[0:00] And we read, I do know it's a very lengthy set of scripture, but we're going to read all of Revelation 21 and the first five verses of Revelation 22. John records for us, Then I saw a new heaven and a new earth, for the first heaven and the first earth passed away, and there is no longer any sea.
[0:17] And I saw the holy city, New Jerusalem, coming down out of heaven from God, made ready as a bride adorned for her husband. And I heard a loud voice from the throne saying, Behold, the tabernacle of God is among men, and he will dwell among them, and they shall be his people, and God himself will be among them.
[0:34] And he will wipe away every tear from their eyes, and there will no longer be any death. There will no longer be any mourning or crying or pain. The first things have passed away. And he who sits from the throne said, Behold, I am making all things new.
[0:48] And he said, Write, for these words are faithful and true. Then he said to me, It is done. I am the Alpha and the Omega, the beginning and the end. I will give to the one who thirsts from the spring of the water of life without cost.
[1:00] And he who overcomes will inherit these things, and I will be his God, and he will be my son. But for the cowardly and unbelieving and abominable and murderers and immoral persons and sorcerers and idolaters and all liars, their part will be in the lake that burns with fire and brimstone, which is the second death.
[1:16] Then one of the seven angels who had the seven bowls full of the seven last plagues came and spoke with me, saying, Come here, and I will show you the bride, the wife of the Lamb. And he carried me away in the Spirit to a great and high mountain, and he showed me the holy city, Jerusalem, coming down out of heaven from God, having the glory of God.
[1:35] Her brilliance was like a very costly stone, as a stone of crystal-clear jasper. And it had a great high wall with twelve gates, and at the gates twelve angels, and the names were written on them, which are the names of the twelve tribes of the sons of Israel.
[1:51] There were three gates on the east, three gates on the north, three gates on the south, and three gates on the west. And the wall of the city had twelve foundation stones, and on them were the twelve names of the twelve apostles of the Lamb.
[2:03] The one who spoke with me had a gold measuring rod to measure the city and its gates and its wall. And the city is laid out as a square, and its length is as great as the width. And he measured the city with a rod, fifteen hundred miles.
[2:16] Its length and width and height are equal. And he measured its walls, seventy-two yards, according to human measurements, which are also angelic measurements. And the material of the wall was jasper, and the city was pure gold like clear glass.
[2:29] The foundation stones of the city wall were adorned with every kind of precious stone. The first foundation stone was jasper, the second sapphire, the third chanceldonny. The fourth emerald, the fifth sardonyx, the sixth sardius, the seventh chrysolite, the eighth beryl, the ninth topaz, the tenth chrysoprace, the eleventh jasynth, and the twelfth amethyst.
[2:48] And the twelve gates were twelve pearls. Each one of the gates was a single pearl, and the street of the city was pure gold like transparent glass. I saw no temple in it, for the Lord God the Almighty and the Lamb are its temple.
[3:00] And the city has no need of the sun or of the moon to shine on it, for the glory of God has illumined it, and its lamp is the Lamb. The nations will walk by its light, and the kings of the earth will bring their glory into it in the daytime, for there will be no night there.
[3:14] Its gates will never be closed. And they will bring the glory and the honor of the nations into it, and nothing unclean, and no one who practices abomination and lying shall ever come into it. But only those whose names are written in the Lamb's book of life.
[3:27] Then he showed me a river of the water of life, clear as crystal, coming from the throne of God and of the Lamb. In the middle of its streets, on either side of the river, was the tree of life, bearing twelve kinds of fruit, yielding its fruit every month.
[3:39] And the leaves of the tree were for the healing of the nations. There will no longer be any curse, and the throne of God and the Lamb will be in it, and his bondservants will serve him. They will see his face, and his name will be on their foreheads.
[3:51] And there will no longer be any night, and they will not have need of the light of a lamp or the light of the sun, because the Lord God will illumine them, and they will reign forever and ever.
[4:03] Let's pray. Lord, we thank you so much that you have allowed us to gather together. Lord, we thank you for the testimony of obedience which we have already seen. Lord, we thank you for the word which we have had the privilege to read and to hear.
[4:16] We pray that its truth would now grip our hearts. Lord, that it would move our lives, and Lord, you would be glorified and honored through it all. We ask it in Jesus' name. Amen. You may be seated.
