God Makes All Things New

Frames in this band: T Timeline · G Geography · A Arts · s sources

● Put a length of blue cloth or blue paper across the floor before they arrive, and set one chair on the far side of it.

● Start with John. Sit one child on the far chair, across the blue.

“A very old man named John was far away from everybody he loved. He was on a little island, and all around it was the sea. He could not get across.”

How would that feel?

● Now tell what God showed him. Say it slowly and use your hands.

“God showed John a picture of what is coming. In the picture, God does not take everybody away. In the picture, God comes down here — and God moves in, to live with the people.”

● Do the motion together three times: reach up high, then bring both hands slowly all the way down. “Down. Not up. Down.”

“He will wipe every tear from their eyes.” (Revelation 21:4)

● Have every child touch gently under their own eye with one finger. Then say it plainly, once: “No more crying. No more hurting. No more anybody dying. God says he is making everything new.”

● If a child asks when, tell them the truth and keep it short: “Nobody knows when. We know who.” Then move on. Do not add anything about how, or how soon.

○ The sea. Take the blue cloth away and let the child on the far chair walk over and join the circle. “In the picture, the sea is gone. The thing that kept John away from everybody is not there any more.” Do it twice — they will want to.

When somebody is crying, what can you do?

God says he will wipe the tears. How close do you have to be to wipe somebody's tear? (Right next to them. That is the whole point of the picture.)

● Give them the words and put them up where they can see: sad, lonely, safe, glad, hopeful.

Who wipes your tears at home?

○ Ask the gentle one and let it be quiet: “Is it better when somebody sits with you, or when somebody tells you it will be fine?” Take whatever answer comes and do not fix it.

G — Geography. Draw the island. A little piece of rock in the middle of a great deal of water, a long way from the towns where John's friends lived. Have the children make waves with their arms all around one child standing in the middle. Then ask: “How do you get off?”

T — Timeline. Three cards: THE SAD THINGS · GOD SAYS “NEW” · GOD COMES TO STAY. Hand them out mixed up and let the class put them in order. Do not tell them when it happens, because you do not know.

A — Arts. God gave John a picture, not a list of rules — a city, a bride in a beautiful dress, a hand wiping a face. Ask why a picture is easier to remember than a list. Then look around your building: if there is a stained glass window, a painting, or a banner, go and stand in front of it and ask what picture somebody chose to make, and why that one.

s — sources. Hold the Bible open at the very end. “This is the last book in the whole Bible, and this is nearly the last page.” Then turn all the way back to the first page. “Right at the start, God made the world. Right here at the end, God makes it new.” Let a child hold the book open at both places with two hands.

● Four questions to end the year. Ask them one at a time and let anyone answer. There are no wrong answers today and you are not testing anybody.

• What is one thing you know about God?
• Who can you be kind to?
• Where do you belong? Who are your people?
• What will you take with you when you walk out that door?

● Then draw it: the world with all the sad things taken out. Whatever that looks like to them.

“One thing I will carry with me is ______________.”

● Closing prayer, one lap around the circle. Each child says one thing they are glad about. You answer every time with the same line:

“Thank you, God. You are making everything new.”

○ Before they go, say each child's name out loud, one at a time, looking at them, and tell them you are glad they came. That is the last thing this year says to a six-year-old, and it should be their name.

Frames in this band: G Geography · S Society · A Arts · s sources

● Read Revelation 21:1–5 aloud once, then again slowly while the class hunts. They are looking for two lists.

● Build both columns on the board with them. Do not put it up finished.

Gone	Arriving
The sea (21:1)	A city, coming down out of heaven (21:2)
The first heaven and the first earth (21:1)	God's dwelling place, among the people (21:3)
Death, mourning, crying, pain (21:4)	God himself, with them (21:3)
“The old order of things” (21:4)	“Everything new” (21:5)

Which direction does the city move? Find the word in verse 2 and read it out.

How do you know? Read me the words.

The list of what disappears is longer and more detailed than the list of what arrives. Why might that be more comforting than the other way round?

○ In verse 5 somebody speaks. Have them find where God is quoted in these five verses and count the words. It is a very short speech, and it is one of the only times in the whole book that God talks.

● Look at the four things in verse 4 again — death, mourning, crying, pain — and point out what they have in common. Every one of them is something that happens to a person. Not one of them is something a person did wrong.

