Well, it doesn’t mean you just give up. It means you repent. “I wasn’t very family-like to that member of our church.” And then you try to manifest this, because we know that God has made us part of his family. And the greatest place that’s seen is in two places: the conversion of a family into a Christian family, and also the family of the household of God that’s represented by a particular church.

So we’re his family. We’re his sons. We have sonship. Again, this is not new. John 1:12 says: “But as many as received him, to them he gave the right to become children of God, to those who believe in his name.”

Well, you believe in his name. You’ve received him. So you’re already children of God. You don’t have to wait for the consummation for this to be true. He’s your people now, okay?

Now, then it will be more manifest. You’ll believe it more. All doubt will be removed, et cetera. All the sin that clogs up with guilt and shame our realization that we are sons and daughters of God—all that stuff’s going to be dealt with definitively. But we should experience now, to some degree, this great blessing of being sons, being part of the family of God.

We’re his people now. And so number one: it’s a great source of joy to us. It’s a mark of our citizenship in heaven. And then secondly, that means that’s what we take with us into Babylon to transform it into New Jerusalem. When we go into our cities—you know, metaphorically speaking—engage in the city through whatever activities we do, so as those who are holy, those who have the presence of God dwelling with us as we go into the city. Otherwise, there’s no ability to transform anything without the presence of God with us.

And we go in with a confidence of the love that we have in Christ, that we’re part of his family. We’re his people, okay? And so that helps us to go in fully consecrated to his purposes. And that’s what we’re calling people to do.

Now, remember, most cities are places of tremendous isolation these days, right? It’s all, you know, kind of dog eat dog. There are communities that form, but there’s a lot of isolation in cities. I mean, it’s legendary. And what you have is this tremendous beautiful lure of being part of the family of God, with the presence of God with them, okay?

So part of the way we transform the city is we pray that Oregon City might reject and repent of its unholiness, might accept submission to God and delight in him. We pray that the city of Oregon City might experience the presence of God, primarily through the people of God, and that Oregon City might be a place where they recognize that this city is the part of the people of God. That’s their identity, right?

The old city’s identity is in their work, right? “We’re going to make a name for ourselves. We’re going to build this city. We’re going to do our job, make a name for ourselves.” But the new city—you know, our identity is that we’re the people of God. Now, that means we do our jobs well. It means we do them with beauty and excellence and diligence, but that’s not our identity.

Our identity ultimately is we’re the people of God.

—

Now, one last thing—should I say this now or should I wait just a minute? Well, these things kind of go together. But you know, the Bible, of course, in Romans 8 talks about this sonship idea that we’re part of the people of God, right? And we read in Romans 8:

“For you did not receive a spirit of bondage again to fear, you know.”

So that’s what you’ve got in the old city—a spirit of bondage to fear. And in contrast to that, what we have in the New Jerusalem, our citizenship being in heaven: “We receive the Spirit of adoption by whom we cry out, ‘Abba, Father.’”

“Abba, Father.” And I’ve mentioned this before, but we heard a talk, and the speaker pointed out that “Abba Father” is only used in three places in the Bible here and in Galatians. And then our Savior utters that expression of being part of God’s family, having being part of his people, so to speak, in Mark 14:36: “Abba, Father, all things are possible for you. Take this cup away from me. Nevertheless, not what I will, but what you will.”

Being part of the family of God, being part of having this spirit of adoption—doesn’t mean that we don’t have any problems or that when we see tremendous difficulties and trials, we don’t have tears. We don’t have pain. We don’t have suffering. That’s not what it means to cry out, “Abba, Father.”

What it means is in the midst of sufferings and difficulties and problems, we cry out, “We’re your sons. Bless us, Lord God, in some way. Maybe this way. We don’t know. Maybe that’s not the right way. But through whatever this is, your way to get us, to deliver us through this pain and suffering—do that for us.” And we claim it because we’re your children, okay?