[4:28] Revelation 21, starting in verse 1 through Revelation 22, starting in verse 5, shows us the believer's eternal glory. The believer's eternal glory. While we may be glorified, and we will be, as Paul says, we will be as he is.
[4:45] And this impure will put on the pure. This failing away will put on the imperishable. This tent will be clothed with a house.
[4:56] We will be made perfect in every sense. We will be perfect in thought. We will be perfect in action. And we will be perfect in speech. The believer's eternal glory is not that which he possesses himself, but it is that place in which he is called to inhabit.
[5:11] We have been shown in Revelation 20, the lake of fire and its eternal destruction and the eternal outcry that streams from it. We have seen from other portions of Scripture that the lake of fire was prepared for Satan and his demons.
[5:23] Yet those who fail to accept Jesus Christ as their Lord and Savior are confined to there for all of eternity. And just as much as that is the eternal existence of those who do not know Christ, we are now introduced into the eternal existence of those who do know Christ.
[5:39] We are introduced to the believer's eternal glory as it is found in what we would call heaven. But it is not heaven as which most of us think of. It is not this place far beyond the sky.
[5:49] This is many believers or many Bible scholars think that this is what Paul was referring to when he says, I know a man who is called up into the third heavens. And we need to understand Scripture gives us these third heavens.
[6:02] The first heaven is the place where we see the birds flying and we see the clouds floating. That is referred to, at least in Judaism, the first heaven. The second heaven would be the atmosphere around the earth.
[6:14] When we get into what we refer to as the ozone layer and the host of the stars and the planets, even beyond the ozone. And the third heaven would be into the very presence of God.
[6:25] That would be entering into his courtroom. What we see here is that the new heaven and the new earth are joined together, that there is no longer any separation. There is no longer a first and a second and then a third, but rather it is the two becoming one.
[6:40] This is the believer's eternal glory as he lives eternally in this blessed state of existence. And I want you to be captivated by four things as we look at this.
[6:52] But let us not be so consumed. This evening we will have a great privilege of seeing these stones. We will see them displayed. We will see them in all of their beauty and their splendor.
[7:05] And I don't know if Brother Kenneth will allude to it, but I know that when the first time I ever saw him walk a group of believers through the stones, he pointed to one in particular. He says, and I don't understand why this stone is there because in our world today it's not very precious.
[7:21] It's just common. And he referred to one of the stones as being something that seemed out of place. And it will be interesting for us to see that. It will be interesting for us to learn that.
[7:32] But while there are so many questions of what heaven will be like and so many questions of what eternity will be like, let us not lose the focus of the book of Revelation. It is not a revelation of our eternal home.
[7:46] It is not a revelation of our future place of existence. It is what? The revelation of Jesus Christ. So let us not get so consumed and let us not get so overwhelmed with the fact that the streets are paved in gold, that there is the sea of life or the river of life, that there is the tree of life, which is for the nourishment of the nations.
[8:08] We will mention that. Let us not get so overwhelmed by all of the details. As Jesus says, I go to prepare a place for you and I will come back and I will take you to that place. And we refer to that as the mansions.
[8:20] Whether or not it's a mansion, I don't know. And I don't mean to cause Bible doubt because the wording there is dwelling place. He is building a dwelling place. And I am content. If he wants my dwelling place to be big, that's awesome.
[8:31] If he wants my dwelling place to be a broom closet, that's awesome too. Because I don't need a place to put a bed because there's no night. Right? I won't ever get tired because I'll be living in perfect vitality.
[8:41] I won't ever have to sleep. I don't want a mansion in eternity because I will never be there. I plan on gathering around the throne and singing at the top of my now redeemed voice and sounding good for once in my life and probably dancing like I always thought I could and celebrate.
[8:57] Just be careful if you're ever standing around me, okay? Because I might get a little carried away. But in case I'm mistaken, you probably will too. And I will not be so concerned about where I'm living while I'm there.
[9:09] I'll just be concerned as the book of Revelation is, who's there with me? Matter of fact, the who one person is there. And I will be overwhelmed in his presence. So as we look at the believer's eternal glory and we see four things from this chapter and part of chapter 22, let us all point them back to Christ.
[9:27] Number one, we see the perfection that describes it. The perfection that describes it. It says, then I saw a new heaven and a new earth. The wording in the original language is very important.