If you were adding to that list, what would you put on it?

Is there a difference between somebody telling you it will be all right and somebody sitting down next to you? Which one does verse 4 describe?

● Watch this one. A student may name something that has actually happened in their family. Take it seriously, thank them, do not make it the example for the rest of the hour, and follow up with your church afterwards.

○ Push once: “Nothing on that list has disappeared yet. Does a promise about later change anything about today? How?”

G — Geography. John was writing from Patmos, a small island off the coast of what is now Turkey (1:9), and the letters at the front of the book go to seven real cities on the mainland — Ephesus, Smyrna, Pergamum, and four more — strung along a road that runs a rough circle. Every one of those churches was on the other side of the water from him. Ask what “no more sea” would mean to somebody stuck on an island.

S — Society. Verse 3 says God's dwelling place is now among the people. Ask what changes in a neighborhood when somebody important moves in, and how that is different from everybody moving out. Then ask which of those two this verse is describing, and make them point at the words.

A — Arts. This is a vision, and it is built out of pictures: a city, a bride dressed for a wedding, a throne, a hand wiping a face. Ask what a picture can say that a plain sentence cannot. Then try the reverse — have them say verse 4 with no pictures in it at all, and ask what got lost.

s — sources. Revelation is the last book in the Bible, and it had a harder time getting in than almost any other. For a long stretch some churches used it and some did not. Ask what it means that a book can be in the Bible and still be argued about — and notice that nobody hid the argument from you.

● Four questions to end the year. Everybody writes an answer to all four on one card. Three minutes, no talking first.

• What have I learned about God? One thing is enough — and if today is your first day, one thing from today is enough.
• Who can I care for? Write a name, not a group.
• Where do I belong, and what is one job I actually do there?
• What can I carry with me out of this room?

● Then the plan, on the back of the same card:

“One thing I will carry out of this room is ______________, and the first person I will do it for is ______________, on ______________.”

○ Go round the circle and have each student read out only their answer to the fourth question. Do not comment on any of them. Then stop.

Frames in this band: e era · G Geography · S Society · R Reason · s sources

● Read Revelation 21:1–5 with a pencil. Mark every verb and write beside it who is doing it.

• God makes, God dwells, God wipes, God is making, God speaks. The city comes down. In these five verses the people do nothing at all — they are the ones things are done for.

● Now the direction. Read 21:2 and 21:3 again and say out loud which way everything is traveling.

“God's dwelling place is now among the people, and he will dwell with them.” (Revelation 21:3)

Ask most people what Christians hope for and they will say going to heaven. Read those two verses and say whether that is what they describe.

Verse 4 names four things: death, mourning, crying, pain. Why name four instead of saying everything bad?

Verse 5 says “I am making everything new,” not “I am making all new things.” Say what the difference would be if it said the other one. Then say which of the two you had assumed it said.

○ Verse 5 is one of very few places in the book where God speaks directly, rather than an angel or a voice or a vision doing the talking. Find the other one at 1:8. Ask why a writer would save that for two moments out of twenty-two chapters.

● Put the real question on the table: “There are two ways of believing things will be fine. One makes you stop trying. One makes you show up. What is the difference from the outside?”

Name something you stopped bothering with because you decided it would not matter. Was that being realistic, or was it giving up? How would you tell?

If you knew for certain that something would be repaired eventually, would you work on it more or less? Argue both sides before you answer.

Who at your school is currently living inside verse 4 — mourning, crying, pain? What does hope owe them this week?

○ Say the guard out loud: hope is not the same as pretending. Verse 4 only means anything because the four things on the list are real. A person who says everything is fine is not more hopeful than a person who says this is terrible and it will not be forever.

e — era. The sea in verse 1 is not a beach. In the world behind this book the sea is chaos and threat — the deep of Genesis 1:2, the sea monsters of Job 41 and Psalm 74, the four beasts that come up out of the sea in Daniel 7:2–3, the beast out of the sea at Revelation 13:1. By Revelation 4:6 the sea is already glass in front of the throne, flat and going nowhere. It is also the empire's road: chapter 18 has sailors and shipmasters mourning, because a whole trading system goes down with the city. So “no longer any sea” says something to a first-century reader that “no more ocean” does not say to us. Ask what your era pictures when it pictures menace, and what you would put in that sentence instead.

