When you’re flying at 30,000 feet, you look out the jetliner window and catch the general contours of the earth below. The details are lost to altitude, but you still get the lay of the land – a general sense of where you are. Even if the navigational aids are small, you nonetheless sense that you’re headed in the right direction, and your confidence lies with the flight crew to get you safely where you need to go.
That’s been the essence – these recent Sundays – of our short, high-altitude trip across the New Testament book of Revelation. Our panoramic, window-seat view of the Bible’s last book is majestic with deafening praise lifted to God, stunning with Good News about the Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world, awe-inspiring with the assurance of evil’s final defeat. Here’s where we’ve been, and peek at where we’re headed –
For these last few Sundays of our high-flying adventure across Revelation, let’s slow down a bit and circle over John’s final chapters about the marriage of heaven and earth. “Blessed is the one who reads aloud the words of this prophecy, and blessed are those who hear it and take to heart what is written in it, because the time is near.” (Revelation 1:3) I’m reading to you the opening verses of chapter 21 –
Then I saw a new heaven and a new earth; for the first heaven and the first earth had passed away, and the sea was no more. And I 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 the throne saying, “See, the home of God is among mortals. He will dwell with them; they will be his peoples, and God himself will be with them; he will wipe every tear from their eyes. Death will be no more; mourning and crying and pain will be no more, for the first things have passed away.”
And the one who was seated on the throne said, “See, I am making all things new.” Also he said, “Write this, for these words are trustworthy and true.” Then he said to me, “It is done! I am the Alpha and the Omega, the beginning and the end. To the thirsty I will give water as a gift from the spring of the water of life. Those who conquer will inherit these things, and I will be their God and they will be my children.
“But as for the cowardly, the faithless, the polluted, the murderers, the fornicators, the sorcerers, the idolaters, and all liars, their place will be in the lake that burns with fire and sulfur, which is the second death.” (Revelation 21:1-8)
Most of my life has been spent living near mighty rivers and great lakes. So impressive bodies of water are somehow woven into the fabric of my being. And Lake Superior – to my eyes, anyway – is the most splendid of them all.
Superior is the largest freshwater lake in the world by surface area and the third-largest freshwater lake by volume. It is better described as a freshwater “sea” – an entity unto itself, a force to be reckoned-with. Capable of producing its own weather! Superior is the glory of God writ large: In gentle waves lapping warm summer sand, in freezing torrents splashed against ancient red rock. How great is our God!
Thus I have a hard time wrapping my soul and spirit around the prophet John’s claim that, in this new marriage of heaven and earth, the sea is no more. It doesn’t jibe well with an adjacent claim: “Behold I am making everything new.” Think about it! The sea is part of the Creation’s “everything,” and the sea was one of the wonders of Creation in which the Creator God took such delight – in both making the sea and then also filling its water to the brim with creature and fish to exceed imagination.
So, as another suggests, if the divinely arranged marriage of heaven and earth does not include every God-created thing ever made, then we’re conceding defeat to the devil – whose goal all along has been the ruination of God’s handiwork. The redeeming and re-creating of every created splendor proves beyond a reasonable doubt that in the end God wins and evil loses. That just seems right.
So, why does John dream of “no more sea”? Probably because “sea” is bible-speak for “chaos,” for the dumpster-fire of creation run amok after its fall into sin. In Scripture “sea” refers less to geography and more to anarchy, bedlam, and disorder: forces that wield the power to end life, not create and sustain it.
Largely landlocked nations like ancient Israel feared the ocean. Its horizon looked like the end of the world, the fatal place where you could fall off the face of the earth forever. The chaotic oblivion of the sea was to be avoided at all cost. But as God’s created splendor, oceans – the vast majority of the earth’s surface – surely the sea must be preserved and renewed, too!
Indeed, in the New Marriage of Heaven and Earth, the seas in all their splendor will remain, but all chaos and offense will be flushed away. That’s exactly what we proclaim with an ancient creed: “He will come again to judge the living and the dead.” That just seems right, too.
No one likes judgment, of course, and it’s tempting to turn away from John’s foul-smelling talk of hot-sulfur lakes consuming a rogue’s gallery of ne’re-do-wells. And yet, for a lot of people in history and who live on this planet right now – but maybe not necessarily you and me, a longing for justice stirs in their long-crestfallen hearts. It simmers alongside a craving to know that God won’t merely wink at or casually wave off evil and the chaos it generates. For these saints, such confidence in God’s meting out of final judgment is part and parcel of their hope for a renewed and flat-out better world – preferably sooner rather than later.
It is simply not enough for God to wipe away the pollution of Creation like a window-washer squeegees away unsightly streaks. No, those who murder the innocent, those who exploit and terrorize the vulnerable, those who lead people astray in evil schemes calculated to bring suffering — these vile and noxious beings must be confronted, held accountable, and rightly punished. God in the crucifixion of Jesus cannot be a God of justice and true righteousness if all the wrongs of human history are not one day thoroughly and completely righted.
Let’s not pretend that the prospect of God going toe to toe with the unrighteous and the unjust cannot be of a piece of Revelation’s vision of God making all things new. One without the other would be incomplete. And whatever else the New Creation will be, it most certainly will not be unfinished. That, too, just seems right.
Pastor Grant M. VanderVelden shared this message during worship on Sunday, February 1, 2026, at First Presbyterian Church in Waukon, Iowa, USA. It is part of his current series on the book of Revelation. Scholarship, commentary, and reflection by Anthony Hoekema, Scott Hoezee, and Fleming Rutledge inform the message.