Eliminating Death
Day 364: Revelation 21:1-27
"He will wipe away every tear from their eyes, and death shall be no more, neither shall there be mourning, nor crying, nor pain anymore, for the former things have passed away." - Revelation 21:4 ESV
Do you find limitations in this life to be among the most frustrating? We have limited time and energy. We can only go so long before making a mistake (we've made many). We are limited on how many days we can go without food and water. We have a limited amount of time with those we love. Even when it comes to creativity, we could be on such a great roll, yet we run out of material, daylight, or stamina.
When we are mourning or crying, it is impossible to focus on anything else; it feels like we are in the mud.
Limited.
As John writes, he leans heavily on language from Isaiah 65 (see especially Verses 15 and 17). It is wild to think that God has known what the new heaven and new earth will look like from the beginning, but now John is allowed to get a clearer picture that was first revealed, in an even smaller way, to Isaiah.
The picture given is that when we are (on that glorious day) entirely in the presence of God, all of our limitations will be removed. Everything will be new and ready for us to praise, create, love, and focus, without the fear of danger or our own weaknesses. Not to mention that our enemy, the Devil, won't be around to start this cycle all over again (see our post from yesterday).
Why doesn't God call it all quits and start this "new" activity today? (He might!)
Verse 8 is the key. There are more within all of these lifestyles now being given more time to repent and run to Jesus (2 Peter 3:9). May we not waste this time. May we be ever-reaching in our approach to those who are currently rejecting our Lord and Savior.
Lewis Foster’s comments on this passage are so helpful when thinking of what statement God is making by way of Revelation 21: “If God had given this vision to John earlier, and John had recorded this in the middle of his book, we would not have been able to pay attention to the many lessons he has been giving us. We would have passed over Babylon’s fall, we would have slighted the warnings of the resilience of evil and the constant attacks of the beast and of Satan. We would have shrugged off plagues and the suffering of both the people of God and the judgments upon the wicked, and simply focused on the glories of an unmixed portrait of the redeemed in eternity. But the book of Revelation saves this picture until last, after the end has been presented in the realistic doom of the condemned as well as the security and honor of the end millennium in Heaven. Even in Heaven, the existence in store for eternity had not begun until this moment. Now God himself will live with His people in a way He has not done before.”