[9:39] It's very emphatic. It says new in nature. Everything. It says later on, behold, I make all things new. This is really a return back to Genesis 1 and 2.
[9:51] The first two chapters, not only of Revelation, actually a little bit more than the first two chapters of Revelation, but the first two chapters of all of Scripture, Genesis 1 and 2, are absent of someone. And that someone is the serpent of old.
[10:03] Genesis 1 and 2 show us everything in its perfect creative work, everything in its perfect environment, and man being placed in this place of perfection. When we come to Revelation 21 and 22, we see that Satan is not there either, and man is being replaced into a perfect creation.
[10:19] What we see here is that God is making things the way they are supposed to be. The Bible tells us in the book of Romans, Romans chapter 8, that all of creation groans until the day of redemption of man.
[10:31] Man has really marred and messed up what God has created, right? Man has messed it up. The fall of man, that is man's choice to rebel, openly rebel against a holy God, does so much more than cause us problems.
[10:44] We cause problems for all of creation. It is our actions. It's not Adam and Eve's actions. It is our sin nature, which has made creation not be what it is supposed to be.
[10:55] It has made creation not be perfect because God created it perfect, but man messed it up. But what we find in the book of Revelations is God is finally doing what he has said he would do all along, and that is he will bring it back to what it was supposed to be.
[11:10] It is coming all the way back around, and God is working in a full circle here. Now man will inhabit the new Garden of Eden. Now man will inhabit the new paradise. Now man will find himself in a place of perfection which will forever be closed.
[11:25] There will be no opportunity for the serpent of old to get there because he is confined eternally into the lake of fire. What we see is the perfection that describes it. We are seeing not only just a perfect place of existence.
[11:37] It says, and there is no longer any sea. Now, Bible scholars are out on this. I don't know which one to tell you it is. Some people say, well, there's going to be a sea, at least a bodily of water.
[11:49] You will see the beauty of it, and you will behold it. Others say that there will be no bodies of water whatsoever on it. And the reason is this. There are two interpretations. Number one, you can take it literally.
[11:59] That there will be no water. That there will be no separation. I can lean towards that because we find in the beginning of the Bible, in the first pages of the Bible, that the land was all one mass, right?
[12:10] That God divided up the lands after the Tower of Babel in Genesis chapter 11. And the seas divided the lands. But there was water in creation. God created water and the sea creatures. So I can also lean a little bit towards the other way.
[12:22] God created the oceans and the waters and perfections and beauty. And he set a limit for them. So the other interpretation is you can see this as it is represented in the book of Revelation.
[12:33] All throughout the book of Revelation, the sea is a reference to the dwelling place or the birthplace of evil. Satan and the beast come out of the sea. The multitudes of rebellious people come out of the sea.
[12:44] Over and over again, we see sea being representative of sin and evil. But either way, what we see here is there will be no disturbance. There will be no distraction. There will be no division. I believe in the new heavens and the new earth that the earth will be one big body of land as if God had created it to begin with.
[13:00] We need to understand what is happening here. Maybe you weren't with us when we started out almost five years ago now in the book of Genesis on Sunday nights. Genesis chapter 1 through Genesis chapter 11 introduced for us every problem that man has.
[13:14] Every rebellion, every sin, everything that man has ever done in sight and revolt to a holy God is introduced in 11 chapters. God takes Genesis 12 to Revelation 22 showing us how he's going to make that right.
[13:28] And the one way he's going to make it right is he's going to bring it back full circle to a new perfect place of existence. Friend, I know you realize it deep within you and I realize it deep within me.
[13:39] God has created us to live in a place of perfection. And it is the imperfections that cause us problems. Something deep within us says no things are supposed to be right.
[13:49] And I'm not talking about being OCD or making sure everything is in perfect order. The reason we have those tendencies is because God has created things in order. And when things get into disorder, it creates chaos and havoc and disturbances, which we know, at least deep down within us, are not supposed to be that way.
[14:10] We see the perfection that describes it. Not only is the place a place of perfection because there is no evil found in it. There is no sin found in it. It says in verse 4, this is the promise of the believer.
[14:21] Now, let us read this in context. If our interpretation of the book of Revelations is correct, and that would be that we are looking at the pre-tribulation rapture of the church.
[14:33] And you say, what does that mean? Well, that means that after Revelation chapter 4, the church is raptured, and then we have the seven years of tribulation, and then we have the millennial reign of Christ, which is a thousand years of Christ.
