New Jerusalem

This note is interpretation, not translation. It gathers what this book says about the new Jerusalem, where each piece of the picture comes from in the prophets, and what the rest of the New Testament says about the same city. It adds no reading of its own and none of Jon’s; the green markers through chapters 21 and 22 carry the echoes one by one, and this note sets them side by side.

Where the book names it. The city is first promised, not shown. To the one at Philadelphia who comes through: “I will write on him the name of my God, and the name of the city of my God — the new Jerusalem, which comes down out of the sky from my God — and my own new name” (3:12; “my God” four times in one verse). Then at the end John sees it: “the holy city, new Jerusalem, coming down out of the sky from God, prepared like a bride dressed for her husband” (21:2), and a messenger carries him to a great high mountain and shows him “the holy city, Jerusalem, coming down out of the sky from God, with God’s glory” (21:10–11). Before that it is “the beloved city” the nations surround (20:9). The book keeps two cities apart by their adjectives: “the great city” is Babylon (16:19, 17:18, 18:10, 16, 18, 19, 21) and the place “where their Lord was crucified” (11:8); “the holy city” is this one (21:2, 21:10, 22:19), and the one trampled for forty-two months (11:2). The word “new” (kainos) is the word of 21:5, “Look — I am making everything new”: a new sky and earth (21:1), a new Jerusalem, a new name (2:17, 3:12), a new song (5:9, 14:3).

It comes down. Three times the same words: “coming down out of the sky from God” (3:12, 21:2, 21:10). Nobody builds it. The first city in scripture is the one people build for themselves, “let us build ourselves a city and a tower, and make a name for ourselves” (Genesis 11:4), and Babylon carries that name to the end of this book; the letter to the Hebrews sets against it the city Abraham waited for, “the city that has foundations, whose designer and builder is God” (Hebrews 11:10), and says of all the patriarchs that “He has prepared a city for them” (11:16). Jesus’ word to His disciples the night before the cross uses that verb: “I am going to prepare a place for you … I am coming again and will take you to myself” (John 14:2–3; hetoimasai, hetoimasō), and the city of 21:2 is “prepared” (hētoimasmenēn). A shared verb, not a stated identification.

The bride and the city are one. The messenger says, “I will show you the bride, the wife of the Lamb,” and what he shows is the city (21:9–10); and the city of 21:2 comes down dressed as a bride. The prophets said it of Zion first: “your Maker is your husband, the LORD of hosts is His name” (Isaiah 54:5); “you will be called My Delight Is in Her, and your land Married … as the bridegroom rejoices over the bride, so your God will rejoice over you” (62:4–5); “He has clothed me with garments of salvation … as a bride adorns herself with her jewels” (61:10, marked at 21:2). Paul: “the Jerusalem above is free, and she is our mother” (Galatians 4:26), and the psalm counts people as born in her, “this one was born there” (Psalm 87:4–6). The reading on the bridegroom gathers the wedding texts.

Ezekiel’s city, and what is different here. The frame is Ezekiel’s. He too is set on “a very high mountain” and shown “something like the structure of a city” (Ezekiel 40:2), and a man with a measuring rod measures it (40:3; marked at 21:10 and 21:15). His city has twelve gates named for the twelve tribes, three to each side (48:30–34; marked at 21:12–13), and his last word is its name: “and the name of the city from that day on: the LORD is there” (YHWH shammah, 48:35; the Greek translation has lost the name and reads only “its name will be”). A river runs from his sanctuary with trees on both banks whose fruit is for food and whose leaves are for healing (47:1–12; marked at 22:1–2), and God says of the place, “this is the place of my throne … where I will dwell in the midst of the children of Israel forever” (43:7), which here is “the throne of God and of the Lamb will be in it” (22:3) and “God’s tent is with people” (21:3; Ezekiel 37:27, marked at 7:15). Three things are different. Ezekiel’s vision is nearly all temple, nine chapters of it, with tables for the sacrifices (40:38–43) and an altar to be consecrated with offerings (43:18–27); here, “I saw no temple in it, because the Lord God the Ruler over everything is its temple, and the Lamb” (21:22). Ezekiel’s river comes out from under the temple’s threshold (47:1); here it comes “from the throne of God and of the Lamb” (22:1). And Ezekiel’s city measures 4,500 cubits a side (48:16), about two and a half kilometres; this one is 12,000 stadia a side, more than two thousand kilometres, and as high as it is long and wide (21:16). That shape, a cube, is the shape of one room in scripture, the holy of holies: “twenty cubits long, twenty wide and twenty high” (1 Kings 6:20, marked at 21:16). The whole city is the inner sanctuary, which is why it has no temple.

