“Is this heaven?” wonder we Iowans when ruminating on a cinematic field of dreams.
So also wonder all God’s people in hearing this morning’s dreamy Scripture lesson for All Saints Sunday from the New Testament Book of Revelation: Is this heaven?
Is the apostle John imagining God’s heavenly field of earthly dreams? Or does John describe the new heaven and earth that Jesus will inaugurate when he returns to earth at the end of measured time? Or, maybe, John speaks to the visible difference that Jesus’s reign on earth makes in the here and now.
All three, I should think. After all, the lay of the heavenly land at this very moment – however wonderfully glorious and utterly spectacular – surely will find its most jaw-dropping fulfillment in God’s creation of a new heaven and earth. And the Lord’s promise of eternal dwelling places infuses creation and its creatures with life-giving hope and assurance already today.
Our lesson provides what another calls a “salvation interlude” that reassures God’s beloved children that God our Father really is the lead author in the story of our salvation. The Spirit uses these passages to refresh God’s people along our sometimes-toilsome way – not just through the present glory of earthly life but also through images of heaven’s glory and the glory of God’s new creation. Listen to the word that God has spoken, even if you don’t understand –
After this I looked, and there was a great multitude that no one could count, from every nation, from all tribes and peoples and languages, standing before the throne and before the Lamb, robed in white, with palm branches in their hands. They cried out in a loud voice, saying, “Salvation belongs to our God who is seated on the throne, and to the Lamb!”
And all the angels stood around the throne and around the elders and the four living creatures, and they fell on their faces before the throne and worshiped God, singing, “Amen! Blessing, and glory, and wisdom, and thanksgiving, and honor, and power, and might be to our God forever and ever! Amen.”
Then one of the elders addressed me, saying, “Who are these, robed in white, and where have they come from?” I said to him, “Sir, you are the one who knows.” Then he said to me, “These are they who have come out of the great ordeal; they have washed their robes and made them white in the blood of the Lamb.
“For this reason they are before the throne of God, and worship him day and night within his temple, and the one who is seated on the throne will shelter them. They will hunger no more, and thirst no more; the sun will not strike them, nor any scorching heat; for the Lamb at the center of the throne will be their shepherd, and he will guide them to springs of the water of life, and God will wipe away every tear from their eyes.” (Revelation 7:9-17)
Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. found it appalling that, in his words, “the most segregated hour of Christian America is 11 o’clock on Sunday morning.” Little has changed since Dr. King’s mid-20th-century day. Currently only 8 percent of all Christian congregations enjoy significant degrees of racial diversity.
And it isn’t just churches that remain stubbornly segregated. Folks who study such things deem U.S. schools and neighborhoods both racially and socio-economically segregated. And the raging battlefields of our political skirmishes and culture wars entice the particularly anxious and fearful to circle their wagons with those who think and act like themselves. Indivisible we are not; divisible we have become.
So, thanks be to God for Revelation 7 and its much-needed, counter-cultural vision of the Good News that lies ahead on our spiritual journey. When God shows John what God is doing both in the heavenly and earthly realms, the witnesses to that holy work are a marvelously integrated “multitude.” A huge crowd, too huge to count; everyone is there, all nations and tribes, all races and languages.
Though breathtakingly diverse, the heavenly throng is yet united: Its members all clad in white, their dazzling robes conveying special status, as when the anguished faither in Luke’s Gospel welcomes the return of his prodigal son with a brand-spanking new robe to signal the wayward young man’s restoration to the family circle (Luke 15:22). Revelation’s alabaster crowd clutches palm branches – as we do every Palm Sunday – in celebration of the victory God in Christ has won for them and for us. Restoration and salvation, complete purity and final victory: the gifts of God for the people of God!
The Lord has delivered his people – each and every last one of them – from immense earthly suffering and into God’s eternal presence. The shockingly varied people who stand in the heavenly realm have, by God’s grace, survived the worst that sin, brokenness, and death could throw at them, and they emerge safe and sound on the other side that is the heavenly realm. During their long, hard slog on earth, the integrated congregation clung to faith – believing, hoping, praying, and witnessing – even when doing that was incredibly difficult; some even sacrificing everything, including their very lives, for their faith.
And now this broad swath of fallen humanity finally and fully is at rest – united more than anything by the Lamb who sits on the throne that’s right before them. This Lamb – this Jesus who rescues them – brings freedom not primarily from misery but rather more so from their sin-soaked rebellion against God and God’s good purposes.
And these varied saints don’t just celebrate what God has already done to rescue them. They also celebrate in eager anticipation of what God is yet to do. As an elder promises John, God will take away all hunger and all thirst. The day is surely coming when the Lord no longer allows harm to befall his Creation or threaten God’s adopted sons and daughters. At the end of our lesson comes the most majestic and stirring of all of its promises: “God will wipe away every tear from their eyes.”
No wonder, then, that this united multitude bursts into boisterous song: “Salvation belongs to our God, who sits on the throne, and to the Lamb.” They jubilantly sing with the mighty roar of sports fans who’ve just watched their favorite team score the last-second, game-winning touchdown, goal, or basket. In echo of that thunderous roar, elders, angels, and animals join in the exuberant revelry: “Amen! Praise, and glory, and thanks, and honor, and power, and strength be to our God for ever and ever. Amen!” Indeed, everything that’s good, noble, powerful, and wise comes from the Lord God himself!
That foretaste of rapture to come assuredly nourishes the broken hearts and sagging spirits among those of us dwelling on this side of heaven’s curtain.
In her book The Nature of the Beast, author Louise Penny introduces a woman named Clara, whose husband died very suddenly. Clara “knew that grief took a terrible toll. It was paid at every birthday, every holiday, every Christmas. It was paid when glimpsing the familiar handwriting, or a hat, or a balled-up sock. Or hearing a creak that could have, should have been a footstep. Grief took its toll each morning, each evening, every noon hour as those who were left behind struggled forward.”
By God’s amazing grace, Revelation 7 insists such grief has no place now in the heavenly realm and will have no place soon in the new creation. And it is the anticipation of such glory that sustains our daily journeys through the shadowy valleys of death. Thus we join the psalmist in song: “Surely goodness and mercy shall follow me all the days of my life, and I shall dwell in the house of the LORD my whole life long” (Psalm 23:6).
Sola scriptura! Scripture alone!
The Word of the Lord. Thanks be to God.
Pastor Grant M. VanderVelden shared this message on All Saints Sunday, November 2, 2025, at First Presbyterian Church in Waukon, Iowa, USA. Scholarship, commentary, and reflection by Doug Bratt, Eugene Peterson, Barbara Rossing, Walter Taylor, and N.T. Wright inform the message.