[14:44] So that would mean that as believers, because last time I checked, somebody please let me know if I missed it, the church has not been raptured yet, because we're still here, right? So the trumpet has not sound.
[14:55] The believers have not left to meet him in the end. It's 15, and we can even read 1 and 2 Thessalonians. Let me just stop right here. I don't know if you realize it, but 1 and 2 Thessalonians, every chapter in 1 Thessalonians and 2 Thessalonians end with a reference to the coming of Christ.
[15:13] And that was probably one of the earliest writings of Paul, because Paul from the very beginning was looking forward to his coming, looking forward to his coming, and looking forward to his coming.
[15:24] And the best way that he knew how to prepare the church at Thessalonica would be to prepare them for his coming, right? And he also wrote 1 Corinthians, which is 1 Corinthians 15, where we meet him in the air. That's where we find the word rapture, where it says we will be called together.
[15:38] That word in the original language is rapture. That's where we get our word rapture. So what I'm saying is, up to this point, the church, the believers, have been in his presence for at least 1,007 years.
[15:52] At least. If we're alive when he raptures the church, there is immediately the seven years of tribulation, and then there's immediately the 1,000-year reign of Christ. So we've been in his presence for 1,007 years at least.
[16:04] If we die before the church's rapture, just add to that, whatever, however many years until the rapture comes. But after the 1,007 years, here's the promise. And he will wipe every tear from their eyes.
[16:18] It will no longer, there will no longer be any death, and there will no longer be any mourning or crying or pain. The first things have passed away. This is twofold. Number one, we see that it is exactly, absolutely possible for believers to mourn for an extended time in eternity, not mourning because they're there, but probably mourning because of opportunities they missed and mourning because of those who aren't there.
[16:41] If that's not motivation for us to be faithful in the gospel, I don't know what is. Because how sad it is to be standing in the presence of a holy God, standing before the Lamb who gave his life for us, and for 1,007 years say, I should have done more.
[16:58] But then we come to this place of perfection where everything is made what it should be, and then he reaches down and he wipes those tears. There's no more mourning. So not only is the place perfect, the people are perfect.
[17:11] It makes us whole. We are clothed with bodies. Because the reality is if we die now, our spirit joins him. Not until the rapture of the church does our body join him. But now we are made absolutely 100% perfect.
[17:25] We see the perfection that describes it. Number two, we see the presence that defines it. The only reason that we can say eternity will be perfect is because of who is there.
[17:36] And that's not you and I. When we show up, we bring with us, and this isn't to be dark and dooming, and I'm not trying to be belittling of any one of us. But let's not say we, let me just say me.
[17:48] When I walk into the room, I bring with me imperfection. Why? Because I am imperfect. I mess up. I make mistakes. I have faults and I have failures just like everyone else.
[18:01] So a place is perfect until I show up, as long as it's empty. Right? It is absolutely empty. It's perfect in there. And then I show up and I introduce into it imperfection.
[18:12] So eternity is not perfect because we are there. Eternity is perfect because he is there. Look at what it says before it says that he wipes every tear away. In verse 3 it says, And I heard a loud voice from the throne saying, Behold, the tabernacle of God is among men, and he will dwell among them, and they shall be his people, and God himself will be among them.
[18:33] Do you think the throne wants us to know who's going to be there? This is a voice coming from the throne. This is God himself saying, The tabernacle of God is among men. He will dwell among them, and he himself will be among them.
[18:45] The beauty of eternity is that God is no longer from us, and we're not walking by faith, but praise be to God, we'll be walking by sight. Right? And no man has seen God. And the Bible tells us that no man has seen God.
[18:57] But Jesus says, But if you've seen me, you have seen the Father. Some ask the question, Will I be able to see God in all of eternity? Yes, you'll see God. Well, what will he look like? I have no idea, but we will see him, because he says he will be there.
[19:08] Right? If any man was to see God now, he would die. Remember, Moses said, Let me see you, O God. And he says, If you look upon me, you will die. You will not be able to live, because of all my glory, and all my holiness, and all my splendor.
[19:18] And he says, He put him in the cleft of the rock, and he covered him with his hand. And Moses saw, I love how Tony Evans describes this, the swoosh of his garment. He saw the tail end of his glory. Then when God passed him by, he says that he saw the swoosh.