G — Geography. Revelation 1:9 puts John on Patmos, a small island in the Aegean, and says he was there because of the word of God and the testimony of Jesus. Notice what it does not say: it does not use the word exile and it names no sentence. The exile account comes from later writers — Clement of Alexandria and Tertullian around the year 200, and Eusebius, who reports it as something said — and it is tradition rather than a statement inside the book. Irenaeus, at the end of the second century, supplies the date of the vision, not the banishment. Either way, he is on the wrong side of the water from every single church he is writing to. Ask what the geography does to a vision in which the sea is the first thing to go.

S — Society. Verse 3 says “they will be his people” — but the manuscripts divide, and some read peoples, plural. The NRSV and the CEB print the plural, the ESV footnotes it, the NIV prints the singular with no note at all. Then read 21:24–26, where the kings of the earth bring their splendor into the city and the glory and honor of the nations are carried in. Ask what changes if the nations arrive still recognizably themselves, carrying something, instead of being flattened into one. Then ask what that would cost a church that quietly prefers everybody the same.

R — Reason. Two readings, and the whole escapism question sits between them. If this world is going to be thrown away and replaced, then working on it is at best first aid. If it is going to be made new, then working on it is the same kind of thing God is doing. Verse 5 is the sentence to argue over; so is verse 1, where the first heaven and the first earth have passed away. Have them build both cases from the text before saying which one they hold, and require each of them to name what would change their mind.

s — sources. Revelation had the hardest road into the Bible of any New Testament book. It is missing from the Peshitta, the standard Syriac New Testament used for centuries by churches in the east. Cyril of Jerusalem and Gregory of Nazianzus both leave it out when they list the canon. And to this day it is not read aloud in the Eastern Orthodox lectionary, even though it sits in the Orthodox Bible. Ask what “in the Bible” turns out to mean in practice, and notice that none of this information is hidden — it is in reference books your school library has.

● Four questions to close the year. Everybody answers all four in writing, three minutes, no discussion first. This is not a test and you will not collect them.

• What have I learned about God? If today is your first day here, answer it from today.
• Who can I care for? A name, not a category.
• Where do I belong, and what do I contribute there that would actually be missed?
• What can I carry into the world?

Choose one.

• Take one item from verse 4 — death, mourning, crying, pain — and find out who in your town works on it. Not a cause in general: a place, with a name and an address. Bring back what they say they need.
• Pick a group chat, a team, or a job you already have at home, and do one thing there this week that only makes sense if things can actually be repaired. Do not announce it first.
• Write two paragraphs: what you would do differently if the world were going to be thrown away, and what you would do differently if it were going to be made new. Then say which of the two lists your actual week looks like.

○ Before they leave, have each student read out one of their four answers — their choice which. Do not comment on any of them. Then read verse 5 aloud once and stop talking.

Frames in this band: T Timeline · H Historiography · e era · G Geography · S Society · A Arts · R Reason · s sources

● Close reading of five verses. Put six observations on the table:

• The movement is downward. In 21:2 the city descends; in 21:3 God's dwelling relocates to be among people. Nothing in the passage goes up. Whatever else the vision is doing, it is not describing an evacuation.
• “Dwelling place” in 21:3 is skene, tent — the tabernacle word — and the verb built on it says God will tent with them. It is the word behind John 1:14, where the Word made his dwelling among us, and it answers Ezekiel 37:27. The Bible ends with the arrangement Exodus set up.
• 21:1 echoes Isaiah 65:17 and 21:4 echoes Isaiah 25:8; the NIV footnotes both. Revelation never introduces a quotation with a formula — there is no “as it is written” anywhere in the book — while alluding to the Old Testament constantly. Counts of the allusions run from a couple of hundred to well over five hundred depending on who is counting, which tells you something about how allusion gets counted.
• 21:4 abolishes by enumeration: death, mourning, crying, pain. Not evil in the abstract. A list of what people actually go through.
• 21:5 is God speaking in the first person, which commentators commonly note happens only twice in the whole book — here and at 1:8. The verb is present tense: I am making, not I will make.
• The syntax of 21:5 puts “all things” as the object and “new” as what they are made — I am making all things new, rather than I am making all new things. Many readers build a case on that word order. Others answer that 21:1 says the first heaven and the first earth had passed away, so the syntax cannot settle it alone.

“I am making everything new!” (Revelation 21:5)

If the movement is downward and the verb is present tense, what is the vision claiming about the relationship between this world and that one? Answer from the grammar first and the theology second.

