Days of Vengeance - The Preterist Archive

21:3-5
will be established finally, in consummate, absolute
perfection! 8
The City is made ready as a Bride adorned for her
Husband. The Bride is not just in the City; the Bride is
the City (cf. v. 9-10). St. John’s clear identification of
the City as the Bride of Christ serves as another
demonstration that the City of God is a present as well
as future reality. The “Bride” of the weekly Eucharistic
Wedding Feast (19:7-9) is the “beloved City” of the
Kingdom of Christ (cf. 20:9). We are in the New
Jerusalem now, as the Bible categorically tells us: “You
have come to Mount Zion and to the City of the living
God, the heavenly Jerusalem, and to myriads of angels
in festal assembly, and to the Church of the firstborn
who are enrolled in heaven . . . .” (Heb. 12:22-23).
3 If we are citizens of heaven, as St. Paul declared (Eph.
2:19), it is also true that heaven dwells within us (Eph.
2:20-22). Indeed, the Word Himself has tabernacled
among us (John 1:14); He and His Father have made
Their abode with us (John 14:23); and thus we are the
Temple of the Living God (2 Cor. 6:16). Accordingly,
St. John’s vision of the Holy City is followed by a loud
Voice from heaven, saying: Behold, the Tabernacle of
God is among men, and He shall dwell among them,
and they shall be His people, and God Himself shall
be among them. Again, this is a repetition of what we
have already learned in this prophecy (3:12; 7:15-17).
In the New Testament Church the promise of the Law
and the prophets is realized: “I will make My Tabernacle
among you, and My soul will not reject you; I will
also walk among you and be your God, and you shall be
My people” (Lev. 26:11-12); “And I will make a
Covenant of peace with them; it will be an everlasting
Covenant with them. And I will establish them and
multiply them, and will set My sanctuary in their midst
forever. My dwelling place also will be with them; and
I will be their God, and they will be My people. And
the nations will know that I am the LORD who
sanctifies Israel, when My sanctuary is in their midst
forever” (Ezek. 37:26-28).
As verse 9 makes explicit, this passage is the conclusion
of the Chalices-section of the prophecy. At its beginning,
St. John saw the Sanctuary of the Tabernacle
filling with smoke, so that no one was able to enter in
(15:5-8), and then he heard “a loud Voice” from the
Sanctuary order the seven angels to pour out their
Chalices of wrath into the Land (16:1). At the
outpouring of the seventh Chalice “a loud Voice” again
issued from the Sanctuary, saying: “It is done!” –
producing a great earthquake, in which the cities fell
and every mountain and island “fled away” as the vision
turned to focus on the destruction of Babylon, the False
Bride (16:17-21). Now, toward the close of the
Chalices-section, earth and heaven have “fled away”
(20:11; 21:1), and again St. John hears a loud Voice
from heaven, announcing that access to the Sanctuary
has been provided to the greatest possible degree, for
the Tabernacle of God is among men. Soon, that same
Voice will again announce: “It is done” (v. 6), as the
vision turns our attention to the establishment of the
True Bride, New Jerusalem.
4-5 The Voice St. John heard continues: And He shall
wipe away every tear from their eyes; and there shall
no longer be any death; there shall no longer be any
mourning, or crying, or pain. We can look forward to
the absolute and perfect fulfillment of this promise at
the Last Day, when the last enemy is destroyed. But, in
principle, it is true already. Jesus said: “I am the
Resurrection and the Life; he who believes in Me shall
live even if he dies, and everyone who lives and
believes in Me shall never die” (John 11:25-26). God
has wiped away our tears, for we are partakers of His
First Resurrection. One striking evidence of this is the
obvious difference between Christian and pagan
funerals: We grieve, but not as those who have no hope
(1 Thess. 4:13). God has taken away the sting of death
(1 Cor. 15:55-58).
All these blessings have come because the first things
have passed away. And He who sits on the Throne
said: Behold, I am making all things new. Here is
another connection to the teaching of St. Paul:
“Therefore, if anyone is in Christ, there is a New
Creation; the old things have passed away; behold, all things
have become new” (2 Cor. 5:17). Again, of course, we
are confronted with the fact that this is true now, as
well as on the Last Day. The only essential difference
between the subjects of 2 Corinthians 5 and Revelation
21 is that St. Paul is speaking of the redeemed individual,
while St. John is speaking of the redeemed community.
Both the individual and the community are re-created,
renewed, and restored to Paradise in salvation, and this
cosmic restoration has already begun. St. John sees that
what has begun in seemingly (to the eyes of the first
century) isolated instances is really the wave of the
future. The New Creation will fill the earth; the whole
creation will be renewed. This is true definitively, it will
be absolutely true eschatologically – and it gives us the
pattern for our work in between, for it is also to be
worked out progressively. The New Creation must be
unfolded, its every implication understood and applied,
by the royal priesthood in this age.
The great Church Historian Philip Schaff understood
this: “To the Lord and his kingdom belongs the whole
world, with all that lives and moves in it. All is yours,
says the apostle [1 Cor. 3:22]. Religion is not a single,
separate sphere of human life, but the divine principle
by which the entire man is to be pervaded, refined, and
made complete. It takes hold of him in his undivided
totality, in the center of his personal being; to carry
light into his understanding, holiness into his will, and
8. Unfortunately, the almost exclusively futuristic interpretation of such passages in the recent past – and the accompanying neoplatonic outlook, as if to say that it
is useless and even sinful to work for the “heavenization” of this world – has meant that a proper emphasis on the present reality of the Kingdom appears to reverse
the movement of the New Testament. Where the Bible says: “Not in this age only, but also in the age to come,” our zeal to recover the Biblical perspective
sometimes leads us to say: “Not in the age to come only, but also in this age.” The danger in this, obviously, is that it can produce contempt for a truly Biblical
eschatology.
216