The Return of Christ

The New Heavens and New Earth

The Bible's story does not end with escape from the world but with the renewal of it. In Revelation 21 and 22 John sees a new heaven and a new earth, and the holy city coming down from God, where he dwells with his people and wipes away every tear. This is the true end of the Christian hope: not disembodied souls in the clouds, but God with us, death undone, and all things made new. On this destination the whole church agrees.

And I heard a great voice out of heaven saying, Behold, the tabernacle of God is with men, and he will dwell with them, and they shall be his people, and God himself shall be with them, and be their God.Revelation 21:3 (KJV)

Where the story ends

Every story has an ending, and the Bible's ending is one of the most beautiful things ever written. After all the visions of Revelation, after the judgment and the defeat of every evil, John is shown the destination of the whole human story, and it is not an escape from the world but its healing. He sees a new heaven and a new earth, and the old order of death and sorrow passing away.

This matters because people often imagine the Christian hope as souls floating off to a distant heaven, leaving the earth behind forever. But that is not where Scripture ends. It ends with heaven and earth joined, with God coming down to dwell with people in a renewed creation. The last two chapters of the Bible answer the ache of the first three: what was lost in the garden is not merely restored but surpassed.

God with us

The center of the vision is not golden streets or pearl gates, glorious as those images are. The center is a Person, and a relationship. John hears the meaning of it announced from the throne:

And I heard a great voice out of heaven saying, Behold, the tabernacle of God is with men, and he will dwell with them, and they shall be his people, and God himself shall be with them, and be their God.Revelation 21:3 (KJV)

This is the summit of everything. From the beginning God's desire was to dwell with his people, in Eden, in the tabernacle, in the temple, and above all in Jesus, whose name Immanuel means God with us. Now that desire reaches its fullness: the tabernacle of God is with men, and he will dwell with them forever. The whole Bible has been moving toward this sentence. The distance between God and humanity, opened by sin, is closed for good, and he himself is with them, and is their God.

Every tear wiped away

Then comes the promise that has comforted the grieving in every generation, the words read at more funerals than perhaps any other, because they speak directly to the deepest wound:

And God shall wipe away all tears from their eyes; and there shall be no more death, neither sorrow, nor crying, neither shall there be any more pain: for the former things are passed away.Revelation 21:4 (KJV)

Notice how personal it is. God does not send an angel to comfort from a distance; God himself shall wipe away all tears from their eyes. And notice how complete: no more death, no more sorrow, no more crying, no more pain, for the former things are passed away. Everything that has ever made a human being weep is named and abolished. This is not a vague serenity but the specific undoing of every grief. The mourner will not merely be consoled; the cause of mourning will be gone.

A few verses on, the One on the throne says, Behold, I make all things new, and it is worth hearing the exactness of it. Not all new things, as if the old were simply scrapped, but all things new, the very world we know made whole. The scarred creation is not discarded but redeemed.

This gives Christian hope a shape unlike the world's dreams. It is not the wish that we could leave our bodies and our world behind, nor the fear that everything will simply end in fire and nothing. It is the promise that the God who made this world loves it enough to mend it, and that everything good in it, every faithful work, every real beauty, every act of love, will be gathered up and kept. Nothing precious is finally lost. The tears we cry now are not pretended away; they are collected, and one day the same God who saw each one will himself wipe them from our eyes. A hope that specific can carry a person through almost anything.

The city and the garden

John's final vision draws together the whole Bible. The holy city, the new Jerusalem, comes down out of heaven from God, and through its midst flows the river of the water of life, and the tree of life grows on its banks, the same tree lost in Eden, now bearing fruit every month, its leaves for the healing of the nations. There is no temple in the city, because the Lord God and the Lamb are its temple, and no sun or moon, because the glory of God gives it light. The gates never shut, for there is no more night and no more fear.

And at the very heart of it, John says, they shall see his face. That is the oldest longing of the human heart, to see God and live, once impossible, now the everyday joy of the redeemed. This is what all the pages of this cluster have been reaching toward. The return of Christ is not an end in itself; it is the doorway into this. He comes back in order to bring his people home to a world where God is with them and every tear is wiped away.

It is worth pausing on how physical and homely the picture is. There is a city with gates and a street, a river you could drink from, trees bearing real fruit, and faces that can be seen. The Bible does not end in a haze of abstraction but in a place, a home, with the God who made us dwelling among us as naturally as a father among his children. Whatever we do not yet understand about it, we are not promised less than the world we love but more, the same creation healed of all that spoils it, and its Maker present in the midst of it. That is the country the whole story has been traveling toward.

The one destination all Christians share

Of everything in the study of last things, this is perhaps the least divided. Christians who differ sharply over the rapture and the millennium stand together here, gazing at the same city, longing for the same new creation, comforted by the same promise that God will dwell with his people and death will be no more. The destination is not in dispute. Whatever route the different views trace through the details, they all arrive here, at God with us and all things made new.

And so this is where the Christian hope rests, and where the temptation to fear or to argue finally falls silent. Not on a date, not on a chart, but on a Person who has promised to come and to make all things new, and who cannot lie. The right response to this vision is the response the Bible itself makes in its very last lines: to long for it, and to pray, Even so, come, Lord Jesus. If that is the ending of the story, then no grief in the middle of it is the last word, and the darkest night any of us walks through is one that ends in a morning where God wipes away the tears himself.

A note on the end times: on the questions where sincere Christians differ, chiefly the rapture, the millennium, and the timing and details of Christ's return, this platform is non-denominational and describes the main views fairly rather than declaring a winner. What all Christians share and hold as certain is this: Christ will return, the dead will be raised, there will be a judgment, and God will make all things new. We anchor on that, and hold the rest in peace.

Related: The resurrection and the last judgment · How then should we live · The promise of his return · The Return of Christ