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also heavenly in situation.
When this city is mentioned in Revelation, it is
called:
'New Jerusalem, which cometh down out of heaven from my God' (Rev.
3:12).
This feature is repeated in chapter 21:2 and 10:
'And I John saw the holy city, new Jerusalem, coming down from God out
of heaven'.
'And he carried me away in the spirit to a great and high mountain, and
shewed me that great city, the holy Jerusalem, descending out of heaven
from God'.
For the moment we leave the question as to when this city descends and
consider the place that it occupies in the epistle to the Hebrews, the only
other portion of the New Testament that speaks of it. This is found in
Hebrews 12:22, where we read:
'But ye are come unto mount Sion,* and unto the city of the living God,
the heavenly Jerusalem'.
*
See article, Zion, the Millennium and the Overcomer
(page 293).
This, as in Galatians 4, is in contrast with Mount
Sinai. This city is moreover inhabited by an innumerable company of angels,
and angels, while they visited the earth on missions of blessing or judgment,
are designated as 'the angels of heaven' in the Scriptures. In Hebrews 11 we
see how the vision of this city influenced Abraham, for it is written:
'These all died in faith ... and confessed that they were strangers and
pilgrims on the earth ... they seek a country ... they desire a better
country, that is, an heavenly ... God ... hath prepared for them a
city' (Heb. 11:13 -16).
For this, Abraham was willing to be a tent dweller, 'for he looked for
a city which hath (the) foundations, whose builder and maker is God' (Heb.
11:9,10). We learn from Isaiah that when God calls Israel to Himself as a
woman forsaken, as a wife of youth, when refused, who for a little time had
been under the cloud of wrath, and under the hiding of His face, He declares:
'I will lay thy stones with fair colours, and lay thy foundations with
sapphires. And I will make thy windows of agates, and thy gates of
carbuncles, and all thy borders of pleasant stones' (Isa. 54:11,12).
Here, this city is seen to be an earthly reflection of the heavenly
Jerusalem, but must not be confused with it. One feature alone shows that
the two cities are distinct. The gates of the one are of carbuncles, the
gates of the Heavenly Jerusalem were 'every several gate of one pearl' (Rev.
21:21), consequently there can be no confusing of these two cities, beautiful
as they both will be. The city of Isaiah 54 may be invested by an enemy, and
the promise is that no weapon that is formed against it shall prosper (Isa.
54:15 -17), but there is no thought in the Apocalypse that the Heavenly
Jerusalem will ever be, or ever could be, thus threatened. The city that
Abraham looked for cannot be the city of Isaiah 54, it must have been the