New Heavens and a New Earth

Isaiah 65–66 (with Revelation 21:1–7)

Before this session, read Isaiah 65 and 66, the closing chapters of the book, and Revelation 21:1–7, where the same vision returns. Hear God promise to create new heavens and a new earth, the former ones not remembered (65:17); to create Jerusalem to be a source of joy, with the sound of weeping never heard in her again (65:18–19); a wolf and a lamb grazing together, with no one injuring or destroying on His entire royal mountain (65:25); the new heavens and new earth that will remain standing, and your descendants and your name with them (66:22); and all people coming to worship Him (66:23).

For look, I am ready to create new heavens and a new earth! The former ones will not be remembered; no one will think about them anymore. … The sound of weeping or cries of sorrow will never be heard in her again.

Isaiah 65:17, 19

Ready to Create New Heavens and a New Earth

We come at last to the end of the long book of Isaiah, and the prophet lifts his eyes to the farthest horizon of all: to the end not merely of the story of Israel, but of the story of the world itself. For look, I am ready to create new heavens and a new earth! (65:17). Here is the destination toward which the whole book, and indeed the whole Bible, has been steadily moving: a new creation. God will not merely tinker with the old order, patch its wounds, prop up its ruins; He will make all things new: new heavens, and a new earth.

And mark well what He says of the old order, with all its accumulated griefs: “The former ones will not be remembered; no one will think about them anymore.” Not merely that the old troubles will end, though end they surely will, but that they will be forgotten; no one will so much as think of them. The new joy will be so deep, so complete, so all-filling, that the old sorrows will not even rise up to be compared against it. We cannot quite imagine this now, when our griefs press so heavily upon us and our losses seem so permanent; but God promises a day when the whole weight of all our sorrows will be so far outweighed by glory that they will simply slip from memory, not because they were nothing, but because the new thing is so much more than they ever were.

We need not take that to mean a kind of heavenly amnesia, as though the redeemed will be emptied of their own histories and made strangers to all they have lived through. The risen Lord Jesus still bore the marks of His wounds; He had not forgotten the cross. But the wounds, in His risen body, no longer hurt Him; they had become the trophies of His victory rather than the instruments of His agony. And so it may well prove with us. It is not that the old sorrows will be simply erased from us, but that their sting will be drawn out altogether, so that we will be able to look back upon even the hardest things without the old ache, seeing them at last swallowed up in a joy that makes them small. To say that “no one will think about them anymore” is to say that nothing in all those old griefs will any longer have the power to trouble us. The tears are not denied; they are wiped away.

But be happy and rejoice forevermore over what I am about to create! For look, I am ready to create Jerusalem to be a source of joy, and her people to be a source of happiness (65:18). God does not merely create a new world and then place His people inside it; He creates the city itself to be “a source of joy,” and her people “a source of happiness.” Gladness is built into the new creation; it is not an occasional visitor there but the very air of the place. And then a wonder almost too great to take in: Jerusalem will bring me joy, and my people will bring me happiness (65:19). God Himself rejoices over His people. The joy is not ours only; it is His. The God who made us, and bought us, and gathered us home, takes delight in the redeemed He has brought there, and rejoices over them.

We should let that settle, for it is more than we usually dare to believe. We can perhaps imagine God tolerating us in the end, receiving us grudgingly, on the strength of His Son’s merits, into a heaven where we will be allowed to remain on sufferance. But the verse says something far warmer than mere toleration. His people will bring Him joy; He will take active, singing delight in them. The Father who ran down the road to meet the prodigal, and called for music and dancing, is the very same God who here promises to rejoice over the redeemed Jerusalem. We are not barely admitted, on probation, hoping only not to be noticed; we are rejoiced over, delighted in, welcomed home by a God who is glad (glad!) to have us there. That God should be willing to save us at all is wonder enough; that He should rejoice over us once He has is almost more than the heart can hold.