[19:30] And then he began to write, In the beginning was the word. And he began to write all things. In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth. And he started writing the Pentateuch, because he saw just the glory of God. But the Bible tells us, On that day, God will dwell among men, and he himself will be in their presence.
[19:46] Not only him, but we also see the Lamb will be there as well. And it says, In verse 5, And he who sits on the throne, that is the Lamb, I am making all things new.
[19:56] And he said, Write, For these words are faithful and true. And then he said to me, It is done. I am the Alpha and Omega, the beginning and the end. I will give to the one who thirsts from the spring of the water without cost.
[20:08] We see over and over again, this reminder that he will be there. We see it at the end, when it says that God will illumine the city. He says in verse 22, I saw no temple in it, For the Lord God the Almighty and the Lamb are in its temple.
[20:24] The Lord God the Almighty and the Lamb in its temple. And the city has no need of the sun or of the moon to shine on it, for the glory of God has illumined it, and its lamp is the Lamb.
[20:34] And then we see over and over again, this reminder that the reason this place is perfect is because we are living in his presence. The truest definition of hell is to be absolutely cut off from the presence of God.
[20:52] The reason it is cast into eternal darkness is because the eternal light is dwelling somewhere else. He is dwelling among those who believe in him. We see the presence that defines it.
[21:04] But friend, in the midst of the good news, let me stop and show you some sobering news. The reason it is perfect is because those who have believed in him are now standing in his presence, being made perfect by him.
[21:17] But it's also because those who fail to believe him are not there. I hope that you're in a habit of underlining inner scriptures. Not that I want you to color up and to write in your Bibles, but I want you to allow the Spirit to call to attention things that he shows you.
[21:33] And maybe he uses me to call that to attention. Maybe he uses something else. But this is a passage that I have had underlined in just about every Bible ever since I came to Christ. And it is Revelation 21 in verse 8.
[21:45] Because in Revelation 21 in verse 8, we have a description of those who will not be there. And in that listing, there are people that we would expect not to see there, such as the abominable and the murderers and the immoral person and the sorcerers and the idolaters and all liars.
[21:59] We don't want them to be there, right? The people that are abominable. I mean, I'm not talking about the abominable snowman. I'm talking about people who do abominations, people who are desperately wicked, people who are just horrendous, and the murderers and the immoral persons and the sorcerers and the idolaters and the liars.
[22:16] They can't be there. But look at the first two in that list. These are the two that I always underline. Because this is where the Spirit causes the Word to penetrate into the very depths of my being.
[22:31] The very first one says, but for the cowardly. Cowardly. Those scared. This really has emphasis on those that denounce the name of Jesus Christ because it gets hard.
[22:47] Remember in the parable of the soils? There's four soils, right? The seed is cast upon four soils. There was that one soil that when the seed was cast, they began to grow immediately.
[23:00] They sprang up. But the reason they failed to bear fruit is because they entered into times of trials and struggles and tribulations, and they walked away.
[23:11] That was the stony ground. The cowardly. You know why I love the baptism videos? You know why I love baptism? And I can't say this anymore, but I used to say, it's because baptism is a time where only that person is getting wet.
[23:29] You know why I can't say that, because I got wet today. But it is a time where you stand in front of a multitude of dry people, and you go underwater in front of everyone to make a bold declaration that I belong to someone.
[23:46] That's why baptism is important. It's because it emboldens us. And the Bible says the cowardly. Now, I know it's uncomfortable.
[23:57] Friend, I mean, I know this seems as a shock to you. I'm not a really good public speaker. You say, well, sure you are. God called you to be a pastor. When I'm doing anything other than preaching, I am a nervous wreck.
[24:10] And I stumble, and I falter, and I mess up, and I'm not really good at it. There have been times because I was a preacher, everybody expects you, you like being in front of people, and everybody expects it, oh, he's really good, so I get asked to do things, and I'm horrible at it.
[24:28] But I know that when he calls me to do something, it doesn't matter how much I fear it. It doesn't matter how much I don't like it. If he's called me to do it, he will empower me to do it.
[24:40] Nothing other than what he's called me to do, but exactly what that has called me to do. And my family growing up, they used to make fun of me because I couldn't stand ordering my food at a restaurant.
[24:52] I just couldn't stand it. It just, I would, when somebody was looking at me on the other side of the register, it used to bother me. I don't know why. And then God called me to be a pastor, and I still don't know why.
