Revelation 21:1-6a
All Saints
This passage begins the climax, not only of the book of Revelation, but of the entire biblical story, a story that begins with the creator God forming the heavens and the earth (Genesis 1) and ends with God creating a new heaven and a new earth. In Revelation 21 and 22, God’s mission, God’s loving and life-giving purpose for the world, achieves its final triumph and goal.[1]
As the passage begins, John sees “a new heaven and a new earth” (Rev 21:1). The new Jerusalem, the Holy City, descends from heaven and God reestablishes his perfect rule over all creation. Some popular interpretations of Revelation picture Christians ascending to heaven to escape an earth that is doomed to destruction. The final movement in Scripture, however, is not up to heaven, but down to earth. New Jerusalem comes down from heaven to merge with a renewed earth (Rev 21:2, 10). This isn’t the former heaven and earth, or earth as we know it. It is a renewed creation, saturated with the glory and presence of God. God’s loving purpose is not to destroy creation, but to transform it—to enable all creation, including people, to flourish in the way God intended in the first place. God speaks directly, for only the second time in Revelation, and what he says is monumental: “See, I am making all things new!” (Rev 21:5).
John’s vision of the new creation, then, represents both continuity and discontinuity with the old creation. True, the first earth and heaven have “passed away” and the sea has “evaporated” (21:1). But that passing away represents God’s faithfulness to his creation, not its obliteration. God’s good creation isn’t left behind! What ends is an earth in which Satan, sin, and death try to sabotage God’s life-giving purposes for the world. The sea, which symbolizes evil and chaos in Revelation, suddenly gets a “pink slip” (Rev 21:1; cf. Rev 12:12; 13:1; 20:13). God doesn’t junk the old creation and start all over again. Rather, God will heal and transform the earth in order to bring it to its intended goal.[2]
The most stunning aspect of the new heaven and earth is that humans now experience the unhindered and immediate presence of God. Recalling covenant promises from the Old Testament, a heavenly voice announces that God resides among God’s people (Rev 21:3; Ezek 37:27). Literally, God will “pitch his tent” or “tabernacle” among them (Rev 21:3). This is the same language that John’s Gospel uses to picture Jesus, the incarnate Word, “tabernacling” among us (John 1:14). The presence of the slain and risen Lamb drenches the new heaven and earth. What’s more, Revelation expands the traditional Old Testament promise, “they will be his people” (Lev 26:13; Jer 24:7), referring to Israel, to the plural, “they will be his peoples” (Rev 21:3, italics added). In the new creation, people of every culture, language, and nation will flourish in joyous fellowship with one another. This is a picture of true human community. And the Triune God remains at the very center of their shared life.[3]
The new creation signals the end of all death and disease, suffering and sorrow, pandemics and pain. Like a loving and tender parent, God will “wipe every tear from their eyes” (Rev 21:4; cf. 7:17). This glorious promise offers hope and comfort to Christians who suffer under the heavy yoke of grief, pain, injustice, or persecution. Human suffering is not a permanent burden. God, not pain and death, will have the final word!
In the new heaven and earth, God’s purpose for creation to “make all things new” is accomplished. God shouts from the throne, “It is done!” (Rev 21:6). “The Alpha and Omega (the first and last letters in the Greek alphabet), the beginning and the end” (Rev 21:6) reveals God as the Lord of history. God is before all things, creator of the world, and God is creation’s fulfillment. A vital question for John’s first-century readers, and us, is, “Who’s in control of the world?” Is it Rome and its emperors (or any modern counterparts), who claimed sovereignty over everything? Are Satan or evil calling the shots, as it sometimes seems? Revelation’s unambiguous answer is that God alone sits on the throne of the universe. God has already triumphed over the powers of sin and evil in the crucified and risen Lamb. And the God who created the world will one day bring about its complete transformation.
But these verses give us more than simply a snapshot of our future destination. Although New Jerusalem belongs to the future, Revelation 21 offers a vision that shapes the witness and worship of God’s people now. By embracing the future goal of God’s mission that this passage reveals, we receive the grace to get caught up in God’s restoring purposes in the present. Revelation’s vision of the new creation equips and energizes the church to live as a “sneak preview” of that future. God says, “I am making everything new” (Rev 21:5), and that renewing work has already begun, even as we anticipate its consummation to come. For example, although the healing of all suffering, sorrow, and pain will not be fully realized until the future (Rev 21:4), that vision calls us to become communities that love and serve the sick, the disabled, and the grieving even now. While we will only experience God’s unimpeded presence in its fullness in the new creation, such a vision energizes us to invite people into fellowship with the Triune God in the present. And even as people of all tribes and nations will dwell in God’s presence in the Holy City, we are called to embody that vision now as communities who embrace those from every ethnicity, background, and culture. As Jesus taught us to pray, “Your kingdom come, your will be done, on earth as it is in heaven.”
On this All Saints Sunday, we express our gratitude for believers who have gone before us, who no longer know the sting of death, suffering, and pain, and enjoy God’s presence in a more complete sense than is possible in this life. But their example also urges us to live now as a foretaste of God’s future within a broken and despairing world. They inspire us to bear witness to God’s victory over death and evil, in anticipation of a new creation to come.
[1] This reflection adapts material from Dean Flemming, “Revelation,” in Wesley One Volume Commentary, ed. Kenneth J. Collins and Rob W. Wall (Nashville: Abingdon, 2020),
[2] See Dean Flemming, Foretaste of the Future: Reading Revelation in Light of God’s Mission (Downers Grove, IL: IVP Academic, 2022), 193.
[3] See Flemming, Foretaste of the Future, 189-90.