The implications of Scripture’s teaching on this subject are immense. We will not spend eternity floating on clouds. We’ll enjoy something far better: life in the new earth ensconced in God’s glory. We’ll finally see him face to face.

On March 19, 2021, my father passed away. He was larger than life. Nobody who met him ever forgot him. And since his passing, I’ve thought more deeply about death and the afterlife.

One pervasive misconception is that we’ll spend eternity in heaven, gathered around God’s throne with the angels. Of course, this is a present reality—deceased saints are indeed worshiping God in heaven. Scripture is clear on this point (e.g., 2 Cor. 5:8; Phil. 1:23; Rev. 6:9–10). But the church is often ignorant about what will transpire in the future after Christ’s second coming.

For the last hundred years or so, evangelicals have expended more energy on what precedes the eternal state—the nature of the tribulation, the millennial kingdom, and so on—than on the eternal state itself. Let’s examine what Scripture says about the new heavens and earth and consider a few points of encouragement.

New Cosmos

We find the most detailed account of the nature of the eternal state in Revelation 21–22. The challenge, though, is that John reveals his climactic vision using Old Testament symbolism drawn from Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, 1 Kings, Isaiah, Ezekiel, and Daniel. To understand Revelation 21–22, one must understand the Old Testament.

John envisions “a new heaven and a new earth” (21:1; see Isa. 65:17; 66:22), but then he immediately sees a “holy city, new Jerusalem, coming down out of heaven” (Rev. 21:2; see Isa. 52:1; 62:1–2). While these two images may strike us as odd, the progression from cosmos to city is natural. John isn’t describing two different realities but one. Notice the interpretation of these images in Rev. 21:3: “I heard a loud voice from the throne saying, ‘Behold, the dwelling place of God is with man’” (see Lev. 26:11–12; Ezek. 37:27).

John equates the “new heaven” and “new earth” with the “new Jerusalem.” But that isn’t all. John later drills down into some specifics of the new cosmos: “Then the angel showed me the river of the water of life . . . also, on either side of the river, the tree of life” (Rev. 22:1–2; see Gen. 2:8–9; 3:22, 24; Ezek. 47:12). This cosmic city contains Edenic features. It’s a city-cosmos-garden! The readers of Revelation would’ve immediately connected the dots, as each image recalls the Old Testament, especially Genesis 1–2.

Creation of the Cosmos as God’s Sanctuary

The creation account in Genesis 1–2, one of the richest and most influential texts in all of Scripture, reveals that God intended the cosmos to function as his habitation, his sanctuary. Psalm 78:69 explicitly states, “He [the Lord] built his sanctuary like the high heavens, like the earth, which he has founded forever” (see also 1 Chron. 28:2; Isa. 66:1–2). Michael Morales rightly concludes, “The cosmos was understood as a large temple and the temple as a small cosmos.”

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