Revelation 21:5-8 And he that sat on the throne said, Behold, I make all things new. And he said to me, Write: for these words are true and faithful.… His making all things new in the regeneration will not be His making them out of nothing, but rather His remaking them. Look about you and see if this view of the matter, full of comfort as we shall find it, be not substantiated by all that we are able to observe of God's methods now. Do you anywhere find a new thing that is not in some way a product and result of an older thing? We are tempted into taking the despairing view of God's law of renewal, because we think that the past is not only gone, but lost. This is a blunder. Nothing is lost of which we preserve the precious results. Your childhood, for example, is gone, but it is not lost. You could not be the man or the woman you are, save for that childhood's having been. How then can you say that your childhood is lost? It lives on in your mature character. No other childhood could have produced precisely the man or woman you are to-day. This continuity, this keeping up of the chain of connection, is what is really meant by that much used and much abused word, "evolution." This is God's way. He draws the new out of the old, not violently but slowly, gradually, continuously. The old that is fading away and ready to perish does not actually perish until the new one has been grafted upon it. Take that very best of all living products the world can show, a Christian character; how did it become what it is? Suddenly? Abruptly? No; but by the quiet, gradual, patient shaping and moulding of the hand of the Spirit. The saintliness of St. Paul is different from the saintliness of St. John. Why? Because John differed from Saul at the start; and even in recreating them God would not neglect His own law of continuity. Sainted, they are just as much unlike each other as they were unsainted. In making all things new for both of them, He that sitteth upon the throne has respected and preserved the identity of each. We see the same law holding in the larger life of the whole Church. The Christian Church of this nineteenth century is certainly different, in very many ways, from the Church of the Crusades, for instance, as that in its turn differed from the Church of the catacombs and the martyrs, and yet it was one holy, Catholic, and Apostolic Church through all the generations, the same body from first to last. Nay, we may push the principle further still in the same direction, and affirm that from the dawn of history there has always been a Church on earth, always an elect people of God, and that the Church of the gospel is joined to the Church of the law and the prophets by ties and ligaments that bleed if you attempt to sever them. But let us lift our thoughts to their grandest and best fulfilment. How will it be with the new heavens and the new earth? Will they be cut off by an impassable gulf of oblivion from all the memories, all the associations, all the home feeling of the old life? No, we do not so read the mind of God either in His works or His Word. His way of making all things new is not by the utter destruction and annihilation of the old, but rather by the remoulding and readjustment of it. Nothing could be more new than was the resurrection life of Christ, and yet how intricately, how indissolubly was it wrapped up with the old life out of which it came forth. And as with the resurrection body of the Christ so with His body mystical, His Church, there will be change, adaptation to new conditions, fitness for larger and fuller life, and yet at the same time a continuity, a remembrance of the battles and the victories — yes, and of the defeats — of the far back militant days, when on the old earth and under the old heavens and before the former things had passed, it lived and struggled and endured. (J. F. B. Tinling, B. A.) Parallel Verses KJV: And he that sat upon the throne said, Behold, I make all things new. And he said unto me, Write: for these words are true and faithful. |
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