The Lamb our Lamp: Sermon on Revelation 21:22-27 + 22:4-5

The scene: London, a June evening in the year 1662. It's before the Industrial Revolution. There are no light bulbs. No street lamps. Nothing but darkness. Samuel Pepys, a 29-year-old administrator on the board of the British Royal Navy, gets home from work, his mind troubled by his conflicts with Admiral William Penn, father of our state's namesake. Slipping into bed, Samuel tosses and turns beside his wife Elisabeth. He can't stop thinking about the government funds entrusted to him. He calls for a maid to go light a candle in the dining room, a sign of residence to scare away potential thieves. Only then can he fall asleep. Twenty-five months pass by. Feeling ill from drinking too much mineral water, Samuel, now 31, slips into bed. The clock strikes eleven, and his body begins to sweat. Paranoia sets in over the government money. And as he hears a noise, he nearly melts. He rings the bell again and again, but can't rouse the maids, starting to wonder if a thief in the night has slipped in and gagged them. Only after his maid Jane rises and assures him the noise was just the dog could Samuel slip off to sleep. Another thirteen months go by. It's a Monday night in August 1665. Samuel, 32, has little choice but to walk the unlit streets of London at ten o'clock, and all is blackness. It's a plague year, but though that scares him most, he can't stop thinking about the prospect of being waylaid by robbers and rogues. It takes him an hour to get home, and he collapses wearily into bed next to Elisabeth. Thirteen more months pass, and throughout a September week, a great fire rages through the city. But it, too, fades to history. Then, fourteen months later, comes the close of November 1667. Samuel, 34, wakes early one Friday morning, seven o'clock, stirred by a crashing noise in the late twilight. Sure that thieves are inside the house, he and Elisabeth cling to one another until after sunrise. Even when all's clear, he's left to ponder whether his house is haunted.  The dark can play with our heads.

Such are not uncommon fears at times today, and such were hardly uncommon fears before the installation of the artificial lights we take so readily for granted. Before the Industrial Revolution, people routinely plunged off docks, tumbled into ditches, hit their heads on signs, crashed into open cellars, while thieves and murderers roamed in bands, exploiting popular superstition to add to their fearsomeness. Night was, for many, a source of unease. Nearly four decades before Samuel was born, another Londoner – Thomas Nashe, a pastor's son who became a friend and collaborator of Shakespeare's – wrote about “the terrors of the night,” saying “they are as many as our sins. The night is the devil's black book wherein he records all our transgressions. … When Night, in her rusty dungeons, has imprisoned our eyesight..., the devil keeps his audit in our sin-guilty consciences..., the table of our heart is turned to an index of iniquities, and all our thoughts are nothing but texts to condemn us. … Well have poets termed night the nurse of cares, the mother of despair, the daughter of hell.” All manner of unpleasant things could happen in the night. In the dark. How haunted our lives can be by the darkness!

When we turn, not to Nashe's devil's black book, but to God's holy book, we find that in the beginning, “God is Light, and in him is no darkness at all” (1 John 1:5), for “he dwells in unapproachable light” (1 Timothy 6:16) from everlasting to everlasting; but in the created world first begun, “darkness was upon the face of the deep” (Genesis 1:2). Only then does God, from the very start, declare “Let there be light,” and suddenly light burst into the darkness (Genesis 1:3; cf. John 1:5). In the course of creation, God appoints the sun to be a lamp for ruling over the daytime hours and the moon to be a lesser lamp ruling over the hours of the night; the pair will thus give the world a rhythm and grant those below visibility and warmth and health and joy (Genesis 1:16-18). And we, once created, need this sun and this moon, because we need light. A neuroscience study done 11 or 12 years ago showed that extended light deprivation can not only induce depression but even cause brain damage. Researchers who've spent prolonged time isolated in darkness for months have lost track of time, taken 30-hour naps, suffered hallucinations, and simply started to break down. One researcher, interviewed after several stints living in underground caves, told the interviewer: “It is dark. You need a light. And if your light goes out, you're dead.” Indeed, without our lamps in the sky, life on earth would soon be extinguished. Were the sun to vanish, the average global surface temperature would plunge under zero within a week, and over the course of that first year would edge its way to a hundred below. During those first weeks, most plants and animals would die off, and we would freeze with them. We depend so heavily on the sun and moon – it's no wonder eclipses terrified civilizations throughout history, who – without understanding their causes – feared the sun threatened.

