One of the greatest apparent advantages to a godless way of life is the freedom that it allows. No longer must the unbeliever be concerned with the law of God and whether it permits him to do what he wants to. Instead, he is free to do whatever he thinks is right.

However, this seeming benefit comes at a steep cost. When we are free to do whatever we want, there is nothing for us to do. There is no meaning for us to achieve, no purpose for us to fulfill.

When we point this out to atheists, they often reply that they are free to create their own meaning. You can decide to make your life about whatever you want it to be about! Sadly, the reality here does not measure up to the theory. The goals that we choose for ourselves inevitably prove unfulfilling.

This is well illustrated by the first couple of chapters of Ecclesiastes. In them, Solomon deploys the nearly unlimited resources that he has amassed in order to discover purpose for his life. He embarks on massive building projects and funds to the fullest every pleasure that he enjoys.

The worldly would suppose this to be heaven on earth. Many of them live with the goal of accumulating wealth until they too, like Solomon, can do anything they want. However, Solomon’s experience with it was anything but heavenly, and the few who achieve such levels of wealth today also discover that it is unsatisfying.

As the Israelite king says in Ecclesiastes 2:11, “When I considered all that I had accomplished and what I had labored to achieve, I found everything to be futile and a pursuit of the wind. There was nothing to be gained under the sun.” If we place our hope in ourselves, we will be disappointed.

Still others seek to find meaning in some earthly cause. There are those who give their lives to an organization or business; still others live for an ideal, like environmentalism.

The problem is, though, that results don’t live up to our aspirations. Businesses fail or, worse still, fire us. Organizations fall short of their goals. Causes get sidetracked by human selfishness and pride. More subtly, success may be even harder to deal with. What do you do if some worldly goal of yours is completely achieved? Go fishing?

Thus, we see that honoring the purpose for which we are created, though it appears very restrictive, is actually a blessing. Christians can live a meaningful, fulfilled life from beginning to end without facing the disappointment that hounds the worldly. Because God's goals are bigger than we are, we never find them inadequate. Better still, when we come to the end of our lives, we can anticipate an eternal reward instead of oblivion or eternal punishment. The yoke of Christ may appear to be a burden, but when we take it up, we find it to be lighter than anything else.

Our final Bible reading in the New Testament, Revelation 21 and 22, contains a great deal of imagery that is familiar to us from the songs that we sing. Here, we find the street of gold, the river of life, the trees that bear fruit every month, and a city where there is no night because it is illuminated by God and the Lamb. When we read these images, we immediately associate them with heaven because that's what our hymns do.

However, on their own terms, the last two chapters of Revelation are not about heaven. This comes as a shock to many Christians, but it is plain on the face of the text. In Revelation 21:1-2, the actual state of affairs is described. The first heaven and the first earth are destroyed, along with the sea, signifying the end of the Hebrew cosmos. They are replaced with a new heaven and a new earth.

Into this new cosmos descends a city from heaven. The city is described as the holy city, the new Jerusalem, a city prepared like a bride adorned for her husband. A very similar description of this city appears in Revelation 21:10. Once again, John makes clear that this is a city coming from heaven.

This city is the subject of most of the rest of the book. It is the city with 12 gates, 12 foundations, and walls built of precious stones. Everything else in the city is made of gold. In this city there is no night, the throne of God is in its center, and the river of the water of life flows from that throne. The tree of life flourishes along the banks of the river. Here, the people of God will reign along with Him forever and ever.

Certainly, there is considerable dispute about the nature of this city. Some believe that it represents the victorious church. Others, myself included, think that it describes the eternal reward of the faithful. However, never once does John call it “heaven”.

As always, John's words here ought to be taken seriously but not literally. Because we live in the present creation, we have no way of comprehending what the future creation will be like. Nonetheless, the glorious imagery that John uses helps us to appreciate the glory that awaits us.

I wish that the authors of our hymns about heaven had been more careful with their language. Interestingly, the greatest of our hymns about the life to come, “There Is a Habitation”, never once describes the holy city as heaven. The author of the hymn was a 19^th-century gospel preacher named Love H. Jameson. He clearly knew his Bible well, and all of his descriptions of our future home are easily justifiable from Scripture.

Even now, I don't mind singing about the streets of gold in heaven. I think we should sing with longing for our future home, and I am willing to use “heaven” accommodatively to get the point across. However, as we sing, we should remember that the Bible itself says something different.

One of the most off-putting visions of praise in the book of Revelation appears at the beginning of Revelation 19. Many of the elements here are familiar. The 24 elders and the living creatures from Revelation 4 and 5 make an appearance, and they are joined by a numberless multitude that also is praising God. The text is filled with hallelujahs.

The behavior of God's servants here does not trouble us, but their motivation does. They are glorifying God because he has judged the notorious prostitute Babylon, and the smoke of her burning is rising up forever. That's not very nice! Shouldn’t they be mourning that God had to reluctantly destroy Babylon instead?

However, this praise that seems so inappropriate to us reveals something vital about God. It is right for His people to rejoice at the humiliation and downfall of His enemies because He is glorified in that too.

The iron law of God's creation is that all of it must bring glory to its Creator. Most of the time, this is a straightforward process. The stars glorify God every night as they have since the fourth day. The birds sing His praises; the mountains are memorials to His majesty. All of these honor Him, and they have no choice but to do so.

At first glance, it seems that the role of human beings is different. God created us with free will. We can choose whether we are going to serve Him or not. A few live for Him, but most serve themselves. They will go to their graves never having glorified Him.

