in a world of conflicting values, when questions are more common than answers. God's Word provides everything we need to live a God-centered, truth-driven life. Now, here's the Word for Life broadcast, brought to you by Brookside Baptist Church. Good morning. Thank you for joining us on this Wednesday morning on the Word for Life. My name is Mark Widmer and I'm joining Pastor Ken Keltner as we are continuing our verse-by-verse walk through the book of Revelation and today is quite the day because we enter the Final chapter. Chapter 22. Unbelievable. Amazing. And in this portion of Scripture, we are seeing the amazing description of what God tells us and shows us is going to be in the New Jerusalem, all the splendors of it, any hint of wickedness or waywardness or whatever is totally done away with, not only on our part, but collectively. There's no more sin. Satan's been cast into the lake of fire by this point. This is a chapter of just glory and celebration. Pastor Kent, Well, in chapter 21, remember, we started looking at the perfect city, that's going to be the New Jerusalem. Then we looked at the perfect temple, there's not a temple building in the New Jerusalem. Jesus is the Lamb, the temple himself. And now we're into what we would call the perfect garden, starting in chapter 22. And again, as Pastor Mark, anytime I look at what I know is to come, it really gives me a burden for people. There's people that don't have the confidence of what's going to happen to them after they leave this earth. It's sad because as one person mentioned it to me, 10 out of 10 people die. Death is undefeated. The death rate, my friends, is 100%. In fact, I looked up some facts on this. We're told that three people die every second. a hundred every minute, and nearly 11,000 every hour. You know, I believe what the Bible says about eternity, and so that means more than 250,000 people die every day, and they either go to heaven or they go to hell. And yet the apostle Peter tells us the Lord's not slack concerning his promise, but his long suffering toward us, not willing that any should perish, but that all should come to repentance. My friends, God so desires that people will come to repent of their sin and trust Christ for eternal life, that they can live with him forever. He desires that so much that he sent his only begotten son to take on all of our sin and pay for our sin, past, present, and future on the cross. I mean, Jesus wanted to put his followers at ease about life after death. It's a very familiar passage in John chapter 14, and I'll have Pastor Mark, if you'd read that for us. Yeah, this is verses 1, 2, and 3. Let not your heart be troubled, You believe in God, believe also in me. In my Father's house are many mansions. If it were not so, I would have told you. I go to prepare a place for you. And if I go and prepare a place for you, I will come again and receive you to myself, that where I am, there you may be also. I mean, what a comforting, reassuring passage of Scripture. You know, God wants mankind to know, hey, we're going to live somewhere forever. And that has shaped every civilization in human history. In Australia, the folks that inhabited Australia there in the beginning pictured heaven as a distant island beyond the western horizon. the early Finns thought it was an island in the faraway east. Mexicans, Peruvians, Polynesians believed that they went to the sun or moon after death, you know, and so, mankind has been thinking something is after this life. And it's evidence because God, we're told, has put eternity in the hearts of men. So, Revelation 22, we're going to see just these final snapshots here inside the eternal city and this new perfect garden, paradise. You know, we all think, man, I'm going on a vacation, I'm going to paradise. That paradise has nothing of the paradise we're going to experience in this perfect garden. It's better than the Garden of Eden. It will be reminiscent of the Garden of Eden. But there is no break in the picture for us between the end of chapter 21 and what we see in chapter 2. So, Pastor Mark, I'm going to ask you to read the first five verses for us here in chapter 22. And he showed me a pure river of water of life, clear as crystal, proceeding from the throne of God and of the Lamb. In the middle of its street and on either side of the river was the Tree of Life, which bore twelve fruits, each tree yielding its fruit every month. The leaves of the tree were for the healing of the nations. And there shall be no more curse, but the throne of God and of the Lamb shall be in it, and His servants shall serve Him. They shall see His face, and His name shall be on their foreheads. There should be no night there, they need no lamp nor light of the sun, for the Lord God gives them light, and they shall reign forever and ever. You read that and you think, wow. I mean, we're really focusing right now on heaven. This final description that we see here are phrases of heaven, what it's going to be like. So, heaven, as we've learned already, is a word for the eternal state. It includes the new heaven, it includes the new earth, the eternal city of God, that would be the new Jerusalem. and the Father's throne, that's where God, we're going to be in the presence of God Almighty. And my friends, all of this for the believer is going to be there for us to enjoy as it shines with the glory of God forever. It seems low, Pastor Mark, the more that we study about heaven, the more questions come to our mind. I mean, what's it, I mean, can we do this? I mean, I've had people say, do you think we can swim in heaven? Someone said, you know, if they're golf courses, it might be frustrating because you're getting a hole in one every time, you know. Recreation, every shot I take in basketball is just going in the hoop, you know. I hate when that happens. Yeah, exactly. But God evidently wants us to be thinking about what heaven's like. In fact, that word heaven appears 582 times in the Bible and the plural form heavens is found another 133 times for a total of 715 times. And Revelation 21 too tells us that the holy city, the New Jerusalem coming down out of heaven from God. It sure seems that God wants us to get excited concerning our imaginations of what heaven's going to be like. I mean, chapter 21 we encountered a city that makes Mount Everest look like a small hillside. 