This chapter and vs. 1-5 of the next bring before us the closing scenes in the magnificent panorama of the Apocalypse. The main question of interpretation here is whether this is truly the heavenly, post-resurrection state. Does this state follow the final judgment as brought before us in vs. 11-15 of the previous chapter?—I am compelled to take the affirmative by the following considerations.—(1.) The consecutive order of the visions naturally demands it. We have had the Millennium; then the last rallying of Satan's hosts and their destruction; then the "great white throne" of final judgment with the resurrection of all the dead immediately preceding and the wicked sent to their eternal destiny following:—so that now it only remains to unfold much more in detail the eternal home and state of the righteous. That this should be given much more fully than the corresponding doom of the wicked is legitimately in harmony with the moral purpose of the whole book. There is every reason to assume that this is precisely the order of succession in these stupendous events which close up the moral history of our race as related to this earthly life and its corresponding future.—(2.) The first verse alludes definitely to the passing away of the first heaven and the first earth and indicates that these new scenes come upon the great stage of action subsequently, i. e., after the old earth and heavens are gone. No rational sense can be given to this language save by assuming that we are now borne onward to the state beyond the resurrection and the final judgment. The very intent of this clause—"for the first heaven and the first earth were passed away"—must have been to locate these new scenes beyond and subsequent to those before described.—(3.) All the features of this new state as here given represent it as the consummation of final retribution for all the moral good and moral evil of our present world. The righteous are shown in their eternal reward; the wicked in theirs.—(4.) No objection lies against this view of the passage on the ground that the symbols and imagery are borrowed from things earthly—largely from Old Testament descriptions of the gospel age of the world—in general, from Jewish conceptions of the holy city as the dwelling place of Israel's God. If any thing positive is to be said of the ultimate heavenly world it must by the laws of the sternest necessity be put in symbolic language, and these symbols must be drawn from things with which we are familiar. Otherwise all possible illustration is precluded. All positive conceptions of heaven must be built upon our actual conceptions of things earthly. Suppose an effort to evade this necessity. For example, suppose that the words used are in the dialect of heaven and not the dialect of earth; the figures and symbols used for illustration are borrowed from the scenery of the planet Saturn and from the great facts in the history of that planet. How much wiser should any of us be for such a revelation?—I have said, "all positive conceptions of heaven," for my argument does not look specially to those negative conceptions of the heavenly state which the Scriptures readily give us. It is easy to say of heaven.—"No night there;" no tears there; no sorrow there; no sin there; nothing whatsoever that worketh abomination or maketh a lie: "no more sea," etc. Such negations of the ills of our present state come home at once to our souls, impressed by our bitter experience of life's conflicts and woes, of its griefs and tears; and we feel that by these points of the description, we have learned something definite about heaven. And we have. But heaven is more than a system of negations. It is more than earth with these ills of earth taken out. Hence we naturally long to know something beyond these negative points. The symbolism of this chapter is an effort to teach us something more—an effort which by the demands of a stringent necessity seeks to build up a positive heaven upon the illustrations afforded us in the scriptural views of the earthly Zion. The point of my argument here is that this resort to the earthly Zion for symbols and illustrations with which to lift our thought to the heavenly world ought not to prejudice or in any way damage our doctrine that these scenes do set forth the real heaven that lies beyond the final judgment.—The thoughtful reader will notice that this argument has become incidentally (and I may say unintentionally) an exegesis of the chapter, giving in the main the clew to its just interpretation.

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