The garden becomes a city

Open a Bible to its first pages and you find a garden: a river, trees, the tree of life in the middle, and God walking in the cool of the day with the people He made. Open it to its last pages and you find almost the same scene – a river of the water of life, the tree of life bearing fruit, and God dwelling with His people. The book ends where it began, but raised to a higher key.

This is not an accident of imagery. John, exiled on Patmos and shown the end of all things, describes that end in the vocabulary of the beginning. There is a river (Genesis 2:10; Revelation 22:1). There is the tree of life (Genesis 2:9; Revelation 22:2). There is the presence of God with His people (Genesis 3:8; Revelation 21:3). The whole canon is built like an arch, and these chapters are the keystone that lets you see the shape of the thing for the first time.

But notice what is different. Eden was a garden; the end is a garden inside a city. Eden had one couple; the city holds a countless multitude from every nation. Eden could be lost; this city’s gates, John says, never close (Revelation 21:25). What humanity walked out of in shame, God carries us back into in glory – and this time there is no serpent, no fruit forbidden, no way to fall out again. “No longer will there be any curse” (Revelation 22:3). The sentence pronounced in Eden is not merely suspended. It is gone.

A woman I know spent eleven years estranged from her father. Hard words on both sides, then silence, then a habit of silence that nobody knew how to break. When he grew old and sick, she went back. She told me the strangest part was the porch light. He had left it on every night for eleven years – not because he expected her, exactly, but because turning it off would have meant admitting she was not coming home.

When she finally walked up that driveway, the door was already unlocked. He had not locked it in years. “In case,” he said. That was all. In case.

Revelation says the gates of the city are never shut, and that there is no more night there, because the glory of God is its light (Revelation 21:23-25). I think of that porch light. The whole Bible is the long account of a God who left the door unlocked and the light on – through the flood and the wandering, through kings and prophets and exile, through a cross – waiting for His estranged people to come up the driveway. The end of the story is not a reluctant reunion. It is a Father who never once turned off the light.

Traditionally identified with John the apostle, he received the Revelation while exiled to the rocky island of Patmos ‘because of the word of God and my testimony about Jesus’ (Revelation 1:9). An old man under Roman pressure, cut off from the churches he loved, he was given a vision of the end – and chose to end it not with thunder but with an invitation and a longing: ‘The Spirit and the bride say, Come.’ The same hand that, by tradition, wrote ‘the Word became flesh and dwelt among us’ wrote ‘the dwelling place of God is with man.’ His life’s work runs from the manger to the new Jerusalem, and both poles are God coming to live with us.