Rev 21:1 Then I saw a new heaven and a new earth, for the first heaven and the first earth had passed away, and there was no longer any sea.

     

The book of Revelation leaves us with a number of questions, but above all else it shows us God who is sovereign and God who is working to a timetable – which has an end! The trouble with trying to grapple with understanding the things in Revelation, is that they are all prophetic and the one thing I know about personal prophecy is that it WILL be fulfilled by God, but often not in ways that we can see now. This may be literal or it may be figurative and commentators will argue over it.

 

But what does this verse say in its simplest form? It says that God is working towards something that will be different at the end from what it was at the beginning. An intriguing phrase here is “had passed away”. Not “it was destroyed and something utterly new was made to replace it", which many of us have traditionally thought here. No, see it as we've just said, ‘different at the end from what it was at the beginning'. Because of the work of Jesus, the end is very different from the earlier part of history – think about it.

 

Why no longer any sea? Well the sea is something that divides the land, separates the nations. Whatever else this says it says that God's end product will produce a people, an experience that epitomizes total unity. God's end product will be one people who are utterly united. Check out how you feel about the rest of the Church.

Yes, the reality is that what we know of as the present will pass away, and many of us will say 'thank goodness' for we live in a Fallen World, a world that goes wrong because of the presence of Sin in it. At the present we struggle with sin, we struggle to cope with circumstances and even with one another. This is the world we know and Jesus is here in it with us and he is working out his purposes, seeking to draw more and more people to the Father before the time is right - and only he knows when that will be - for him to return in power and hand the completed kingdom back to his Father. We are living in a world with a limited time to go!