And yet, for all our reliance on the created natural lamps that pass through our sky, creation has always longed for the light of God himself. Late traditions imagined that Adam and Eve were originally clothed with garments of pure light in the garden, but that their sin led them to realize their nakedness because it extinguished their light (Sirach 49:16; Genesis Rabbah 20.12; Leviticus Rabbah 20.2; Apocalypse of Moses 20.1-2; Pirke de Rabbi Eliezer 24; Ephrem, Commentary on Genesis 2.14). And so, banished from the garden, they wandered out into a darker world. Worst of all, it came to pass that their descendants “loved the darkness rather than the light, because their works were evil” (John 3:19), even though “one who walks in darkness doesn't know where he's going” (John 12:35). As a prophet lamented, “We hope for light, and behold, darkness! And for brightness, but we walk in gloom! We grope for the wall like the blind, we grope like those who have no eyes, we stumble at noon as in the twilight..., for our transgressions are with us, and we know our iniquities” (Isaiah 59:9-12). But those very same offspring of Adam and Eve had the promise that one day, they might be clothed in light again: “those who are wise shall shine like the brightness of the sky above” (Daniel 12:3), “the righteous will shine like the sun in the kingdom of their Father” (Matthew 13:43).

And they would always pray for God's light to shine on them. When God formed his elect people, their high priest was taught to bless them by saying, “The LORD bless you and keep you; the LORD make his face to shine upon you and be gracious to you; the LORD lift up his countenance upon you and give you peace” (Numbers 6:24-26). Their psalmists longed for that blessing, praying things like: “May God be gracious to us and bless us and make his face to shine upon us” (Psalm 67:1), and: “Restore us, O God; let your face shine, that we may be saved” (Psalm 80:3), and: “Lift up the light of your face upon us, O LORD” (Psalm 4:6). And God promised that “the upright shall behold his face” (Psalm 11:7). One later Jewish book would even praise God by saying, “In your heavenly dwelling place, there is an inexhaustible light of an invincible dawning from the light of your face” (Apocalypse of Abraham 17.19). But down through the years, in the meantime, sun and moon and stars kept shedding light down onto the earth, preventing total darkness from plunging us into endless night.

To cherish the light, Israel built a tent called the tabernacle. The tabernacle was like a model of the universe – the colors of its curtains were the rich hues of space and sky (Exodus 26:1), and it it was a great seven-branched lampstand, the menorah, whose lamps represented the sun, moon, and visible planets (Exodus 25:31-40; Philo, Who is the Heir of Divine Things 45). These were set up at twilight each day and freshly dressed each morning, at the times of the twice-daily incense offerings (Exodus 30:7-8), with “seven lamps” to “give light in front of the lampstand” (Numbers 8:2). It was a constant feature of Israel's life, to ensure that they had light at all times (Leviticus 24:1-4). Later, when Solomon built a temple to replace the tabernacle, he lavishly commissioned not one but ten lampstands, placing five in front of each side of the Holy of Holies (1 Kings 7:49). One of the saddest reports Hezekiah, a later king, could give was that the prior generation had so forgotten God and world that they'd “put out the lamps” in the temple, starving their model universe of its light (2 Chronicles 29:7). And when the Babylonians burned down the temple, they stole the lampstands away (Jeremiah 52:19). All this time, at least Israel still had sun and moon overhead in the sky, but their temple was lost, and the nights were still so very dark. They – and we – were limited in our visibility, our warmth, our health, our joy. No wonder some Jews dreamed of a coming day when they'd have “immortal light” (Sibylline Oracles 3.787), talking of a time to come when there'd be “neither weariness, nor sickness, nor affliction, nor worry, nor want, nor debilitation, nor night, nor darkness; but they will have a great light, a great indestructible light” (2 Enoch 65.9-10).

And then, into that dimmed and darkened world of groaning, “the light of the gospel of the glory of God” was announced (2 Corinthians 4:4), with the goal of reaching people like us, to “open [our] eyes, that [we] may turn from darkness to light” (Acts 26:18). So although the temple had burned, John sees a temple rebuilt here and now – it's the whole gospel-enlightened people of God, in whom each local church is like a lampstand which Jesus our High Priest tends (Revelation 1:12-20), though faithless churches are in danger of having their lampstands removed from that holy temple (Revelation 2:5).

