New Jerusalem, City of the Living God
Hebrews 11:10 says that Abraham “eagerly waited for the city which has the foundations, whose Architect and Builder is God.” This city is New Jerusalem, described in Hebrews 12:22 as “the city of the living God, the heavenly Jerusalem.”
Abraham certainly was not waiting for a physical, material city. A material city could not be the wife of Christ [Rev. 21:9] or the mother of the believers [Gal. 4:26]. Furthermore, a material city could not be composed of all the saved ones as the sons of God. If the New Jerusalem, the Jerusalem above, were a physical entity, how could this city produce us as her children?…We should not understand the New Jerusalem in a physical, material sense, for it is altogether a spiritual entity.*
The Old Testament is full of physical pictures of the spiritual New Testament realities. An example are the animals which were sin offerings in the OT, but in the NT John “saw Jesus coming to him and said, Behold, the Lamb of God, who takes away the sin of the world!” (John 1:29).
In the New Testament all God’s building work, including New Jerusalem, is spiritual. Ephesians 2:22 says “you also are being built together into a dwelling place of God in spirit.” and 4:16 speaks of “the growth of the Body unto the building up of itself in love.”
* Life-Study of the New Testament, Conclusion Messages: The Church, the Kingdom, and the New Jerusalem, message 254, p. 2667, by Witness Lee. Published 1998 and © by Living Stream Ministry, Anaheim, California.
Photo courtesy of U.S. National Park Service.
Posted by Don on September 20, 2024
https://newjerusalem12.wordpress.com/2024/09/20/new-jerusalem-city-of-the-living-god-3-2/
