In many church services you will hear the prayer, “Thy kingdom come. Thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven.” Have you ever wondered what that means? It falls off our tongues so easily. Many of us have said it since childhood: “Thy kingdom come. Thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven.”
Stop Limiting Your Hopes
Consider for a moment the kind of people who carefully tend their hearts because they want to avoid hurt or disappointment. The only hopes they allow themselves are the hopes they are able to make happen. The only promises they hear or make to themselves are the promises they have the power to keep.
Yet limiting your hopes in this fashion is the complete opposite of Christianity. If you tend your heart in this way, I encourage you to look at the gospel. As Christians, Peter says, “we are looking forward to a new heaven and a new earth, the home of righteousness” (2 Pet. 3:13), and this is entirely beyond our power to effect. No elected party, no economic scheme, no job promotion, and no successful relationship can bring about the great thing we as Christians wait for. We wait for the fulfillment of our first and final hope: the whole world being put right, as God’s plan in the New Testament extends from Christ to his covenant people to the outermost circle—his whole creation.
In other words, we wait for his kingdom to come and his will to be done, on earth as it is in heaven.
The Book of Revelation
This is what we find at the end of the New Testament in the book of Revelation. It is a letter too, but it is an unusual letter in which the apostle John describes a number of visions God gave him. In certain respects, John’s apocalyptic letter picks up on the Old Testament prophetic tradition by focusing on great events that lie in store for the earth’s inhabitants. More specifically, Revelation describes the consummation of God’s people, in God’s place, in right relationship to him. The church militant becomes the church triumphant—the victorious church in heaven. And the whole heavens and earth are re-created forever (see Rev. 21:1–4; 21:22–22:5).
The Bible does not present Christians as Platonists or gnostics—people who think this world and material things do not matter, that only the spiritual afterlife matters. Throughout the book of Revelation and the whole New Testament, the biblical authors stress the bodily nature of the resurrection. Jesus was bodily resurrected, and his resurrection is called “the firstfruits.” It begins what we will experience in the final resurrection from the dead. We will be taken up to be with God forever, but that is no world-denying proposition. God’s plan for the world does not exist on some ethereal plain, far away from concrete reality. There is an interesting verse in Revelation that reads: “The nations will walk by [Christ’s] light, and the kings of the earth will bring their splendor into” the city of heaven (Rev. 21:24). In the final consummation of creation, the kings of the earth will present their splendors and all the cultural grandeur of the world before the gathered heavenly assembly; and all these things will display God’s glory as we discover what he meant for creation. Not only what Mark the preacher or Mary the Sunday school teacher brings will be counted worthwhile. Rather, the things you and I do in our daily lives in business, education, government, health care, or our families—if we have done them unto the Lord—will be presented and appear on the last day as adding to the luster of God’s glory. These things are part of God’s plan for the world.
And here at the end, the holiness of God’s people will finally be complete, as they are at home with him. John wrote in his first letter, “Dear friends, now we are children of God, and what we will be has not yet been made known. But we know that when he appears, we shall be like him, for we shall see him as he is” (1 John 3:2). The end will be like the beginning, only better. The garden of Eden, in some sense, will be restored. God will dwell with his people. The whole heavenly city is presented in Revelation as a perfect cube, which recalls the Most Holy Place in the Old Testament temple. The Most Holy Place, which represented the presence of God on earth, was also in the shape of a cube. Only now, this heavenly cube is not restricted to the high priests once a year, as in ancient Israel; all the children of God will enter his presence, and we will live there with him forever! That is how the book called the New Testament ends.
The Curtain Drops
It is a good way for the New Testament to end, I think. It gives us as Christians great news to offer the world. We presently live in a time of waiting, but we wait with God and we wait for God. After all, Revelation was written by a man in his nineties who had been exiled on an island by the mightiest power on earth, the Roman Empire. At the time, Christians were being killed for their faith. He was utterly desperate and dependent upon God. Yet he was full of hope because his hope did not rest on external circumstances. It rested on the sovereign God who ruled above the Roman emperors. That’s when the curtain of the New Testament drops.
God promises in Scripture that the earth will be filled with the knowledge of his glory, and the promise is certain to be kept in his new creation.
Promises made, promises kept.