And now, as John bids us look ahead to the New Jerusalem, to that glorious eternal destiny set before us, we might expect to see a temple... but there's no temple shaping the landscape: “I saw no temple in the city,” John writes (Revelation 21:22a). But only because we don't need a temple, don't need a special building. The entire city he sees – the whole worldwide civilization of the saints – is one massive Holy of Holies, as you might remember from last week. God's presence will be at home everywhere just the same – with us: “Its temple is the Lord God the Almighty and the Lamb,” John explains (Revelation 21:22b). And that's all the temple we need. John beholds no gleaming temple marked out and built up, because everything is temple once God is “all in all” (1 Corinthians 15:28).

And then, John tells us something fantastic, something else we could hardly believe if he hadn't seen it and if we didn't trust the Spirit who spoke through him. He writes: “There will be no night there” (Revelation 21:25b) – that “night will be no more” (Revelation 22:5a). And yet this is not to be brought about through the created intermediaries of light like sun and moon, the familiar sky-lamps that have been our constant companions since the Bible's first page. We learn that “the city has no need of sun or moon to shine on it” (Revelation 21:23a) – that “they will need no light of lamp or sun” (Revelation 22:5b). That does not tell us whether the sun or moon will exist in the new creation; it just says that, so far as our human civilization will be concerned, they won't be relevant. And that should perplex us, because in this present creation, we know how desperately we depend on them! Everything in our lives is organized around sunrise and sunset. The moon creates the tides that keep our ocean from stagnating, the moon reflects the sun's light to guide our nights, and the sun itself is truly vital each and every day of our lives. How could we ever say to the sun, “I don't need you”?

But John goes on to explain. “The glory of God gives it light” (Revelation 21:23b) – “the Lord God will be their light” (Revelation 22:5c). The sun and moon are relativized because God himself shows them up, because God himself steps in as a light source. And here, John is only celebrating what Isaiah already heard long before him, when Isaiah announced to Israel, “Arise, shine, for your light has come, and the glory of the LORD has risen upon you; for behold, darkness shall cover the face of the earth, and thick darkness the peoples, but the LORD will arise upon you, and his glory will be seen upon you, and nations shall come to your light, and kings to the brightness of your rising” (Isaiah 60:1-3) – “Violence shall no more be heard in your land, devastation or destruction within your borders; you shall call your walls Salvation and your gates Praise. The sun shall be no more your light by day, nor for brightness shall the moon give you light; but the LORD will be your everlasting light, and your God will be your glory. Your sun shall no more go down, nor your moon withdraw itself; for the LORD will be your everlasting light, and your days of mourning shall be ended” (Isaiah 60:18-20).

When Isaiah says that, you can hear the profundity of the personal connection: your light has come, glory has risen upon you, sun and moon are no longer your light, but the Lord will be everlasting light for you. Those who have refused a relationship with God may be exiled into “the outer darkness” for “weeping and gnashing of teeth” (Matthew 8:12), but as for you, you who know God, you who trust God and hope in God, these promises are for you. God is talking to Isaiah's Israel, and through them to the New Jerusalem, and pledging to have special relationship with them – a relationship of active transmission, the Light to the lit. It's divine light! For “with [him] is the fountain of life; and in [his] light shall we see light” (Psalm 36:10). If we belong to that city and persist on our journey with Jesus, we will see all light in God's light. Sun and moon will not matter – the light will be from the Lord our God himself. Neither thief nor terror can haunt where God makes bright.

But it gets better. Before John even wrote, other Jewish writers hoped that the Messiah would have something to do with this bright picture. And one of them wrote that the Messiah would “shine forth like the sun in the earth; he shall take away all darkness from under heaven, and there shall be peace in all the earth” (Testament of Levi 18.4). And John knows the truth in that hope. The Messiah, the Christ, will take away all the darkness. It will give way to his shining light. And in his light, flowing from God's everlasting light, will be world peace.

So now John tells us what he's seen: “The city has no need of sun or moon to shine on it, for the glory of God gives it light and... its lamp is the Lamb” (Revelation 21:23). There, in that last phrase, is our key. This is the same Lamb who shares a single throne with the Supreme Majesty, for we read about “the throne of God and of the Lamb” (Revelation 22:1, 3). This is the same Lamb who is a single temple with the Supreme Majesty, for we read that “[the city's] temple is the Lord God Almighty and the Lamb” (Revelation 21:22). This Lamb, most unquestionably, is everything great that God is. This Lamb is Jesus. And Jesus evidently shines together with his Father a single divine light, since another author tells us that Jesus is “the radiance of the glory of God” (Hebrews 1:3). God's light is not in competition with Jesus' light; but all God's light is shining from Jesus!