The sound of weeping or cries of sorrow will never be heard in her again (65:19). In all the new creation there will not be one more tear. The sound that has accompanied every single generation of human life, the sound of weeping at gravesides and sickbeds and in the dark watches of the night, will never be heard again. The apostle John, given his own vision of this same new creation, heard it put in words we know well: “He will wipe away every tear from their eyes, and death will not exist any more—or mourning, or crying, or pain” (Revelation 21:4). That is where the book of Isaiah has been taking us all along. That is where the whole story ends, for those who are God’s: not in the winepress, but in the city where God Himself wipes away the tears.

A New Earth

We should pause over a small word in this great promise, for it quietly corrects a notion many Christians carry without ever quite realizing they hold it. God promises new heavens and a new earth. Not the abolition of the physical world, not the escape of disembodied souls into some misty spiritual realm, but a new earth: a real, solid, physical creation, made new. We sometimes speak as though the Christian hope were simply that, when we die, our souls float away to heaven and leave the earth behind forever. It is true that believers who die go at once to be with Christ, “which is better by far” (Philippians 1:23). But that is not the end of the Bible’s hope. The Bible’s hope is the resurrection of the body and the renewal of all creation: a new earth, beneath new heavens, where the redeemed will live, embodied, forever.

The pale, ghostly picture, souls escaping the body and the world to float in some immaterial heaven, owes far more to old Greek philosophy than to the Bible. The Greeks tended to think of the body as a prison the soul would be glad to be rid of, and of salvation as escape from the material world. The Scriptures think no such thing. They begin with a God who made matter and called it good, who formed a man from the soil of the ground and breathed His own breath of life into him, who took flesh Himself in the Lord Jesus and rose again bodily from the grave. When we confess in the creed that we believe in the resurrection of the body, we are saying that our hope is not to be rid of the body and the earth at last, but to have them back, renewed and incorruptible. Salvation is not escape from creation; it is the redemption of creation, ourselves included, body and all.

This matters far more than it might at first seem. It means that God is not going to throw away the good world He made; He is going to redeem it. The creation that was subjected to futility and decay when Adam fell, the creation that, Paul says, “groans and suffers together until now” (Romans 8:22), waiting, will itself be set free from its bondage of decay. The earth is not a disposable stage we strut about upon until we graduate to heaven; it is part of the very thing God intends to save. The same hands that made the world will remake it; the same God who looked on it in the beginning and called it good will call it good again, and this time there will be no fall to spoil it.

And so the Christian hope turns out to be a far earthier, more solid, more satisfying thing than the pale picture of ghosts drifting in the clouds. We do not look forward to floating about as disembodied spirits, plucking harps on insubstantial clouds; we look forward to a new earth, with new bodies, in a renewed creation: to rivers and mountains and feasting and work and rest and the faces of one another, all of it cleansed at last of every trace of the curse. The God who gave us bodies and a world to live in did not make a mistake that He now means to undo; He made a good thing that sin spoiled, and He means to have it back, glorious and whole. The new heavens and the new earth are the homecoming not only of God’s people, but of God’s world.

No Longer Injure or Destroy

The prophet goes on to describe the new creation, and much of what he says is the simple undoing of the curse under which we have lived ever since Eden. There, in the new earth, people will build houses and live in them, plant vineyards and eat their fruit; No longer will they build a house only to have another live in it, or plant a vineyard only to have another eat its fruit … They will not work in vain, or give birth to children that will experience disaster (65:22–23). Think of how much of our present grief is bound up with futility: work that comes to nothing, labor whose fruit others seize or time destroys, the dull ache of building what will not last. All of that, the curse of futile labor first pronounced in Eden, is reversed. In the new creation no work is wasted, no labor is in vain, nothing good is ever built only to be lost again.