21:4 names four sufferings and then stops. Is a list more comforting than a general promise, or less? Say why.

○ Read Revelation 21:1–5 and then 2 Peter 3:10–13 aloud back to back with no commentary. Ask what a reader holding only those two passages would conclude about the fate of the physical world, and where exactly the two texts pull against each other.

● Say it plainly: 21:4 is what gets read at funerals, and it is read there for a reason. Somebody in this room has heard it in that setting. Do not perform around that, and do not use anybody's loss as an illustration.

What is the difference between hope and denial? Name a test that would tell them apart from the outside.

Does a promise that suffering ends make present suffering easier to bear, or does it add insult to it? Both have been argued seriously, and the second is not argued only by people outside the faith.

In the introduction to his Critique of Hegel's Philosophy of Right, Karl Marx called religion the sigh of the oppressed creature and the opium of the people. Read the whole paragraph rather than the slogan and say what he is actually claiming. Then say what would count as evidence for it or against it.

This same vision was sung by people held in slavery and quoted by people who wanted the poor to stop asking for anything. What decides which use a text gets put to — the text, or the people holding it?

○ Ask the one that costs something and take no answers out loud: “What are you currently waiting out that you could be working on?”

T — Timeline. Where these five verses sit. They come after the judgment sequence of chapter 20, at the end of a book addressed to seven named congregations in Asia Minor under identifiable pressure (chapters 2–3). The book's date is contested. The main external evidence for the mid-90s under Domitian is Irenaeus, writing near the end of the second century, who says the vision was seen toward the end of Domitian's reign; a minority of scholars argue for around 68 or 69, under Nero, mostly from internal evidence. Ask what changes about the vision if the empire behind it is a different one, and what does not change at all.

H — Historiography. Four schools of reading, all of them held today by serious Christians, and none adjudicated here. Futurist: the visions describe events still to come. Preterist: they describe events of the first century, chiefly around Rome and Jerusalem. Historicist: they map the span of church history from the apostles onward. Idealist: they portray the recurring pattern of the church's conflict with evil rather than any sequence of datable events. Each one explains something easily that the others have to work at. Then a second item, because it will be in the room whether you raise it or not: the popular picture in which believers are removed from the earth before a period of tribulation is traced by most historians to John Nelson Darby and the Plymouth Brethren in the 1830s, spread through the English-speaking world by the Scofield Reference Bible of 1909 and by twentieth-century fiction; possible precursors are argued about. Say the careful thing, and say it in both directions: recent is not the same as wrong, and old is not the same as right — but a student should know how old an idea is before deciding it is the obvious reading. Note also where the language actually comes from. “Caught up” is 1 Thessalonians 4:17 — the Latin of that verse, rapiemur, is where the English word rapture comes from — and “one will be taken and the other left” is Matthew 24:40–41. Neither is in Revelation.

e — era. The sea. Genesis 1:2's deep; the sea monsters of Job 41 and Psalm 74:13–14; Daniel 7:2–3, where four beasts rise out of the sea; Revelation 13:1, where the beast does the same. By 4:6 the sea is already glass before the throne — chaos made flat. And 18:17–19 has shipmasters, sailors, and everyone who earns a living from the sea mourning the fall of Babylon, because the sea is the artery of imperial trade. So 21:1 is not oceanography, and a reader who supplies a modern beach has already lost the sentence. Ask what the equivalent image would be in your era — what does your culture picture when it pictures menace — and then say honestly what is lost by substituting it.

G — Geography. Patmos is a small island in the Aegean, roughly forty miles off the coast of Asia Minor. Revelation 1:9 says John was there “because of the word of God and the testimony of Jesus,” which is not the same as saying he had been sentenced; the exile reading comes from later tradition — Clement of Alexandria, Tertullian, and Eusebius, who introduces it with “it is said” — rather than from anything in the book. Irenaeus, usually cited here, dates the vision but does not report a banishment. The seven churches of chapters 2–3 sit on a road running a rough circle from Ephesus north and back round, and the order they appear in is the order a courier would reach them. Every one of them is across water from the writer. Ask what it does to the argument that the first thing abolished in the vision is the thing standing between him and everyone he is writing to — and then ask whether noticing that makes the verse more than a personal complaint, or less.