And didn't Jesus tell us in advance that he was “the Light of the world” (John 8:12)? Didn't John already call him “the True Light” (John 1:9)? For John opens his Gospel with the declaration: “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God; he was in the beginning with God. All things were made through him, and without him was not anything made that was made. In him was life, and that life was the light of men. The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness has not overcome it. … The True Light, which gives light to everyone, was coming into the world. … To all who did receive him, who believed in his name, he gave the right to become children of God … The Word became flesh and dwelt among us, and we have seen his glory … Behold, the Lamb of God, who takes away the sin of the world!” (John 1:1-5, 9, 12, 14, 29). Jesus, Lamb of God, is the True Light: his shining will either attract us or repel us, but it cannot leave us neutral.

But Jesus didn't just tell us that he was the Light of the World. He showed us that he was God's Light. We read in the Gospels that Jesus climbed a mountain with three of his dearest disciples, Peter, James, and John. But what happened then on the mountaintop while they prayed? Jesus, deep in conversation with his Father, “was transfigured before them, and his face shone like the sun, and his clothes became white as light” (Matthew 17:2). It was no light from outside. It was the True Light shining through, shining with his own glory, showing and revealing his blinding brightness. Down through the centuries, the church – especially the eastern church – has reflected on what this scene must mean. And in the fourteenth century, the medieval church was embroiled in a controversy over this story – over whether the light that Peter, James, and John saw on Mount Tabor at the Transfiguration was a created light like the kind the sun gives off, or else an uncreated light intrinsic to God's very own self, the unapproachable light in which God dwells, the Light which God himself is. And that was the option the eastern church chose, lead by a theologian named Gregory Palamas who preached that “the light of the Lord's transfiguration does not come into being or cease to be… This light, then, is the light of the Godhead, and it is uncreated,” being “the glory that proceeds naturally from his divinity.” And just the same, Palamas insisted, the very same “divine light” radiating from Jesus will still, radiating from Jesus, be the “unchangeable and never-setting light” of our “everlasting future city.”

And in that, Palamas was right. Jesus' eternal light will be the light that lights up everything in the future stored up for us in eternity. In what John sees, the Lamb will be our lamp! Jesus will be our Lamp, our source of all the things we need, the One who sheds on us not just light, but immortal light, unchangeable light, everlasting light, divine light. Jesus will illuminate everything. In his light, we'll see light. Jesus will be the center. Jesus will be the source. Jesus forever will be where we'll turn. Jesus forever will be where we'll look. Jesus forever will be how we find our way, even when shines that “one eternal day.”

Now, in this life, the sun gives us visibility. But Jesus will be our visibility. It's by Jesus and in Jesus that we'll be able to see each other, really see each other. It's by Jesus and in Jesus that we'll see the terra firma under our feet, that we'll see the colors of the sky above, that we'll see the rocks and rills around us. It's by Jesus we'll look and know that we're fully in our Father's world. It's by Jesus we'll see anything and everything. And just as our sensory inputs now shape and train our brain how to interpret the world around us, just as the way we see shapes the way we think and dream, so Jesus will completely govern the way we think and dream then. Jesus will be our visibility. We will walk through eternal life by his light, and by no one else. The Lamb will be all the glory of the new creation.

In this life, in this old creation, the sun in the sky gives us warmth, sheds its heat down on us, keeps us and our world from freezing to death. But in the new creation, Jesus will be our warmth. The heat of his love will fill all things and keep everything alive. The heat of his love will make the world flourish. And as the flowers by instinct tilt toward the sun in the sky, so in the new creation will all things tilt toward the warm love of Jesus, the warm love that Jesus is, the love of God incarnate to dwell forever among us. Conditions will never freeze us, never chill us to the bone, with Jesus as our warmth – he will warm us to life, eternal life.