So we cry out to God. We recognize our spirit of adoption—not because of the blessing God’s blessings to us, that’s sometimes the case—but we recognize we’re children of God when in the midst of our sufferings, the Lord God ministers to us. And that’s what God does with Jesus, right? In the middle of his sufferings in the garden, God sends angels to come and minister to him.

That’s what being part of the family of God is.

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**4. Comfort**

And that’s the next characteristic here. The next thing he says is: “And God will wipe away every tear from their eyes.”

So he’ll be their people. He’ll be their God. And the next thing it says is he’ll wipe away every tear from their eyes. And at that point there’ll be no more pain or death or suffering or whatever. But he wipes away the tears from their eyes. And he’s doing that now with you. Then he’ll do it ultimately and in a culminative way. But now he’s doing it for you as well.

When we cry out, “Abba, Father,” he ministers to us through angels. And frequently those angels are people that are walking around. You know, the angel in the New Testament is just a messenger, right? And so we’re to be messengers to each other of comfort. So this fourth characteristic of the New Jerusalem, God’s city as opposed to man’s city, is comfort.

There’s cold comfort in the city of man. There’s God’s comfort in the city of God. And we’re supposed to recognize that. We’re supposed to experience that. And we’re supposed to minister that to other people as well—wiping away their tears. We’re supposed to be engaged with people, right? Why do we care about their tears? Why wipe them away if we’re not committed to them, if we’re not the people of God together in a particular place, right?

So comfort is this fourth characteristic. Very important. When we go ready, and when we go into isolation, we offer them community. True community. And when we offer them true community, what we’re bringing with us is comfort, which they need, right? They need to come in from the cold. Joni Mitchell: “All we ever wanted is to come in from the cold.” That’s right. But they want to come in the wrong way—their way.

We bring the gospel to them, and we try to bring them into, or out of the cold, into community, into places of comfort. And we comfort people. We don’t wait for them to make a profession of faith to do that. We comfort other people. We know that ultimately they’ll only receive true comfort from God when they become his people like we’re his people. That’s where our comfort comes from. And that’s what we do.

We seek the transformation of the city to be a place of comfort as opposed to competition and striving against each other. Comfort. That’s the fourth characteristic.

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**5. Newness**

Fifth characteristic: drop down to the next verse, verse 5. Very important.

“Then he who sat on the throne said, ‘Behold, I am making all things new.’”

Fifth characteristic of the city of God, as opposed to the city of men: everything’s being made new. Now, newness is the characteristic that I want to—if you want to put a name to it—there is a newness that exists in the city of God in the New Jerusalem. Jesus is making all things new.

And really, from his death on the cross, saying “It is finished,” he began to make all things new. We’ve got a banner we put up for Easter sometimes: “I’m making all things new,” right? That’s what God is doing. And we’re making the cities new. We’re moving them from Babylon to the New Jerusalem.

But it’s important to think about this a little bit, I think—this aspect of newness in our lives. What are we tempted to do when we’re surrounded by a world that has departed from Christ? When we’re living in Jeremiah 29 times, right? What are we tempted to do? Well, we don’t want a whole lot to do with newness at that point. We want to hold on to the past. We want to cling to what’s left to us as exiles, right?

We want to hold on. We want to be concerned conservatives. We want to conserve things. But that’s not what Jesus is into. He’s making all things new, right? We’re not conservatives. We’re—if you want to put us on a political scale—we’re actually radicals. Not in the sense of being leftists, but in the sense of getting to the root of the problem. That’s what a radical is. Gets to the root, the radius of a thing.

And Christianity, the Lord God, gets to the root of things in our attitude and relationship to him, which changes the way we do our vocations, build communities, build cities, et cetera. We get to the root of the problem. We’re not ultimately conservatives. Now, politically, a lot of us are. We want to conserve what the culture has done that is consistent rather with Christianity.