A house of prayer for all the nations. The temple that is gone here is the one Jesus cleared. Only Mark keeps the whole of what He said as He did it: “Is it not written, My house will be called a house of prayer for all the nations? But you have made it a den of robbers” (Mark 11:17; Matthew 21:13 and Luke 19:46 drop “for all the nations”). He is quoting two prophets in one sentence. The first half is Isaiah 56:7, and Isaiah’s subject is the foreigner and the eunuch who fear they are shut out: “let not the foreigner who has joined himself to the LORD say, The LORD will surely separate me from his people” (56:3); God’s answer is that He will bring them to His holy mountain, “their burnt offerings and sacrifices will be accepted on my altar, for my house will be called a house of prayer for all the peoples” (56:6–7). The second half is Jeremiah 7:11, “has this house, which is called by my name, become a den of robbers in your eyes?”, said of people who “steal, murder, commit adultery, swear falsely, burn incense to Baal” (7:9) and then come and stand in the house and say “we are delivered” (7:10); a robbers’ den is where robbers hide, so the charge is a temple used as a safe house for the unjust. What was in the courts was lawful trade: sellers of the oxen, sheep and doves the law required for sacrifice (John 2:14; the doves were the poor’s offering, Leviticus 12:8, what Mary brought at Luke 2:24), money-changers for the half-shekel “in the shekel of the sanctuary” (Exodus 30:13; Matthew 17:24), and people carrying goods through the courts as a shortcut, which He also stopped (Mark 11:16). John’s word for the fault is the plainest: “do not make my Father’s house a house of trade” (2:16, oikon emporiou), which answers Zechariah’s last line, “there will no longer be a trader in the house of the LORD on that day” (14:21, where the Hebrew word is “Canaanite”, used for a merchant). That the market stood in the outer court, the only part open to the nations, is what Josephus and the Mishnah describe; the scriptures do not say it, and this note gives it as history. What the text gives is the join He made: Isaiah promised the nations a place to pray and sacrifice, and the court had been given to buying and selling. The last chapters answer both prophets at once. There is no temple (21:22); “the nations will walk by its light,” and the kings bring their glory into it (21:24–26), which is Isaiah 56’s foreigner welcomed; “nothing unclean will ever come into it” (21:27), which is Jeremiah’s robbers gone; and a whole city of merchants has been judged in the chapter before, “your merchants were the great men of the earth” (18:23).

The name among the nations. Paul puts the same charge in one sentence: “the name of God is blasphemed among the nations because of you, as it is written” (Romans 2:24). What is written is Isaiah 52:5, and Paul follows the Greek translation, “because of you, continually, my name is blasphemed among the nations”; the Hebrew is shorter, “continually, all day, my name is despised”, with no “among the nations” and no “because of you”, and the nearest Hebrew for Paul’s thought is Ezekiel’s, “they profaned my holy name among the nations where they went” (36:20). Isaiah 52 is the chapter this book is already drawing on for the city. Four verses before the despised name is “Jerusalem, the holy city; the uncircumcised and unclean will not come into you again” (52:1, marked at 21:2 and 21:27); the verse after it is “therefore my people will know my name” (52:6); then the feet of the one bringing good news, “your God reigns” (52:7), “all the ends of the earth will see the salvation of our God” (52:10), and “go out from her midst, touch nothing unclean” (52:11, marked at 18:4). So in one chapter Isaiah has the holy city that nothing unclean enters, the name despised among the nations, the nations seeing salvation, and the call to come out; and 21:24–27 has the holy city, the nations walking by its light, and nothing unclean. The list Paul gives before the quotation is Jeremiah’s. Jeremiah 7:9, the passage behind “a den of robbers”, charges “steal, murder, commit adultery, swear falsely”; Paul asks the one who boasts in the law, “you who preach not to steal, do you steal? you who say not to commit adultery, do you commit adultery? you who abhor idols, do you rob temples?” (Romans 2:21–22), and then quotes Isaiah. He has also just given Israel’s calling in Isaiah’s words, “a guide of the blind, a light to those in darkness” (2:19; Isaiah 42:6–7, “a light of the nations, to open blind eyes, to bring out those who sit in darkness”). The charge is the same in Jeremiah, in Jesus’ words at the temple and in Paul: the people who hold the law and the house are the ones breaking it, and the house meant to bring the nations to God becomes the reason the nations curse His name. How close this is: Paul’s “rob temples” is hierosyleō, used only there as a verb in the New Testament, and the “robbers” of Mark 11:17 are lēstai, a different word; Paul is writing about Jews who break the law, and Mark 11:17 is about the temple court; neither quotes the other. The tie is a likeness of charge, and Jeremiah 7 standing behind both. Ezekiel gives the answer in the same breath as the charge: “I will sanctify my great name, which was profaned among the nations ... and the nations will know that I am the LORD” (36:23), and the way He does it is “a new heart ... and a new spirit I will put within you” (36:26–27). In this book the name is insulted by the animal (13:6) and by the people under the bowls (16:9, 16:11, 16:21; the verb is Paul’s), and the other side of it is sung before the bowls are poured, “who will not fear you, Lord, and give glory to your name? ... all the nations will come and bow in front of you” (15:4), and seen at the end, in the city where the nations walk by its light and “his name will be on their foreheads” (22:4). Isaiah 52:5 and 52:6 side by side, the name despised and then known, is the shape of it.

