"Do Over!"

Remember that phrase? As children, when we completely messed up while playing some

Game — missed the shot, dropped the ball, broke the bat — there was always the option to get a "do over." Shouting "do over" was like a magic reset button. It canceled out failure and offered a clean slate to try again.

As John’s astonishing vision approaches its conclusion, Revelation begins to describe God’s "do over" the creation of "a new heaven and a new earth," and the manifestation of a "New Jerusalem."

Although John is describing something wholly "new" in these verses, the language he uses is not. The "new heaven and new earth" were described in Isaiah 65:17. So too was the arrival of a New Jerusalem. In John’s vision the creation of these "new" things comes after his dramatic descrip…