So you know, I don’t think I’ve gone off the deep end here. But Jesus is about making all things new. We chose a name as a church: Reformation Covenant Church. Why Reformation? Well, we didn’t want to say “reform” because people thought that meant liberal 35 years ago, whenever it was. And that’s true, and they still think it. So that’s one reason we chose it. Another reason we chose it was to draw connection to the Protestant Reformation in the 16th and 17th century, okay?

We wanted connection with that. We adopted some confessional standards that were developed then, right? We want connection with the past. We wanted to conserve those things. But the third reason we chose the name was because we were saying we also need reformation today. Not to just get back to the 16th or the 17th century. That’s not the idea, because that’s not who God is. God moves forward. God’s building a city. He’s making all things new. He’s taking the existing eternal word of him—the word of God—and he’s using it to transform us in ways that are new all the time.

There’s a newness. There should be a newness to who we are. You know, I think probably RCC is something to repent of here, or maybe at least to think about and think, “Well, are we really embracing newness? Are we really embracing the fact that Jesus makes all things new?”

I’m not talking about running off into some kind of newness that has nothing to do with connection with the past. That’s not what I’m talking about. But this verse means something. And the reality is that if I’m in the midst of editing a book on the Lord’s day—what was that about in the Gospels? That was about moving into the future and not staying in the past. That’s what Jesus saw it as. The Lord’s day is the time to move forward.

God’s word comes, renews us, renews us, makes us new, makes us different. We do things a little differently tomorrow than we did them today. God is doing things different in history. History is moving forward, right? We like that Jesus is making all things new. We don’t want to just cling to the past.

We’ve talked about this before, but Ogden Rosen Sakusi has this description that the Christians are on the cross of life. So imagine this cross. And so when I look up at something like that, I feel like I’m falling. It’s vertigo. So I can’t do that. But think of that cross. Part of the cross beam is the past, and this part is the future, right? And so as Christians, we’re in the middle there. We have a proper esteem for the past, but we also lean toward the future.

And at a particular stage in a church, or a person’s, or an institution’s development, they may lean a little more to conservative. And I understand the instinct in our day and age to lean that way, but you can’t go all the way that way. You’ve gotten off the cross. Being united to Jesus and bearing our cross means we’re also pointed toward the future. Jesus makes all things new.

And a characteristic of our citizenship, who we are, is that God is making us new every day. There was a man who converted to faith after he graduated, I think, from Princeton graduate school. But he wanted—before he converted to Christianity—he wanted a book that understood him. He wanted a book that he could read and would transform him, right?

So what he did was he would read a reader, and he’d read things, nice quotes that really spoke to him at the moment, right? And he would cut them out or copy them out, and he made this book filled with all these quotes of things that were inspiring to him, right? And that resonated with him—that understood him, okay?

So he does this book, and he just keeps developing it. And then after a while, after about a year of doing this, he goes back. He says, “I’m going to read the whole thing, and I’m really going to, you know, get jazzed. I’m going to become really new. I’m going to become—this will really speak to me and transform me again the way all these things have done in the past.”

But you know what? It was dead to him. He was demoralized because it didn’t do that. He had changed. He wasn’t the same person a year later that he was a year before, and the words of men—no matter how beautiful and inspiring—really didn’t inspire him the way he was now.

Eventually he converted to Christianity, and he has an article on this. The article is “The Book That Understands Me,” and he contrasted that book of quotes with the Bible. You know, if you’ve been a Christian very long and you’ve read your Bible over and over and over again, yeah, I suppose you get stale sometimes. But you know what it’s like? You know that sometimes you read a passage and you’re like, “I never saw that before.” It resonates with you. The Bible never gets stale. It’s the word that continues to manifest Christ’s newness to us. It always understands us.

It is a living word. It’s the breath of God. It connects up with who we are. When we ask it—have a high commitment to Bible study and understanding the word of God—you know, one of the reasons for that is, as your pastors, we want you to delight in the newness that Jesus is creating in you, and he creates that newness through his word, which is, you know, the mercies of God through his word are new every morning.