Hosanna: a prayer answered another way — Jon’s reading. Jon sees a second lesson in the same week, about how God answers prayer. The people, as he reads them, were asking for a king in the flesh who would save them from Rome. Jesus did save them, in a far greater way than they asked, and almost nobody understood it at the time; most of them went away sad, thinking the prayer had not been answered. “My thoughts are not your thoughts, and your ways are not my ways, says the LORD; for as the heavens are higher than the earth, so are my ways higher than your ways, and my thoughts than your thoughts” (Isaiah 55:8–9). The order of that week, from the texts, is this. The crowd’s cry at the gate was itself a prayer: “Hosanna” is Psalm 118:25, hoshi’ah na, “save, please”, and with it they called Him king: “Hosanna! Blessed is he who comes in the name of the Lord, the King of Israel” (John 12:13; Luke 19:38, “the King who comes in the name of the Lord”). They had tried once before to make Him king by force, after the loaves, and He withdrew (John 6:15), and on the road up Luke says plainly what they expected: “they thought the kingdom of God was going to appear at once” (19:11). He wept over the city as He came near it: “if you had known in this day the things that make for peace” (19:41–42). He went into the temple, looked round at everything, and left for Bethany, and the next day He cleared it (Mark 11:11–17; Matthew 21:12 puts the clearing on the day of the entry). The tribute question followed, whether to pay Caesar (Mark 12:14–17). At the trial the crowd was given a choice and took Barabbas, a man “bound with the rebels who had committed murder in the uprising” (Mark 15:7; Luke 23:19), the kind of deliverer they had in mind; and the chief priests answered Pilate’s “shall I crucify your King?” with “we have no king but Caesar” (John 19:15). The title over the cross read “Jesus the Nazarene, the King of the Jews” (19:19), and the mockery was the prayer thrown back: “he saved others, he cannot save himself; he is King of Israel, let him come down now from the cross” (Matthew 27:42). On the third day two of His followers walked to Emmaus “looking sad” (Luke 24:17), and said why: “we had hoped that he was the one who was going to redeem Israel” (24:21). Even after the resurrection the question was still the same one: “Lord, is it at this time that you are restoring the kingdom to Israel?” (Acts 1:6). What He had said to Pilate stood over all of it: “my kingdom is not of this world” (John 18:36). And the prayer was answered in the week it was prayed: the name they shouted, save, is His own name (Matthew 1:21), the one man who asked Him for the kingdom that day was answered the same day, “today you will be with me in paradise” (Luke 23:42–43), and this book ends with a kingdom, a king, and a city that no Caesar rules (11:15; 19:16; 21:24). And the palms come back. The word for a palm, phoinix, is in the New Testament only twice: the crowd at the gate took “the branches of the palms” and went out to meet Him shouting “save” (John 12:13), and the crowd before the throne stands “with palm branches in their hands” shouting “Salvation belongs to our God, who sits on the throne, and to the Lamb” (7:9–10). The prayer of the first crowd is the praise of the second, with the same branches in their hands. Paul says the same of prayer in general: God “is able to do far more than all we ask or think” (Ephesians 3:20), “we do not know what to pray for as we ought” (Romans 8:26), and when Paul asked three times for a thorn to go, the answer was “my grace is enough for you” (2 Corinthians 12:8–9).

Red flag That the crowd’s prayer was for deliverance from Rome, and that most went away thinking it unanswered. No verse says what the crowd meant by Hosanna; what the texts give is the expectation of a kingdom appearing at once (Luke 19:11; John 6:15; Acts 1:6) and the choice of Barabbas, a rebel. The sadness is stated of two disciples on the Emmaus road (Luke 24:17, 21), not of the crowd. Isaiah 55:8–9 is said of God’s pardon in its own setting (55:7). The order of events above is the Gospels’; the lesson drawn from it is Jon’s.

