The Wonder Of Heaven

Three hundred years before Christ, in the days of Alexander the Great, the Greeks made a list of what they called the “Seven Wonders of the World.”

This group is composed of monuments remarkable for their splendor and/or size:

· Pyramids of Egypt

· Hanging Gardens of Babylon

· Temple of Diana at Ephesus

· Statue of Jupiter in Athens

· The Great Mausoleum of Persia

· Colossus of Rhodes

· Lighthouse of Alexandria

· Today we have a similar list called the Seven Natural Wonders of the World. They are:

· The Grand Canyon

· The Rio de Janeiro Harbour

· Iguaçu Falls of Argentina

· Redwood Trees of California

· Mt. Everest

· Amazon River

· Northern Lights

This morning I want us to stand in awe of the Wonders of Heaven. Our text is Revelation 21. We are past the horror, past the evil, past the violence that surrounded us so much in the earlier chapters of the Revelation. We have arrived.

• At the place of new beginnings.

• At the place where dreams are born.

• At the place our distance ancestors lived and lost awhile.

This is not the end of the world. This is the renewal of the world. The restoration of all things. The book of Revelation does not have an ending. It has a new beginning. We call it heaven. It is filled with many wonders. I was going to preach on the seven wonders of heaven but then decided that really there is only one Wonder of Heaven.

God is the wonder of heaven. Everything else is a footnote. 60 years ago I was a young man from Prince Edward Island. For some reason I took great interest in a little Prairie town on the other side of the country - Innisfail, Alberta. In those days Innisfail had several large grain elevators, there was Fred’s Grocery Mart, and of course, the Club Café where you could have a veal cutlet dinner for next to nothing. I loved the historic village. They even had a small Railroad station where the rail liner between Calgary and Edmonton stopped each day.

And so I started going to Innisfail, a lot, several times a year. But it wasn’t the grain elevators that I was focused on, it wasn’t the Fred’s Grocery store that I looked forward to seeing, it wasn’t even the Club Café with its great cutlets. I went to Innisfail to see a beautiful teen age girl. She had captured my heart. I wanted to get to know her better and spend the rest of my life with her.

Why do you want to go to heaven? Is it the place or the person? Many people want to go heaven for the same reason they want to go to Arizona – they think the weather will be better and the people will be decent.

Do you see how the book of Revelation describes heaven? God will live with humans, and they will be his people, and God himself will be with them as their God. God with them. How can anything go wrong with God at your side. All the wonders of heaven flow out of the fact that God is with us – joy, peace, love. God almighty living with humans is the greatest wonder of heaven.

As far as the eye can see the hills are peppered with laughter. Creation playing with creation. Toddlers ride atop lions, children pile onto the back of big brothers, Mothers smile as they wipe gold dust from their youngster’s face. Teenagers jump off a cliff into a deep pool of water that doesn’t understand the word drown. God is at our side – forever!

God has been dreaming of this moment from the dawn of time. He has forever wanted a close, intimate relationship with us. That was His original intent. We are his pride and joy. God loves us with an everlasting love.

And just to make sure no one in this meeting thinks it’s the other guy that God loves. Have you checked out the names engraved on the twelve gates of heaven. Can you see the names carved onto the twelve foundations of the Holy City.

The 12 gates of the New Jerusalem are named after the twelve sons of Israel. How much do you know about those rascals? Ten of them were prepared to murder their brother Joseph. Reuben the eldest went to bed with his father’s concubine. Judah got his daughter in law pregnant. Shall I tell you about Gad or Dan or Issachar? Do you really want to be depressed this morning with the stories of jealousy, incest, brutality, fraud, kidnapping, and slaughter, from these 12 men.

My point here is that God’s grace is greater than all our sins. The New Jerusalem is populated with people who have done all these terrible things and worse, and yet God’s grace, God’s love, God’s power reached them and redeemed them.