Newness is part of the city of God. We could take the time—we’re not going to—but if you look at the structure of this section of Revelation, what you’d see is a seven-day structure, you know? You’d see the implications. You could line up particular verses that we’re reading here to the seven days. If you’re interested, ask me about it. I can send you a little chart.

But you could do that. Why? Because that’s what it’s about. It’s about new creation. God is repeatedly manifesting his revelation in sevenfold patterns throughout the Bible. Why? Because he’s making all things new. He’s always bringing about a new creation. There’s a definitive new creation at the end of time, but that’s the way it works throughout time as well.

I think sometimes one of the reasons we don’t make more impact on our cities is because we’re not embracing the newness that Jesus is calling us to and is creating in us and in how we approach things in life. We’re too conservative. We’re too fearful of what’s going on in the world, and so we’re afraid to engage. Don’t need to be afraid. The Creator is. He is in you, and he is in the world. Don’t be afraid of that stuff. Embrace, you know, things that God is doing, do new in your life in the culture. Make discerning judgments about it. But you know, there’s a lot of really good things that God is doing quite apart from you or me or this church in our culture. Jesus is making all things new.

It’s part of who we are in the Lord Jesus Christ. I mean, ultimately we’re not reforming. We’re not Reformation Covenant Church. Ultimately we’re transforming, right? You see the difference? This was one of the problems. The word “reconstructing”—it means the implications seem like all you need to do is go back. Protestant Reformation, Westminster Confession, whatever it is—we just need to go back. That’s not true. Jesus is making all things new. We want to understand our roots and our origins. We want to stay on that cross and lean that and develop that. But we want to see the new things that God is doing in our day and age.

We’re not reformationists. We’re transformationalists. From one sense of the word, I’m fine with the name Reformation Covenant Church. But you know, you just have to be careful because names start to kind of peg us in a particular way, even if we’ve never thought of it that way before.

I had an idea. I had a phrase come to me, and I’ve already had people just mock it, so I’m not suggesting it’s a good phrase. But you know, kind I was thinking of slogans that we could use for who we are, promoting ourselves or something. And I thought: “Fresh Expressions of an Ancient Faith.”

Did somebody already gag back? “Fresh expressions of an ancient faith.” You know, if you listen to that, you sort of like, “Wait a minute, what are we doing? Is that Mars Hill thing you keep talking about? What is that?” No. It’s Jesus making all things new, okay? And it’s staying with the ancient faith once delivered, but it’s seeking fresh expressions of that faith because we live in a fresh new world. Not just because history is somehow marching onward by itself, but because Jesus is making all things new, okay?

I believe I’ve beaten that point enough, probably. But I think it’s pretty significant that what we have in the Bible is this personal relationship with God that creates a newness to our lives and our lives in community as well as our lives individually.

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**6. Satisfaction**

Oh boy, running too long. Okay, couple of last points. Very important points. Satisfy. This is the sixth characteristic.

So we go on in the text, and he says: “I will give of the fountain of the water of life freely to him who thirsts.”

What do you need to be part of the New Jerusalem? You need to be thirsty. I don’t know if it’s true—I’ve never read the book—but there’s some book by Chesterton, right? “The Man Who Would Be Thursday.” Is that right? Right. And I hear that “Thursday” is actually a play on Thursday. I don’t know. But the point is here—forget that.

But thirsty, you know? Why are you here? Ultimately we’re part of the New Jerusalem because we’re thirsty. We desire God. We desire righteousness. We hunger and thirst after that relationship with God and a right ordering of the world.

If you’re thirsty, what do you need to be part of the New Jerusalem? The Beatles—the first intercontinental worldwide broadcast of television—said, “All you need is love.” The Bible says, “All you need is need.” Thirstiness is a need.

And as you recognize that need, as God’s Spirit shows you that need, brings you to that need, that’s all you need. You don’t need anything. You just need a need for God and a thirst. And he promises in response to that to give you freely of the water of life.