There is an ache built into life under the curse that this promise reaches all the way down to and heals. Everything we build, we build knowing that it will not last: the house will pass to strangers, the work will be undone, the body will fail, and the very memory of us will fade from the earth in a generation or two. The Teacher in Ecclesiastes felt it keenly: everything is futile, like chasing the wind, because nothing under the sun finally endures. It is one of the deepest sorrows of being human, this sense that we pour ourselves out into things that will not keep. And the new creation is God’s own answer to it. There, at last, what is built endures; what is loved is not lost; what is planted is not torn up again. The labor that here runs perpetually through our fingers will there hold fast in our hands. For a race long haunted by the fear that nothing lasts, it is hard to imagine better news than a world where nothing good is ever lost again.

And then the prophet reaches for an image we have met before, away back near the beginning of the book. A wolf and a lamb will graze together; a lion, like an ox, will eat straw … They will no longer injure or destroy on my entire royal mountain (65:25). We heard very nearly these same words in the eleventh chapter, when we studied the peaceable kingdom of the Branch: a wolf residing with a lamb, a baby playing over the hole of a snake, no one injuring or destroying on all God’s royal mountain. There it was the promise held out at the book’s beginning; here it returns at the book’s very end, framing the whole. The reign of the Branch and the new creation belong together: the kingdom He came to bring, present now wherever His word gathers His people, comes to its fullness in the new heavens and the new earth, where the long war of tooth and claw is over at last, and nothing injures or destroys any more. Isaiah is not sketching an earthly golden age before the resurrection; the Augsburg Confession rejects that notion (AC XVII).

There is one creature, though, for whom the curse is not lifted. “A snake’s food will be dirt.” The serpent, the old serpent of Eden who first brought the curse upon the world, still eats dust, the very judgment that was pronounced upon him in the garden. In the new creation every other curse is reversed; but the serpent remains under his ancient sentence, harmless now, defeated, eating dirt in a world he can no longer poison. The peace of the royal mountain is not a sentimental peace that pretends the evil never happened; it is the peace that comes after evil has been finally judged and rendered harmless forever. The serpent is still there, in a manner of speaking, but he can hurt nothing now. The mountain is safe.

The Heavens Are My Throne

As the book draws toward its close, God speaks once more of who He is, and it is a word of staggering greatness joined to staggering tenderness. The heavens are my throne and the earth is my footstool. Where then is the house you will build for me? Where is the place where I will rest? (66:1). The God of Isaiah is no local deity who can be housed in a building, however grand. The heavens are His throne; the whole earth is merely His footstool; no temple made with human hands could ever begin to contain Him. He fills all things; He is greater than the universe He made; He cannot be boxed up, managed, or domesticated. Stephen, centuries later, would quote these very words to a generation that had made an idol of their temple.

There is a perennial temptation, in every age, to shrink God down to a manageable size: to make of Him something we can contain, and predict, and control; a God who fits comfortably inside our buildings, our systems, our settled ideas; a God we have, in effect, quietly tamed. The people of Isaiah’s day had done it with their temple, treating the God of all heaven as though He were the resident deity of a particular building, kept conveniently at their disposal. We do it in subtler ways, but we do it still. And against all of it stands this towering word: the heavens are His throne, and the earth merely His footstool. He will not be contained. He is not the household god of our preferences, kept on a shelf and consulted when convenient; He is the living God, before whom the heavens themselves are but a throne and the earth a footstool under His feet. To recover a right sense of His greatness is the beginning of all true worship, and, as the very next verse will show, the surprising doorway into His nearness.

And then, in the very same breath, this immeasurable God says the most unexpected thing imaginable. I show special favor to the humble and contrite, who respect what I have to say (66:2). The God whom heaven cannot contain stoops to show His regard, His attention, His favor, to one particular kind of person: not the powerful, not the impressive, not the builder of grand temples, but the humble, the contrite, the one who reveres His word. We heard this same wonder a few sessions back, in the fifty-seventh chapter, where the high and exalted One said that He dwells in a holy place but also with the discouraged and humiliated. Here it is again, at the very close of the book, lest we should somehow forget it: the God of infinite majesty has a particular eye for the lowly heart.

