The Lamb as Lamp (2 of 2)

The temple had been the structure by which Israel's God dwelt among His people without overwhelming them. The whole architecture of the tabernacle in the wilderness, then Solomon's temple, then the second temple, was a graded structure of approach — outer court, inner court, holy place, holy of holies — with the divine presence localized in the innermost room and the priesthood mediating access to it. The temple was a concession to human limitation. The presence had to be mediated because the unmediated presence would have killed the human approaching. In the new creation, the mediation is gone. The presence is everywhere. The cosmos itself is the holy of holies. There is no need for a structure of approach because there is nowhere to approach from — the human is already in the presence at every point of the new earth.

And the unmediated presence the cosmos has been filled with is what the volume has been naming on both Johannine anchors from the Preface forward. The presence is light, and the presence is love. The temple was the structure that allowed the love-essence to indwell Israel without consuming the people it was reaching toward; the mediation existed because human beings were not yet fit to receive what the essence is. In the new creation, the mediation is gone because they have been made fit. The love that 1 John 4:8 names as God's essence has done its native work in redeemed humanity, and those it has been indwelling are now children of God who can be in the unmediated presence without being unmade by it.

And the sun is gone for the same reason. The sun was the secondary light that lit the world in the absence of the unmediated divine glory. Genesis 1:14-19 has God making the sun and moon on the fourth day to give light to the earth — secondary luminaries for a creation that did not yet have the full presence of its Maker as its direct illumination. In Revelation 21, the secondary luminaries are no longer required. The Lamb is the Lamp. The visible glory of the Son saturates the cosmos directly.

Revelation 22 continues the description. A pure river of water of life, clear as crystal, proceeding out of the throne of God and of the Lamb. On either side of the river, the tree of life, bearing twelve kinds of fruits, with leaves for the healing of the nations. The river. The tree. The healing leaves. The garden has returned. The garden that was lost in Genesis 3 is the garden that has been restored in Revelation 22. But the garden has not merely been restored. It has been transformed. The first garden had one tree of life. The second has a tree of life on either side of the river. The first was given to two humans. The second is given to the nations — every tribe and tongue and people.

The narrative envelope of Scripture closes here. Genesis 2 opens with a garden. Revelation 22 closes with a garden. The whole drama of redemption is enclosed between them. But the second garden is not the first restored to its original condition. The second garden is the first glorified, expanded, deepened, brought to a destination the first garden was always pointing toward but had not yet reached.

Revelation 22:4 names the final blessing of the redeemed. And they shall see his face. The phrase is short. Its theological weight is enormous. The patristic and medieval traditions developed an entire doctrine around it, calling it the beatific vision — the seeing of God, the supreme good of the redeemed. Augustine in City of God Book 22 made the vision of God the highest of all the goods enjoyed in the new creation. The seeing-of-the-face is what the participation of Chapter 15 finally becomes. The metamorphosis of 2 Corinthians 3:18 was through a glass darkly. The seeing of Revelation 22:4 is face to face. The disciple who has been seeing indirectly through the Scripture and the worship and the disciplines of the Christian life is now seeing directly.

The pastoral consequence of all of this is concrete. The destination is not a disembodied heaven where souls float forever in a state of pleasant abstraction. The destination is a renewed cosmos where resurrected bodies dwell in the immediate presence of the Son. Everything the disciple has loved that is good — the materials of the world, the work of his hands, the relationships that have formed him, the embodied life he has been given — will not be discarded but transformed. The continuity between this life and the next is greater than the discontinuity. The disciple is not preparing for the abandonment of what he has loved. The disciple is preparing for what he has loved to be made finally what it was always meant to be.