[25:04] But we need to understand that if he's called us to follow him in baptism, or he's called us to follow him in obedience, if he's called us to go, or he's called us to stay, or if he's called us to testify, or if he's called us to do all of these things to make disciples, by the way, he has called us to do that.
[25:21] You don't need to ask God, are you calling me to make disciples? All I gotta do is turn to Matthew, right? And I tell you that he has called you to make disciples. That's the calling of every believer. He's called us to be on missions. And we say, well, I'm not real comfortable with that. Well, that's okay, he is.
[25:34] And what I have found, as long as he's comfortable there, it's okay. Because he enjoys, I don't wanna say enjoy, but he majors on using the uncomfortable in a situation where he's comfortable, because it's no longer about you, and it's no longer about your talents, it's no longer about your abilities.
[25:51] And Paul says, I will boast, if I'm gonna boast in anything, I'm gonna boast in my weakness, because when I am weak, he is strong, right? I wanna talk about how I fail, I wanna talk about how I mess up. I mean, I wanna, I butcher things all the time in my public speaking, and that's okay.
[26:07] I called a man one time from Guatemala, I had shared the gospel with him, he had accepted Christ, and I remember going over my head, all over and over, and I was getting ready to preach, and I remember I had messed up with my family, and talked about, and talked about him, and I stumbled over the words, some of you know exactly where I'm going with this, and I kept telling myself, I'm not gonna say that, I'm not gonna say, then I said he was a guacamolean.
[26:27] What do you do when you say that? You go, praise be to God, he can use even me, right? He used a rooster, he used a donkey, and he's using Billy Joe.
[26:39] He was a Guatemalan. Guacamole's what you eat, guys, that's the green stuff. I like that stuff too, but he was a Guatemalan, not a guacamolean. You'll figure that out later. It's okay, it's not about us.
[26:50] The cowardly won't be there. He'll always be. I love that. Sound effects, thank you, brother. May we always be there who are emboldened for the things of Christ.
[27:02] Number two, the ones who aren't gonna be there, the cowardly and the unbelieving. The unbelieving. You wanna know why we're scared sometimes?
[27:13] I know I'm getting a little personal. It's because we don't believe he can use us. The unbelieving. I've been asked sometimes, what is the unpardonable sin?
[27:26] And the scripture's very clear. The only unpardonable sin is the blasphemy of the Holy Spirit. What is the blasphemy of the Holy Spirit? Blasphemy means to count against or not believe in. It is to believe, to not believe that the Holy Spirit exists.
[27:38] And the reason that's unpardonable is because it is the Spirit that leads you to Christ, who leads you to the Father. So without the Spirit, you cannot accept the gospel, right? So if you do not believe, what limited Jesus' work on earth?
[27:52] The only thing that limited Jesus' work, where he could not do many miracles there because of their unbelief. You know the thing that limits his work in many churches today? We don't believe he can do it.
[28:03] And the reason I know we don't believe he can do it is because we base our whole agenda on everything we believe we can accomplish. As Henry Blackaby used to say, you need to plan your church, that you are doing things that you cannot accomplish unless he does it through you.
[28:20] Then you are believing. So now we see the perfection that describes it, the presence that defines it. Let's get to these last two really quick. The place that inhabits it. We'll get into this more detail tonight, but the place that inhabits it.
[28:31] It says, he looked, he says, and I saw in verse two, the holy city, the new Jerusalem coming down out of heaven from God, made ready as a bride adorned for her husband. This all of a sudden piqued our interest, right?
[28:41] Because the bride of Christ is the church, right? But now it's being defined as a city. Well, that's okay because the church is the city and the city is the church. It is both a literal place because we see its physical structures, but it is inhabited with people.
[28:55] It is a magnificent place that inhabits it. We see that this city has 12 gates, three on each side pointing towards the compass. And these gates are named after the tribes of the nation of Israel, which shows us that our entrance into a relationship with him began with a people.
[29:09] And that is people of the nation of Israel, who is the people of Abraham. So that's our entrance into it. That is the gate. But the foundation stones have 12 names written on them too. And the 12 names of the foundation stones are the names of the apostles.
[29:20] Why? Because the church is built upon the foundation of the apostles and their profession of Jesus Christ as their Lord and Savior. We enter into a relationship because God entered into mankind and he did that through a people group, the nation of Israel.