And this tells us, one last time, how anyone comes near to such a God. Not by building Him a house grand enough to impress Him; there is no such house, and could be none. Not by climbing high enough to reach Him; He is higher than all our climbing. The way to the God whom heaven cannot hold is not up, but down: to become humble in spirit, contrite of heart, reverent before His word; to come empty-handed and humble, knowing we have nothing whatever to offer Him but our need. And the wonder of it is that this is exactly the heart He looks to. The God too great for any temple makes His home in the one temple we are actually able to offer Him: a humble and repentant heart.

As a Mother Consoles a Child

Near the end, the prophet sees something startling: a birth, sudden and complete. Can a country be brought forth in one day? Can a nation be born in a single moment? Yet as soon as Zion goes into labor she gives birth to sons! (66:8). Ordinarily a nation is born slowly, over long generations; but God here promises a birth all at once, a whole people brought forth in a single moment. The Christian cannot read this without thinking of the day the church was born, when, after the long travail of the ages, the Spirit was poured out, and about three thousand were baptized and added to the people of God in a single day, and the people of God leapt suddenly into the world. What had been promised for centuries arrived, as it were, in a day.

And the image of birth opens out into one of the tenderest pictures of God in all of Scripture. The new Jerusalem is pictured as a nursing mother, and her children are promised that they will nurse from her satisfying breasts and be nourished (66:11), comforted and fed at her breast. And then God turns the image directly upon Himself: As a mother consoles a child, so I will console you (66:13). God will comfort His people the way a mother comforts her child. We are used to thinking of God’s love as a father’s love, and rightly so; but here He reaches for a mother’s particular tenderness: the comfort of being gathered up against the one who loves you, soothed, hushed, made safe.

It is worth noticing that this is not the only place the Scriptures dare to picture God’s love in a mother’s terms. Earlier in this very book, God asked whether a woman could forget her baby who nurses at her breast, and then said that even if mothers were to forget, He could never forget His people. The Lord Jesus would one day weep over Jerusalem and long to gather her children together as a hen gathers her chicks under her wings. God is spirit (John 4:24), neither male nor female in His divine nature; yet He has named Himself Father, and as Father we call on Him. But when the Scriptures want to convey the sheer tenderness of His care, the closeness of it, the gentleness, the safety of being held fast by One who loves us, they reach, without the least embarrassment, for the image of a mother with her child. It is a tenderness we sometimes forget belongs to God at all; and here, at the very end of the book, He presses it upon us once more, so that we might not be afraid to be comforted by Him.

This is no small thing at the close of this book, for comfort is the very word on which the whole second half of Isaiah first turned. Long ago, at the fortieth chapter, the great movement of consolation had begun with the cry, “Comfort, comfort my people,” says your God. And here, at the book’s end, that comfort comes to its tenderest possible expression: God comforting His people as a mother consoles her weeping child. The book that has shown us the Servant wounded because of our rebellious deeds, the Warrior treading the winepress, the new heavens and the new earth, does not end its tenderness in grand abstractions. It ends with God gathering His weeping children up to Himself like a mother, and hushing every last cry. That is the kind of God who waits for us at the end of the story.

All People Will Come to Worship

As the book closes, the vision widens out to take in the whole world. I am coming to gather all the nations and ethnic groups; they will come and witness my splendor (66:18). The book that opened with a single nation, Judah, rebellious and wounded, closes with all the nations gathered in. God promises to send survivors to “the distant coastlands that have not heard about me or seen my splendor,” and they will tell the nations of it (66:19). The nations that never knew Him will hear, and see, and come. He even promises to “choose some of them as priests and Levites” (66:21): Gentiles, once shut out altogether, now brought into the very priesthood of God. The missionary heart of God, glimpsed all through the book, here opens fully at the end: the whole earth gathered in to worship.

