The Fixing of All Things

Revelation 22

Here ends our year-long adventure...& here beckoned to start the next one!

I want to thank most sincerely the bloggers who have given their time, faithful contemplation, and willingness to share their personal journeys while crafting these blogs day by day. Be encouraged that a thousand people from 45 different countries have been pointed to Christ ten thousand times by your blog. May God be glorified, and real, lasting spiritual fruit be the result!

My reading of the last chapter of the Bible impresses me with four thoughts or images today. First, I hear (& see) so strongly in the first 5 verses the repair and redemption of all things. Here finally in heaven is a river unpolluted -- a 'river of life' flowing down heaven's main street, supplying, never flooding nor consuming. Along its banks grows the 'tree of life'. It is ever- bearing fruit, and its leaves are for the 'healing of the nations' -- a picture of the expectancy, inclusivity, and certain resolve of the Gospel to reach and 'heal' all people groups! Feel the rapturous joy of the v3 line, 'No longer will there be a curse upon anything.' Think! What would a heaven, what would a life like THAT be?! And God? Fully seen and known to us. God, no more with hidden face, no more shielding our eyes at His glory for fear of being consumed, a never-forgotten, never-disowned God! His identity stamped upon us never more lost nor obscured! This place of the redeeming repair of all things, will be a place of no night, no lamps nor bulbs, not even the sun. 'For the Lord God will shine on them!' Someone recently gloried to me, "there will not even be shadows in heaven!" We will be fully surrounded by His ineffably sublime light!

And then, following this picture of redemption, this chapter leaves me with three subsequent indelible exhortations:

1. The Book. Keep it open (v10), follow it (v9), and let no one never ever add or detract from it (vv18-19)!

2. Coming Soon. The time is near (v10). Jesus is coming soon (vv 6,7, 12, 20). Believe it, & live like it! Make your priorities, parenting, conversations, expenditures & plans as if you really believed He is coming soon.

3. So Come. You, yourself. Come to this place of the repair of all things. Come to Jesus Himself. God and all heaven invite and call to you (v17)! Dirty memory of a sullied yesterday? Dry-pasty-souled from drought of the inner variety? Come. Come. Come be washed (v14). Come drink freely (17). Come to this city, this river, this tree, this fruit & new united nation. Come to this throne, and to this Lamb, & Light, & Face of God. Come.

-PPaul

The End and Still Dwelling

Revelation 21

In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth (Gen 1:1) Here in
verse 1 is the end of that creation. Yet God will continue to dwell with
men. God walked with Adam in the garden and will dwell with men in the new
city.

From creation to creation God walks with men. This is the goal of Jesus
coming to earth, to provide salvation to men. The pain of life (Gen 3) has
come to an end. The tears of that life will be wiped away. Corinthians
tells of men becoming a new creation through Christ. The old has passed
away. Yet we who have been made new still live in the pain filled earth.
The new dwelling place will be the home of righteousness and even death will
be no more.

Steve Louden