Then for the first time St. John hears God the Father speak : " Behold, I make all things new " (fresh). It is the voice of the Throned One, the One who rules over all things from the begin- ning, and who has presided over all the changing scenes of earth's history; it is He who makes even the wrath of man to praise Him, and who causes all things to work together for good to them that love Him, who gives this heart-helping assurance. "I am making all things new." In spite of all the moral disorder, the pain and grief, the dark shadows of life and history, the new creation
is being prepared, and will rise, like the early creation, out of chaos.
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3i8 GOD'S NEW WORLD
i. The Speaker.
1. The Speaker is God the Father. Throughout the whole Book of Kevelation, says Swete, " he that sitteth on the throne " is the Almighty Father, as distinguished from the Incarnate Son. And so it is probable that here for the first time in the book we listen to the words of God Himself, for it is the first time that " he that sitteth on the throne " is represented as speaking. His words go to the centre of things and reach to their circumference, and they are gracious in their purpose : " Behold, I make all things new."
2. Is there a difficulty in the representation of the Father as Judge supreme ? The doctrine seems to join issue with John. v. 22, " For the Father judge th no man, but hath committed all judg- ment unto the Son"; and indeed with the whole current of early Christian tradition. Swete finds a possible reconciliation of the two views in the oneness of the Father and the Son (John X. 30) — when the Son acts, the Father acts with and through Him (John v. 19). St. Paul speaks of the judgment- seat of Christ (2 Cor. v. 10), and also of the judgment-seat of God (Rom. xiv. 10).
If It would seem as if the threefold Personality had become united in one name. No more we hear of " Let us make " ; we are now confronted by an intenser term, " Behold, / make all things new." It would seem as if each Person in the Divine Trinity had times of special expression and times of special relation to nature and to man and to providence and to destiny; now it is the Father, and the other Persons of the Trinity are concealed, as it were, behind His glory : now it is the Son, the only-begotten Son, the Saviour of the world; and, finally, it is the Paraclete, the Holy Spirit, who rules the whole mystery of human development. And what if now the Three should in a peculiar and definite sense be One — as if the Three-One should all be speaking in, " Behold, I make all things new " ? ^
ii. The Place of the Promise.
There are three texts which should be taken together : " And God saw everything that he had made, and, behold, it was very good " (Gen. i. 31).
* Joseph Parker.
REVELATION xxi. 5 319
" For we know that the whole creation groaneth and travaileth in pain together (RV. marg. " with us ") until now " (Eom. viii. 22).
" And he that sitteth on the throne said, Behold, I make all things new " (Eev. xxi. 5).
God's world is the subject of these three verses. The first describes God's world as it was ; the second, God's world as it is ; the third, God's world as it shall be.
1. God's world as it was when He made it — The report of it is — and it is God's own report — that it was very good. It could not be improved. It was perfect. God's eye saw no flaw in it, God was satisfied and delighted with it. It was all glory and beauty, music and song, happiness and peace. The Greek word for " world " contains the idea of order. Nothing was out of place in God's world. But the word "very good" has more than a material and more than an artistic meaning. It is a moral word. It means that there was a contrast between the world as God made it and the world as it afterwards became. It means that there was no sin in God's world as He made it.
2. God's world as it is. — It is no longer very good. Ichabod is written across the face of it. Its glory has departed. Not that the primal order has become pure chaos. God " in His heaven " has been working in the world from the beginning until now. Wherever His hand is not interfered with by the will of man there is order still. Nature is even continually restoring the beauty that man has defaced. It is the moral world and all that depends upon it, the sphere in which the will of man works, that has suffered an eclipse. For sin has entered, and with sin death : the first a murder, the last a suicide. " Oh that my head were waters, and mine eyes a fountain of tears, that I might weep day and night for the slain of the daughter of my people " (Jer. ix. 1). " God's in His heaven " ; but it is prophecy, not history, to say "All's right with the world."