There is a vast movement completed here, if we step back far enough to see it whole. The book of Isaiah opened with God’s complaint against a single small nation, Judah, rebellious, wounded, scarcely faithful, a people who had broken His heart. And it ends with all the nations of the earth streaming in to worship Him. What began as the story of one nation’s failure becomes, by the end, the story of the whole world’s gathering. And this was, in truth, God’s purpose from the very beginning: when He first called Abraham, He promised that all the families of the earth would receive blessing through him. The long narrowing of that promise, down to one nation, then one tribe, then a faithful remnant, and at the last to one Servant, was never the end God had in view. It narrowed in order to widen again; it came all the way down to One, so that it might open out at last to all. The Servant who was wounded because of the rebellious deeds of the many now draws the many in, from every nation and language, until the whole earth is full of the worship of God.

And the worship will never end, and never lessen. Just as the new heavens and the new earth I am about to make will remain standing before me … so your descendants and your name will remain … all people will come to worship me (66:22–23). The new creation will remain: permanent, unfading, secure; and God’s people will remain along with it, their descendants and their name kept safe forever. And “all people” will come to worship: an enormous crowd from every nation, tribe, people, and language, as the Revelation would later see them, gathered before the throne in a worship that has no end. This is the end toward which all things have been moving: not merely the rescue of a remnant, but a whole renewed creation full to the brim with the worship of God.

And then the book of Isaiah ends, strikingly, soberly, not upon the rejoicing, but upon a word of judgment. They will go out and observe the corpses of those who rebelled against me, for the maggots that eat them will not die, and the fire that consumes them will not die out. All people will find the sight abhorrent (66:24). It is a jarring final note, and we might almost wish the book had ended a single verse sooner, on the worship of all people. But it does not, and we should ask ourselves why. The worm that does not die and the fire that is not put out are words the Lord Jesus Himself would later take up, soberly and without flinching, to speak of hell: “where their worm never dies and the fire is never quenched” (Mark 9:48). This punishment does not burn out; with Him the church confesses that the ungodly will be condemned to endless punishment (AC XVII). The book will simply not let us close it upon a comfortable, sentimental peace that pretends there is no other destiny to be had. There are two ways, and there are two ends; and the book deliberately sets them side by side at its very close: the worship of the redeemed, and the judgment of the rebels.

So the great book of comfort ends by pressing a question upon every reader who has come this far. The new heavens and the new earth are real; the worship of all people is real; and the judgment is real too. Which destiny will be ours? The book has spent sixty-six chapters showing us the way from the one to the other: the Servant wounded because of our rebellious deeds, the sins stained red made white like snow, the invitation to come and buy without money, the Anointed sent to help the brokenhearted. The way stands open; the year of the Lord’s favor still runs its course. But the book will not let us pretend that the matter is a small one, or that God’s call can be put off forever. It ends with eternity in plain view, both destinies set before us, and the quiet, urgent question hanging in the air: which of them will be yours?

Gathering the Threads

We have come to the end of the book, and to the end of all things. Isaiah, which opened amid the wreckage of a rebellious and wounded nation, closes with new heavens and a new earth: a wholly new creation, in which the former troubles are not merely ended but forgotten outright, where God Himself rejoices over His people and the sound of weeping is heard no more. The curse of Eden is reversed; no labor is wasted, and on all God’s royal mountain no one injures or destroys. The God whom heaven cannot contain shows special favor still to the humble and contrite heart; He comforts His people as a mother consoles her child; He gathers all the nations to Himself, until all people come to worship before Him. And the book ends with both destinies plainly in view, the everlasting worship of the redeemed and the sober judgment of the rebels, and a question left hanging in the air.

And the question is, in the end, a gracious one, because the way from the one destiny to the other has been the whole burden of the book. We are not left to find our own way to the new creation; the Servant has opened it for us. He was wounded because of our rebellious deeds; He bore the cup of wrath alone; He rose, and He acquits many; and in Him the door into the new heavens and the new earth stands open to everyone. The God who waits for us at the end of the story is the God who comforts like a mother, who rejoices over His people, who wipes away every tear with His own hand. While it is still the year of the Lord’s favor, the invitation stands open: come, and be found in the Servant who was wounded for you, and the new creation will be your home, and the God who made it will rejoice over you, and you will weep no more.