S — Society. Two items that belong together. First, 21:3 divides in the manuscripts between “his people” and “his peoples”; the NRSV and CEB print the plural, the ESV footnotes it, the NIV prints the singular with no note. Second, 21:24–26 has the kings of the earth bringing their splendor into the city and the glory and honor of the nations carried into it, and 21:25 says the gates are never shut. Read together, those describe a new creation in which the nations arrive still themselves and bring something with them that was made here. Ask what that does to the idea that everything from this world is discarded. Then ask what a congregation would actually have to change in order to believe it.

A — Arts. This passage has generated more images than almost any other in the Bible: the Beatus manuscripts of tenth-century Spain, the Bamberg Apocalypse, Dürer's woodcut series of 1498, the Angers Apocalypse tapestries, Blake's watercolors, and Handel's Messiah, which sets texts from Revelation 5 and 19. And in the spirituals of enslaved African Americans the new Jerusalem is sung directly — “Walk in Jerusalem Just Like John” names the vision in its title — by people for whom “no more sorrow” was also a claim about this world. Frederick Douglass wrote in My Bondage and My Freedom that the songs about reaching Canaan carried a second meaning for the people singing them. Ask what artists reach for that commentary cannot, whether an image can be an argument, and who decides what a song is about — the singer, or the person listening.

R — Reason. New creation versus escapism, argued properly. The case for renewal: the syntax of 21:5; the downward movement of 21:2–3; Romans 8:19–22, where creation itself is said to be waiting to be liberated rather than discarded; the restoration of all things at Acts 3:21; and the imported splendor of 21:24. The case against, stated fairly rather than knocked down: 21:1 says the first heaven and the first earth had passed away, which is strong language; 2 Peter 3:10–12 describes the elements dissolving; and the claim that expecting a replaced world makes Christians passive is an empirical claim about what people actually do, not a logical entailment — it needs evidence, and the historical record is mixed enough that both sides can find their examples. Require every student to state the strongest version of the reading they do not hold, in terms its holder would accept, before arguing their own. Then ask the question that bites: name one thing you would stop doing if you were persuaded of the other view, and say honestly whether you would stop it.

s — sources. Three checkable items. First, 2 Peter 3:10, which is the verse most often used to argue that the world burns: the earliest and best manuscripts, including Sinaiticus and Vaticanus, read a word meaning “will be found,” while the reading behind the King James “shall be burned up” is later and Byzantine. The NIV has “laid bare,” the NRSV “disclosed,” the KJV “burned up.” Ask what happens to an argument when its key verse has a contested text. Second, Revelation's own canonical history: Eusebius lists it twice in Ecclesiastical History 3.25 — among the recognized books “if it really seem proper,” and again among the rejected — and at 7.25 he preserves Dionysius of Alexandria's argument, made on stylistic grounds, that the Apocalypse was not written by the author of the Fourth Gospel. It is absent from the Peshitta and from the canon lists of Cyril of Jerusalem and Gregory of Nazianzus, and it is still not read in the Eastern Orthodox lectionary. Third, the Greek of Revelation is notoriously irregular, breaking agreement rules the rest of the New Testament keeps; explanations range from a writer thinking in a Semitic language, to deliberate style, to limited Greek, and none has won. Have students say what each of these three can carry and what it cannot.

● Four questions to close the year. Everybody answers all four in writing before anything is said out loud. They are not collected and they are not marked.

• What have I learned about God — and which part of that did I inherit without ever checking it? If today is your first day here, answer it from today.
• Who can I care for that I am specifically placed to care for and nobody else is?
• Where do I belong, and what do I contribute there that would actually be missed if I stopped?
• What can I carry into the world, and what will it cost me to carry it?

Choose one.

• A 500-word piece: “Does hope for a new creation obligate me to anything now?” State the strongest version of the reading you reject, in terms its holder would accept, before arguing your own. You may end undecided; you must say what would decide it.
• Take one item from 21:4 and find the people in your town who work on it — a hospice, a bereavement service, a pain clinic, a funeral director, a hospital chaplain. Interview one of them with three questions written in advance, and bring back one sentence exactly as they said it.
• Do one thing in the next seven days that only makes sense if this world is going to be repaired rather than replaced. Write down what it was, what it cost, and whether you would have done it anyway.

○ Before they leave, have one student read 21:5 aloud to the room. Then stop. Whatever you were going to add, do not add it.