Day 40 - Coming Home

Revelation 21:1-4 (ESV) - 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, 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, “Behold, the dwelling place of God is with man. He will dwell with them, and they will be his people, and God himself will be with them as their God. He will wipe away every tear from their eyes, and death shall be no more, neither shall there be mourning, nor crying, nor pain anymore, for the former things have passed away.”

 He came back home with amazing stories of a faraway land that his fellow residents of Venice found impossible to believe. A land in the East with cities that dwarfed the great cities of Europe, a culture that had paper currency, a mysterious exploding powder, and a king whose palace dwarfed the great castles of Europe, with a dining hall that could seat 6,000 people eating on plates made of gold. Marco Polo lived for seventeen years in China, having been accepted into the court of the most powerful man on earth, Kublai Khan, in the year 1266. To his dying day, Marco Polo was rejected by skeptics who found his tale too far-fetched.

Some find it hard to believe that there is a future state of being called “a new heaven and a new earth.” A new creation. A restoration of the way things ought to be. A reversal of sin and war, earthquakes and hurricanes, disease and temptation. A condition in which there is no death, no pain, no tears. 

Yet this is exactly what you would expect God the Almighty to do. He wants us to be home with him.
Our place, in his plan, is to come home. Finally, truly, irrevocably—home. 

This call of God in Revelation, this promise of “a new heaven and a new earth,” has one all-important characteristic: “Look! God’s dwelling place is now among the people, and he will dwell with them.” In Genesis Adam and Eve fled the home of the garden and entered the hard life of the field. Ever since, people have lived away from home: in Egypt, in Babylonia, under Roman occupation. In sin, transgression, rebellion, conflict, divorce, unemployment, illness, fear. 

All that will be swept away, and we will dwell with God in a new condition beyond imagining.

PONDER:  Dwelling with God begins now. What are some ways your life can be different if you fully believe that you belong to God every hour of every day? 

REFLECTION or DISCUSSION:
What does home mean to you? Revelation is a book of the Bible that brings us hope. We are told in Revelation that on the day Jesus returns that we will finally be home with God forever.  What does that mean to you.