[29:33] We live in that relationship because he built a foundation upon the profession and the preaching of the apostles. And we see this city in all of its magnificence. We see it in all of its splendor and its beauty.
[29:44] It is a place of security. The measurements that are given there can be taken as literal. The reason it is there is because it is a place of security. It is thousands of miles. It is over a thousand miles wide.
[29:56] It is over a thousand miles long. It's over a thousand miles tall. And we see the width of its walls. We see all of this city. Someone did the math, thankfully, and I did not have to, that if we took the measurements of this city, literally, and we took only about 25% of the capacity of this city, 25%, that over 20 billion people could live comfortably within the confines of this city, with 75% still left uninhabited.
[30:22] What we see here is this city possesses room for all who have believed in Jesus Christ through all of eternity. This city has room for all. Friend, listen to me. Not too many people are going to come to Christ and we're going to be crowded when we get there.
[30:36] So don't worry. Go out and share the gospel with everybody you come into contact with. There's room in eternity for them, right? There is room for all. We see this place that is there, and this place is defined not by the splendor of it, not by the beauty of it, but again by He who is in the center of it.
[30:52] It is the place for His throne. It is where the nations will bring all their glory. It is where they will bring their offerings, and we will continuously be before His throne. He is there, and He lightens the city, literally.
[31:04] It says that there is no need for the sun or the moon or any of the stars because the glory of God is its light, and the Lamb of God is its lamp. And it says that the glory of God shines so forth out of this city that it will spread to all of the new earth.
[31:18] What a beautiful city. What a beautiful place that inhabits eternity. Number four, finally, we see the provisions that are found in it. The provisions that are found in it.
[31:31] Because it is a place of perfection that is full of His presence, and we could go to that place where He dwells, we see provisions like none other. He provides comfort when He wipes the tears away from us.
[31:44] He provides easing of mourning and sorrow. And then it says there in verse 6, It is done. I am the Alpha and the Omega, the beginning and the end. I will give to the one who thirsts from the spring of the water of life without cost.
[31:57] We are introduced in verse 1 of chapter 22. Then He showed me a river of the water of life, clear as crystal, coming from the throne of God and of the Lamb. And in the middle of its street, on either side of the river, was the tree of life, bearing 12 kinds of fruit.
[32:10] That is a fruit for every month, right? Yielding its fruit in every month. And the leaves of the tree were for the healing of the nations. There will no longer be any curse, and the throne of God and the Lamb will be in it, and His bondservants will serve Him.
[32:22] And they will see His face, and His name will be on their foreheads. And there will no longer be any night, and they will not have need of the light of a lamp nor the light of the sun, because the Lord God will illumine them, and they will reign forever and ever.
[32:34] What we see here is that which He had provided for them in the garden will be reprovided in eternity. That is the tree of life, the healing of the nations, the water of life. These provisions, which we need to live eternally in His presence, will be there.
[32:48] There will be no sickness, there will be no sorrow, there will be no death, there will be no hurt, there will be no pain, there will be no infirmities, because the healing of the nations is found in the leaves of the tree. We see everything we ever need is there to be provided for us.
[33:02] But there is this wording, He who thirsts for it. May we close with this. May we live our lives thirsting, for that which only eternity in His presence can provide us.
[33:18] When you're thirsty, you get a drink of water. When you're thirsty, you really want something to quench that thirst. I mean, when you're mean thirsty, you know, you're reaching the point of dehydration, you know it, you're going to find something to quench that.
[33:33] May we thirst for those things that only eternity in His presence can provide, so that we would run to Him in desperation. As the deer pants for the water, may we long to be in His presence.
[33:48] Because my friend, it is there that we find the provisions we need now and in eternity. Let's pray. Lord, I thank You so much You've given us this day.
[33:59] Lord, what a privilege it is to gather around with the people of God to look at the Word of God. We pray, O God, that You would continue to impress these truths upon our heart.
[34:10] Lord, that You would help us to draw closer to You through all walks of our life. Lord, that You would be our longing and our desire. We ask it all in Jesus' name. Amen. Amen.
[34:59] Amen. Amen.
[35:59] Amen. Amen.
[36:59] Amen. Amen.
[37:59] Amen. Amen.
[38:59] Amen. Amen.
[39:59] Amen.