However, human rebellion against God's purpose cannot defeat it. God must be glorified, and indeed God will be glorified. Paul promises us that on the day of judgment, every knee will bow, and every tongue will confess that Jesus Christ is Lord to the glory of God the Father. No one will be able to avoid honoring Him on that day.

Nor does the working out of God's glory end there. When His enemies are cast out from His presence, He will exhibit their eternal ruin as a sign of their folly and His power. It didn't have to be that way. They could have chosen to use their free will to honor Him in life. Instead, their just punishment will forever commemorate His ultimate triumph and their ultimate defeat.

This presents us with a stark choice. We are going to glorify God, whether we like it or not. We can glorify Him the easy way by offering Him our willing obedience. If we refuse, we will glorify Him the hard way, as the unhappy losers in the cosmic struggle between good and evil.

None of us want to be the eternal equivalent of the Nazis in World War II. We want to be the victorious soldiers in the parade, not the prisoners of war. However, even though the devil likes to confuse the issue, those are the only two options. If we will not choose the first, the second will be chosen for us.

In Ecclesiastes 12:11, the Teacher notes that all proverbs are given by one Shepherd.  I don’t think this means that every wise saying from every society is literally inspired.  Rather, the point is that the more wisdom a proverb contains, the closer it comes to the Source of all wisdom and to His revealed word.

This is certainly the case with an epigram I first saw attributed to Jeff Bezos a year or two ago, though I would guess that somebody else came up with it first and he merely popularized it.  Regardless, the world’s richest man wants us to know that the secret to success in business and indeed in life is this:  Create more than you consume.

It certainly has the counter-intuitive quality that we associate with Scripture, doesn’t it?  The world wants us to believe that the secret to life success is, simply:  Consume.  Put yourself first.  Take what you want.  If somebody else comes out on the short end of the deal, how tragic and sad.  They should have paid better attention.

By contrast, worldly wisdom declares the creator (as opposed to the self-indulgent taker) to be a chump.  He works hard churning out all this stuff for others, but he never gets back what he put into it.  Otherwise, he wouldn’t be creating more than he consumed.  He is the natural prey of the consumer.  What a tool!

And yet.  Jeff Bezos didn’t get eleventy hundred billion dollars by thinking about what he wanted.  He made all that money by figuring out what others wanted and creating a way to get it to them.  By contrast, the guy who is focused on what he wants is sitting at home on the couch watching The Price Is Right because he walked out on his job at the Kwik Mart (after having worked there for three whole weeks) when the manager got on his case.

“Create more than you consume” matters if you want unimportant stuff like money.  It matters a whole lot if you want eternal life.  We usually don’t describe God as the Consumer, but we call Him the Creator all the time.  That’s probably a hint about which direction both of those words are aimed.

So too, Paul says of Jesus in 2 Corinthians 8:9, “Though He was rich, for your sake He became poor, so that by His poverty you might become rich.”  Is the Lord a creator or a consumer?

We must ask the same question about ourselves.  It’s easy for us to be consumers, even as Christians, to do nothing but take in our churches, families, and friendships.  However, if we are primarily parasites, the relationships that we feed off of will sicken and die.  Paradoxically, though, when we seek to give more than we take, we nourish them, and they in turn nourish us.  To say things another way, the one who seeks to save his life will lose it, but the one who loses his life for the sake of the Lord and the gospel will find it.  

Create.  Give.  Lose.  The world will think you’re an idiot, but God won’t.

The contrast between Revelation 13 and Revelation 14 is one of the most striking between any two chapters in the Bible. In Revelation 13, all the news is bad. Even though the dragon has been defeated in heaven, a new ally for him, the beast, emerges from the sea. Another evil creature, a beast who is a false prophet, comes up out of the earth.

Together, these beings do incredible harm. The dragon leads all the earth to worship him and the beast. The false prophet mimics the work of Christ, deceiving all the people of the world. Now, anyone who does not worship the beast will be killed, and anyone who does not receive the mark of the beast cannot buy or sell. In short, by the end of Revelation 13, it seems that the bad guys have already won!

Revelation 14 tells a different story. There, we learned that 144,000 have not followed the dragon or the beast. Instead, they have remained faithful to God. Also, God uses His angels to begin his plan to overthrow the dragon, the beast, and the false prophet. Babylon, the city of the beast, will be destroyed. Furthermore, all who have worshipped the beast will be punished. The righteous will be rewarded, and in the end, it is the will of God, not the will of the dragon, that will triumph.

In addition to making for exciting reading, this two-chapter sequence reveals a fundamental truth about the cosmic struggle between good and evil. It always looks like evil is about to win. This has been true at many, many times throughout the history of God's people, and it is certain to continue to be true.

Indeed, we ourselves may feel this way right now. It may be that as we consider the apparent moral decline of our country, the work of the devil is as apparent to us as it is in Revelation 13. The same may hold true in our personal lives as well. In my own life, developing a terminal illness does not look like a victory for God!

However, we must hold the truth of Revelation 14 firmly in mind. It was not obvious at the end of Revelation 13, and it may not be obvious in our lives now, but God is preparing an answer. If we see trouble looming on the horizon, how much more is He aware of it! He has had all the time in the world to address our situation. He knows what He is going to do, and His power is such that He will infallibly do it. Nobody reaches the end of Revelation and concludes that God has lost, and if we are faithful to Him, no one will think that He has lost the battle in our lives either.

This is not always easy to hear. We may well feel like God should have turned the chapter to Revelation 14 a while ago! As always, though, God works on His timetable, not ours. If we trust in Him, His triumph in our lives is as certain as His triumph in Revelation.