A New Heaven and a New Earth
Speaker Notes
Revelation 21:1-4 (NIV)
A New Heaven and a New Earth
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. 2 I saw the Holy City, the new Jerusalem, coming down out of heaven from God, prepared as a bride beautifully dressed for her husband. 3 And I heard a loud voice from the throne saying, “Look! God’s dwelling place is now among the people, and he will dwell with them. They will be his people, and God himself will be with them and be their God. 4 ‘He will wipe every tear from their eyes. There will be no more death’ or mourning or crying or pain, for the old order of things has passed away.”
Shakespeare – Sonnet 116:
Let me not to the marriage of true minds
Admit impediments. Love is not love
Which alters when it alteration finds,
Or bends with the remover to remove.
O no! it is an ever-fixed mark
That looks on tempests and is never shaken;
It is the star to every wand'ring bark,
Whose worth's unknown, although his height be taken.
Love's not Time's fool, though rosy lips and cheeks
Within his bending sickle's compass come;
Love alters not with his brief hours and weeks,
But bears it out even to the edge of doom.
If this be error and upon me prov'd,
I never writ, nor no man ever lov'd.
Josef Pieper – Faith Hope, Love (1997), pg. 170-171:
First, let us remember that “the most marvelous of all things a being can do is to be.” Existence itself, “la présence effective dans le monde”, this simple “act” of being in existence – this being that is so completely incomprehensible and subject to no definition whatsoever, is conferred upon us and all other beings by love and by love alone. And precisely this is what we know and corroborate when we ourselves love. For what the lover gazing upon his beloved says and means is not: How good that you are so (so clever, useful, capable, skillful), but: It’s good that you are; how wonderful that you exist!
Second, the other element in these claims that remains true in spite of the seeming frenzy of the statements is this: that in fact the most extreme form of affirmation that can possibly be conceived of is creation, making to be, in the strict sense of the word. “Creation is the comparative of affirmation.” And I am convinced that no one more fully appreciates this, no one is more persuaded of it beyond all argumentation and proof, than the tru lover. He “knows” that his affirmation directed toward the beloved would be pointless were not some other force akin to creation involved – and, moreover, a force not merely preceding his own love but one that is still at work and that he himself, the loving person, participates in and helps along by loving. … It is God who in the act of creation anticipated all conceivable human love and said: I will you to be; it is good, “very good” (Gen 1:31), that you exist. He has already infused everything that human beings can love and affirm, goodness along with existence, and that means lovability and affirmability. Human love, therefore, is by its nature and must inevitably be always an imitation and a kind of repetition of this perfected and, in the exact sense of the word, creative love of God. And perhaps the lover is not unaware of this before reflecting at all. How otherwise, for example, can we understand what is perhaps too rarely considered: that even the very first stirrings of love contain an element of gratitude? But gratitude is a reply; it is knowing that one has been referred to something prior, in this case to a larger frame of universal reference that supersedes the realm of immediate empirical knowledge.
David is a Theologian and Ethicist.