In this life, in this old creation, the sun in the sky gives us health – its ultraviolet radiation helps us synthesize vitamin D in our skin, contributing to bone health, and it helps us absorb certain minerals and builds immune health and even releases compounds that help with our blood pressure. We know that. But in the city that's coming, we'll have no need for the sun, because Jesus will radiate health for us. “The Sun of Righteousness shall rise with healing in [his] wings; you shall go out leaping like calves from the stall” (Malachi 4:2). In the rays that shine from Jesus, there is health for us. Jesus will be our health throughout eternal life.

In this life, in this old creation, the sun in the sky brings us joy – it triggers our brain's release of serotonin, a mood-improving hormone, and it lets us glimpse beauty that otherwise might be obscured. But in the city that's coming, it won't be a star overhead bringing us joy. Jesus will be our joy. Jesus will radiate joy into us, shed his joy on us – he wants his joy to “be in you, that your joy may be full” (John 15:11). In Jesus, our True Light, we will find joy that surpasses the best we can know under the sun and moon's rule. Life can only be ultimately lived and ultimately enjoyed through Jesus Christ, the True Light, the Lamb our Lamp. And as much as we know that now, and strive to live into that now, we will effortlessly have Jesus radiating his visibility, warmth, health, and joy into us in the world that's coming. Because he will be among us, walking and talking with us, filling us with God's light – he will be the Divine Lamp in our midst.

You might ask, “Why does it all matter?” Well, there are terrors in this world. There are secrets in this world. There is evil in this world. There is danger in this world. For there is night – physically and spiritually – interrupted only by the gracious gifts God placed in creation to keep our darkness at bay. And yet there will be a day when those gifts will have completed their thisworldly mission – even the sun and moon. Because the sun has never yet done for you all that God is going to do for you, and the moon can never achieve for you what God is preparing to give you. The supreme light of God will change everything. There will be no terror, no evil, no danger, no secret. Everything will look different in his light. “While you have the light, believe in the light, that you may become sons [and daughters] of light” (John 12:36). “At one time, you were darkness, but now you are light in the Lord” (Ephesians 5:8) – and the light you will be, we can only imagine.

As we come to the close of our passage, we read that with God and the Lamb turning our whole world into a Holy of Holies for a universe-size temple, “his servants will worship him” like the Levites did in the temples of old (Revelation 22:3c). And “his name will be on [our] foreheads” (Revelation 22:4b), just where Israel's high priest carried it – each and every last one of you, if you follow Jesus all the way into the new creation, will be a high priest and then some, and will be conformed to God's character so that his likeness is all over your face. And we “will see his face” – will see the very face of God (Revelation 22:4a). The prayers of priests and psalmists will be eternally answered. We will always live in God's light, always be shown God's favor, always receive his blessing, always enjoy the Beatific Vision. Our ultimate blessing, our highest joy, will be to behold the Father face-to-face, to his glory and our benefit; to be in complete and perfect relationship with him, not in theory or in the abstract, but through a direct and constant encounter, unveiled, knowing in full, seeing in full; for all our senses and all our faculties to be wrapped up in him; to have him as our eternal focus and as the lens through which to see everything else. To be fully blessed by seeing God, not once, but continually beholding the most perfect Truth, perfect Goodness, perfect Beauty which only he can be – glory, glory, hallelujah!

And we “will reign forever and ever” (Revelation 22:5d), as “a kingdom and priests to our God” (Revelation 5:10), with the Lamb as our Lamp. Even now, looking ahead to that day, we can gratefully say with David and Paul: “You are my lamp, O LORD, and my God lightens my darkness” (2 Samuel 22:29), “for God who said 'Let light shine out of darkness' has shone in our hearts to give the light of the knowledge of the glory of God in the face of Jesus Christ” (2 Corinthians 4:6). John wrote elsewhere that “the darkness is passing away, and the true light is already shining” (1 John 2:8), and whoever follows Jesus “will not walk in darkness, but will have the light of life” (John 8:12) – so how much more then, in the new creation unveiled, when the Lamb of God will be our perfect Lamp! Jesus is the True Light – Light from Light, True God from True God, flowing from the Father in unparalleled divine splendor for all eternity. As our Light and our Salvation (Psalm 27:1), he is everything we need to find our way, now and in the endless new creation. He will be the only Light we'll ever need, and that Light will be our Life. Light isn't light, life isn't life, without him. Jesus alone can make even eternity glorious and bright – how could we ever live without him now? Shine on us, O Lamb our Lamp!