1500 miles square. I mean, we've been given colors of gemstones, the size of freight trains and pearls, the size of massive arenas. We've seen the magnificent ceremony of the parade of nations, which takes place there in the beginning of heaven's glory. I mean, I think it's even hard to imagine this capital city of heaven sparkling like a flawless diamond, reflecting the brilliant light coming from God himself. I mean, look, gold is so commonplace that in heaven, it'll be used for nothing more than just pavement. Asphalt, but much prettier than asphalt. Okay, so Pastor Mark, as you were reading, there's one thing that stood out to me here right off the bat was this river of life. I mean, we're told it's a pure. I mean, I don't think we really get to see pure rivers as often as we think we see them. I mean, I tell you, I've been over to Israel and I mean, the Jordan River is just one filthy river. I mean, and the Jesus went down and got back, I mean, wow. I mean, if you remember, you've been with us, John said in verse one of chapter one, there's no more sea, there's no more ocean in this new earth. So this is not a river necessarily like we know it today. First of all, as we mentioned, it's going to be pollution free. Today we have a hydrological cycle that includes the rivers and the oceans. One Revelation scholar that I've enjoyed reading, Robert Thomas, he writes this, and I quote, these are literal waters that are of nature and quality that we've never seen before, just as we've never seen a literal city like this before. I believe this is the same river that David had earlier predicted in Psalm 46, 4, when he says, there is a river whose stream shall make glad the city of God. The prophet Joel, he wrote that a fountain would flow out of the house of God there in Joel chapter 3. It's interesting. Is it not how many passages in Revelation originate in the Old Testament? What strikes John is the river's color and its source. The color is clear as crystal. Crystallis is that word is transliterated to give us our word crystal. It's detailing for us this shimmering brightness. I mean, just as we were down in Florida and you're sitting there on the balcony and you're looking over What's it called now, the Gulf of America? Yeah, that's the new name, Gulf of America. And as the sun is shining on the water, it just looks like sparkling diamonds out there. I mean, I was kind of thinking, I thought, wow, I don't know if it's going to look necessarily like that, but that's kind of what it would remind us of. The source is its proceeding from the throne of God and of the Lamb. So, it's a symbol of just pure, holy, eternal life flowing down through the city from the throne of God and of the Lamb. That's one throne. So as rivers today have headwaters, the fountainhead, or the source of this river, is flowing down, and it's flowing down from the throne of God. You remember, in the Garden of Eden, there were four rivers that flowed through. In the Millennial Kingdom, a river flows from Temple Mount. Ezekiel talks about it being a wonderful river to swim in. But in this eternal city, the river is literally flowing from the throne of God, which means its source is going to be endless. You know, scripture often describes the glories of heaven symbolically because, I mean, in our human minds, it's just like we can't comprehend it. We do know, without a shadow of a doubt, that heaven is not symbolic. It's a literal, real place, as real as the places we were born and where we live now. And so this river symbolizes that our deepest needs are going to be met. Every thirst we have that is God-given is going to be satisfied in heaven. And John really understood the whole meaning of water in terms of its reference to salvation. For he recorded Jesus' words in John chapter 1 when he said to the woman, and we'll close with this today, you're familiar with that, in Matthew chapter 4. Whoever drinks of the water will thirst again, but whoever drinks of the water that I shall give him will never thirst. But the water that I shall give him will become in him a fountain of water, springing up into everlasting life. We want to leave you with that passage of scripture today, that that water is still Jesus Christ. He is the living water that will give us life, that we'll never be looking for anything in religion again because Jesus is the only one who satisfies that need, that thirst to know the truth. So friends, thank you for joining us today. Join us again on our next broadcast as we're getting close to finishing the book of Revelation. We hope you enjoyed today's program. If you have a question we can answer, or would like information on the Word for Life, would like to donate to continue to produce this broadcast, or need resources for your Christian walk, Contact us at Brookside Baptist Church, 4470 North Pilgrim Road, Brookfield, Wisconsin, 53005. You can also visit us at brooksidebc.org. That's brooksidebc.org. Or call us at 262-783-6180. That's 262-783-6180. Thanks for listening today, and please tune in again as we bring the Word of God to your life. you