For Discussion

These questions are for the group or for your own reflection. They press at the text, at the law and gospel it teaches, and at the Christ it shows forth. Keep your Bible open as you work through them.

1. God promises new heavens and a new earth, where the former ones will not be remembered (65:17). What does it mean that the old sorrows will not merely end but be forgotten? How does this hope, together with Revelation 21:4, speak to our present griefs?

2. The promise is of a new earth, not merely souls escaping to heaven. Why does it matter that the Christian hope includes the resurrection of the body and the renewal of creation, rather than a flight away from the physical world?

3. In the new creation a wolf and a lamb graze together, and they will no longer injure or destroy on my entire royal mountain (65:25), the same vision as chapter 11. Why is it significant that the peaceable kingdom promised at the book’s beginning returns at its end? What does it mean that “a snake’s food will be dirt”?

4. The God whom heaven cannot contain shows special favor to the humble and contrite, who respect what I have to say (66:1–2). Why does the book return, near its close, to the truth we heard in chapter 57? What does it mean that the only “house” this God will dwell in is a humble and repentant heart?

5. God promises, As a mother consoles a child, so I will console you (66:13). Why does the book reach for a mother’s tenderness at its close? How does this fulfill the comfort first promised back in chapter 40?

6. The book ends, soberly, with both worship and judgment in view (66:23–24). Why does Isaiah not end on a comfortable note, but with eternity and the two ways plainly before us? How is even this sober ending an act of love toward the reader?

Looking Ahead

The final session of this volume draws back to take in the whole. We have walked through Isaiah from the wreckage of a rebellious nation all the way to the new heavens and the new earth, and at every major turn along the way we have met the same figure: the Christ whom the book shows forth from its beginning to its end. In our last session together in Isaiah, we will gather all the threads into one. We will trace Him through the book: Immanuel, and the Child born and the Son given who shoulders the responsibility of ruling; the Branch on whom the Spirit rests, and the peaceable kingdom He brings; the voice crying comfort in the wilderness; the Servant who was wounded because of our rebellious deeds and who acquits many; the Anointed Herald, and the Warrior able to deliver; and the new creation that crowns it all. We will see why Isaiah has long been called the gospel before the Gospels, the fifth gospel, and then we will set our faces toward the Twelve, the writings of the Minor Prophets, where the same Christ is waiting still.

Before the final session, look back over the whole book of Isaiah, and reread Luke 24:25–27 and 24:44–47, where the risen Lord Jesus, beginning with Moses and all the prophets, interprets in all the Scriptures the things concerning Himself. As you look back, trace the figure of Christ through the book: Immanuel (7:14); the Child born, the Son given (9:6); the Branch and the peaceable kingdom (11); comfort and the voice in the wilderness (40); the Servant Songs and the suffering Servant (42–53); the great invitation (55); the Anointed Herald (61); the Warrior-Redeemer (59, 63); and the new heavens and new earth (65–66).

Closing Prayer

O God our Father, we thank You that the story does not end in the wreckage, but in new heavens and a new earth, where the former things are forgotten and the sound of weeping is heard no more. We thank You that You mean to redeem, and not to discard, the good world You made; that on Your royal mountain no one will injure or destroy; and that You Yourself will rejoice over Your people, and wipe away every tear with Your own hand.

We bless You that, though heaven cannot contain You, You show special favor to the humble and contrite heart, and comfort Your people as a mother consoles her child. Make us such people, humble in spirit, reverent before Your word, hidden in Your Servant who was wounded for us, that when You gather all nations to worship before You, we may be found among the redeemed, and not among the rebels. Keep us watching and believing while it is still the year of Your favor, until the day the new creation dawns and we weep no more; through Your Son, our Lord Jesus Christ, who was wounded for our rebellion and is Himself the door into the new heavens and the new earth, who lives and reigns with You and the Holy Spirit, one God, now and forever. Amen.