Isaiah’s city. Most of the rest is Isaiah’s, and most of it is already marked. The stones: “I will lay your stones in antimony and your foundations in sapphires; I will make your battlements of rubies, your gates of carbuncles, and all your wall of precious stones” (54:11–12; marked at 21:19 with the high priest’s twelve stones). The light and the gates: “nations will come to your light, and kings to the brightness of your rising … your gates will stand open continually, day and night they will not be shut, that people may bring you the wealth of the nations … the sun will no longer be your light by day, nor the moon … the LORD will be your everlasting light” (60:3, 11, 19–20; marked at 21:23–25 and 22:5). The holy city with nothing unclean in it (52:1; marked at 21:2 and 21:27). The new creation and the end of tears: “I am creating new heavens and a new earth … I am creating Jerusalem a rejoicing, and her people a joy … and the sound of weeping will no longer be heard in her” (65:17–19; marked at 21:1), and “He will swallow up death forever, and the Lord GOD will wipe away tears from all faces” (25:8; marked at 21:4). The new name (62:2; marked at 3:12). The nations streaming to the mountain of the LORD’s house (2:2–3; the reading Into the Rock). And Zion as “a quiet dwelling, a tent that will not be moved, whose pegs will never be pulled up … there the LORD in majesty will be for us a place of rivers and broad streams” (33:20–21). Others say the same thing in their own words: “a river whose streams make glad the city of God” (Psalm 46:4); “the city of the great King” (Psalm 48:2, which Jesus quotes of Jerusalem at Matthew 5:35); “at that time they will call Jerusalem the throne of the LORD, and all the nations will gather to it” (Jeremiah 3:17); “Jerusalem will be called the city of truth, and the mountain of the LORD of hosts the holy mountain” (Zechariah 8:3). One of Zechariah’s pictures runs the other way and should be said: “Jerusalem will be inhabited as villages without walls, for the multitude of people and cattle in her; and I will be to her a wall of fire around her, and the glory in her midst” (Zechariah 2:4–5; 2:8–9 in the Hebrew), where this city has “a great high wall” (21:12) and the glory inside it (21:11, 23). The glory is the same; the wall is Zechariah’s picture turned into stone.

What is not in it. The city is described as much by what is gone as by what is there, and every absence answers a prophet. No sea (21:1). No death, no mourning, no crying, no pain, “because the former things have gone” (21:4; Isaiah 25:8, 65:19). No temple (21:22). No need of sun or moon (21:23; Isaiah 60:19). Gates never shut, and no night (21:25, 22:5; Isaiah 60:11). Nothing unclean, and nobody who does what is detestable or false (21:27; Isaiah 52:1). “Nothing under a curse any more” (22:3), which is the first curse of Genesis 3:17 lifted, with the tree of life that Genesis 3:24 barred standing open in the street (22:2, 22:14; marked at 2:7 and 22:14). And they “will see his face” (22:4), which Exodus 33:20 said no one could do and live.

The rest of the New Testament. Paul: “Hagar is Mount Sinai in Arabia and corresponds to the present Jerusalem, for she is in slavery with her children; but the Jerusalem above is free, and she is our mother” (Galatians 4:25–26); “our citizenship is in the skies, and from there we await a Saviour, the Lord Jesus the Anointed” (Philippians 3:20). Hebrews: the patriarchs “died in trust, not having received the promises, but having seen them from far off and greeted them, and confessed that they were strangers and exiles on the earth” (11:13), looking for the city God prepared (11:10, 16); “you have come to Mount Zion and to the city of the living God, the heavenly Jerusalem, and to myriads of messengers in festal gathering, and to the assembly of the firstborn enrolled in the skies, and to God the judge of all, and to the spirits of the just made complete, and to Jesus the mediator of a new covenant” (12:22–24); “here we have no lasting city, but we seek the one that is coming” (13:14). The city’s twelve foundations carry “the twelve names of the twelve emissaries of the Lamb” (21:14), and Paul says the household of God is “built on the foundation of the emissaries and prophets, the Anointed Jesus Himself being the cornerstone” (Ephesians 2:20). Hebrews 12:22–24 is the one passage outside this book that says who is in the city, and its list is people.

The twelves. Twelve gates, twelve messengers at them, twelve tribes written on them (21:12); twelve foundations with twelve emissaries’ names (21:14); twelve thousand stadia (21:16); a wall of a hundred and forty-four cubits, twelve twelves (21:17); twelve pearls (21:21); twelve fruits, one a month (22:2). The hundred and forty-four thousand of 7:4 and 14:1 are twelve thousand from each of twelve tribes. The text adds its own caution about the numbers: the wall’s measure is “by human measurement, which the messenger was using” (21:17), so the book itself says the units are ours.

Where the text leaves it open. Whether the city is a place or a people: the messenger calls it the bride and shows a city (21:9–10), it is measured (21:16), and Hebrews fills it with people (12:22–24); the text says both, and this note holds both. Who “the nations” and “the kings of the earth” are who walk by its light and bring their glory into it (21:24–26), after a new earth has replaced the first (21:1); the text does not say. How “the beloved city” the nations surround before the fire falls (20:9) relates to the city that comes down after the judgment (21:2); the two are in sequence and the text does not join them. Whether the measurements and stones are to be taken as they stand or as a picture, which the note on the cube at 21:16 also leaves open. The chapter-20 note on this site keeps the same silence about the thousand years, and this note keeps it about the city.