SPROUL: Then he said, “Then I, John, saw the holy city, the new Jerusalem, coming down
out of heaven from God, prepared as a bride adorned for her husband. And I heard a loud
voice from heaven saying, ‘Behold, the tabernacle of God is with men, and He will dwell with them,
and they shall be His people. God Himself will be with them and be their God. And God will wipe away
every tear from their eyes; and there shall be no more death, nor sorrow, nor crying;
there shall be no more pain, for the former things have passed away.’”
Sometimes we hear a message like this, and our immediate response is, “It’s simply
too good to be true.” If we were to invent a religion,
surely we would want to invent one that gave us a promise of some kind of permanent relief from pain
and from suffering and from death. We have the image in Greek literature of the sword of Damocles
that hangs suspended in the air, ready to fall and drop at any second.
And the sword of Damocles represents a constant source of threat that will destroy our happiness.
Now, we are creatures who are alive, and we love life. And yet, every one of us
is on death row. Every one of us is under a death sentence. Every one us knows that somehow,
there in the future awaits our execution. We don’t know what form it will take.
We don’t know what the circumstances of our own demise will be, but that sword of Damocles,
that sword of death, hangs over us and casts a pall over all of our plans and our joyous
anticipations. And though we try to suppress it, it’s always there, the awareness of our mortality.
That kind of dampers the thrill and the joy of life, does it not,
to have this unknown specter of the unwelcome visitation of the angel of death into our lives?
Well, here we are told that there is a moment in history when that last enemy will be destroyed.
For in glory, death will be no more. Now, as I said, we could see this simply as the wish
projection of people who simply cannot bear the burden of this sword of Damocles that hangs over
the neck of every human being. But it isn’t just whistling in the dark that we’re concerned with
here. There is a reason, as the Scriptures tell us, for the hope that is within us.
We have already tasted glory. For, in the record of the biblical Scriptures, we have the testimony
of One who has already defeated death, One who has been there, done that, and come back,
and has promised that He is the first fruits of all of those who fall asleep. That’s fundamental
to the biblical affirmation of Christian faith: resurrection, the resurrection of the Christian
following the pattern of the resurrection of Christ. It’s not simply that Christ was
raised for His own vindication, but He was raised as God’s promise and demonstration of
the surety of that promise that we will also participate in that resurrection.