Revelation 21:1-4

Sisters and brothers in Christ,

The Bible passage for this evening is the same as yesterday but with the emphasis on five words that I ignored first time around:

¹ Then I saw a new heaven and a new earth, for the first heaven and the first earth had passed away, and the sea was no more.² And I saw the holy city, new Jerusalem, coming down out of heaven from God, prepared as a bride adorned for her husband. ³ And I heard a loud voice from the throne saying, “Behold, the dwelling place of God is with man. He will dwell with them, and they will be his people, and God himself will be with them as their God. ⁴ 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.”

For an Englishman to be told that the new heaven and the new earth will have no sea is a little disconcerting. No one in the UK lives more than 70 miles from the coast. As a child, I lived only a mile from the sea. It’s the single thing I miss most in Madison. Lakes are fine and beautiful, but they don’t smell salty, have tides that twice a day reveal broad sandy beaches, generate waves to play in, or go on forever.

The sea didn’t have the same appeal to people of New Testament times. It was a place of great and unpredictable danger. If storms arose over land, you could shelter in the temple and cry “Glory!” (Psalm 29:9). If you were caught in a storm at sea, there wasn’t much you could do but pray, jettison your cargo, or—in one well-known case—throw Jonah overboard. If you had to go to sea, you hugged the coast, sheltered in port over winter, and made sure the lifeboats were in good shape. Think of Paul’s journey by sea to Rome, which ended in “a tempestuous wind, … no small tempest” and shipwreck (Acts 27).

“The sea” was a vivid symbol of all that was dangerous, unpredictable, and beyond human control, whether as a force of nature or an effect of human sin.  One of the beasts earlier in Revelation was seen by John “rising out of the sea” (13:1). Psalm 46 invokes the “roar and foam” of the sea as a symbol of the “rage” of “nations” and the collapse of “kingdoms.”

When John writes of there being no more sea, therefore, he doesn’t mean that in a perfect world, children won’t be able to paddle in the sea and build sandcastles. He’s promising something that ranks along with no more tears, death, mourning, crying, or pain. In the new heaven and the new earth, there’ll be no more uncontrollable forces, no more natural disasters, no more wars or other political turmoil. And no more pandemics! No diseases of any kind. Perfect health and eternal life, never under threat.

It’s not hard to imagine. Human beings have always longed for utopias. But we can’t build them and we tend to mess things up pretty badly when we try. But the God who is love and who loves us unwaveringly in Christ has promised to establish a new heaven and a new earth. All the uncontrollable forces gathered here under the compact symbol of “the sea” will be blessedly absent.

Our part is to do all we can, in small ways or large, to improve human life now, but also—and no less—to pray in faith, as Jesus taught us, “May your kingdom come, may your will be done, on earth as it is in heaven,” and to take comfort in the promise that our prayers will one day be gloriously answered. A pandemic has a way of focusing our minds not only on these words from the Lord’s prayer but also on God’s promise of peace and endless joy in a new heaven and a new earth.

Your brother in Christ,

Max