We’re thirsty. We want more of God, don’t we? I do. We want more of the manifestation of his kingdom. We want more of New Jerusalem and less of Babylon, right? That’s what we want. We want it in our lives. We want it in our cities. Do you want that?

Because that’s what I want. If you don’t want that, if you’re not thirsty, you see? Well, then we’ve got some kind of significant problem going on. Because Jesus says the only inhabitants here are those who are thirsty.

As I mentioned at the end of the chapter, what does it say? It says, you know, the bride says come. The Spirit says come. The one who hears these words says come. And the ones who are coming are those who are thirsty, and they’re given of the water of life from Christ.

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**7. Light**

And then finally, the last characteristic—and this really permeates the whole section—but it’s light. It’s light.

Let’s see. So verse 11, the last verse I read: “This New Jerusalem descending from heaven has the glory of God. Her light was like a most precious stone, like a jasper stone, clear as crystal.”

You know, the New Jerusalem is a place of beautiful reflected and prismed light. And if we could take the time, draw some diagrams, we’d see this. God is the light of the city, right? There’s no night there because Jesus is the light. So God is the light in the middle of the New Jerusalem, and you and I are these various crystals and stuff, and the city itself has like gold streets. But it says it’s gold like glass. Gold is light, okay?

And the idea is that the light of God bounces all over the place within the city, right? And it bounces through all these precious gems that are listed, and we have this prisming rainbow effect going on, and it is beautiful and gorgeous.

You and I are lightbearers, right? Philippians—among whom we shine as lights in the world. The only two places where that word is used is Philippians and here, in a few verses later in Revelation. We’re lightbearers, and God’s light is shining out from us and being prismed out.

We got three elders here, and we’re all quite different. That’s a frustration, isn’t it? Don’t you like to work with people who are like you? It’s a lot easier in the short term. But you know what that is? We’re a prism. We got three different kind of manifestations of the way elders or pastors should be. And without each other, we’re all incomplete.

You’re the same thing. You’re all different. You know, you’re all different from each other. You got different giftings and abilities. You got different personalities. Light is a characteristic of the New Jerusalem. And you take your particular prismed out light and you bring that into Oregon City, and you bring the light of Jesus Christ.

Well, we’re supposed to do that. You and I are supposed to do that. But what do we do? All too often we sin. We don’t like to be a particular kind of person that isn’t like everybody else. We don’t want to, you know, manifest our giftings. We don’t want to talk about Jesus, the source of the light. And what we bring to the city, all too often, to our workplaces and to the city, is darkness. It’s a light, like Jesus said, with a basket over it. You know, we’re in there shining. We got our thing going on with Jesus. But he says, “Take the bushel basket off. You’re a light set on a hill.”

We’re the light to bring the light of Jesus to our cities. And if when we do that, the city moves away from darkness and the city becomes a place of tremendous beauty—individual people shining as individuals with their particular prism of the light of the Lord Jesus Christ.

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**Conclusion**

Those are the seven characteristics that I’ve decided to kind of focus on here at the end. And again, when you leave today: repent in the midst of this service. Repent when you come forward today. Repent of something—lack of holiness, lack of lightbearing, lack of appreciation for the diversity of people in your life, lack of seeking after the presence of God.

Are you thirsty for the presence of God? Are you thirsty for the comfort of God? Go to the source. Go to God in prayer, right? We repent of our sins. God will strengthen and renew us for the work of going into our cities and transforming them.

That’s who we are. It’s a tale of two cities. And the second city is accomplished at the end of time, yes. But in the meantime, the city’s being built by Jesus as we go into those cities with these characteristics. This is what that city looks like. This is what we want it to look like. If we want it to look like that, we’ve got to look like that. That’s who we have to be. That’s what we bring to our cities.

Let’s pray.

Father God, we do greatly desire to bring these aspects of our relationship to you into our cities. Bless us, Lord God. Help us to repent today. Help us to turn away from our sins and to recognize that the end result of that is empowerment from you for lightbearing to our cities. In Jesus’ name we pray.

Amen. Amen.