Revelation 21:5
“He who sits on the throne said, “Behold, I am making all things new.” He said, “Write, for these words of God are faithful and true.””
Where this sits
Spoken from the throne in John's vision of the renewed creation. It is one of the few places in Revelation where the one seated speaks directly.
Reflection
The tense is the thing to notice. I am making all things new. Present, continuous — not I will make, and not I have made. The work is described as underway at the moment of speaking.
And the object is all things, not all new things. That distinction is the difference between renewal and replacement. Nothing here is being discarded and started over; the existing thing is being made new. Which means the world you are in is the raw material rather than the failed draft.
Then something unusual happens. The voice interrupts itself to give an instruction to the writer: Write, for these words of God are faithful and true.
That is a strange thing to need saying. John has been recording visions for twenty chapters without being told to. Here, at the point where the promise is largest, the reliability of the words is explicitly certified — as though the difficulty being anticipated is not comprehension but belief.
Which is fair. This is a book written to churches under a persecution that was not stopping. To people in that position, a sentence about all things being made new is exactly the sort of thing that sounds too good to be recorded accurately.
So the throne says: write it down anyway.
- Theme:
- Newness
- Book:
- Revelation