The Daily Office · Eastertide

All things new

Revelation 21:1–5

1Then I saw a new heaven and a new earth, for the first heaven and the first earth had passed away, and the sea was no more.

2And I saw the holy city, new Jerusalem, coming down out of heaven from God, prepared as a bride adorned for her husband.

3And I heard a loud voice from the throne saying, “Behold, the dwelling place of God is with man. He will dwell with them, and they will be his people, and God himself will be with them as their God.

4He will wipe away every tear from their eyes, and death shall be no more, neither shall there be mourning, nor crying, nor pain anymore, for the former things have passed away.”

5And he who was seated on the throne said, “Behold, I am making all things new.” Also he said, “Write this down, for these words are trustworthy and true.”

What's happening here

Revelation ends not in the destruction the book has spent twenty chapters describing, but in a marriage. The holy city comes down out of heaven, a voice announces that God will dwell with his people, every tear will be wiped away. The voice from the throne then declares what God is about to do — and the verb it uses is in a tense that is already underway but not yet finished. Greek has two words for "new," and the choice between them is the whole claim of the sentence.

The word that matters

καινόςkainos

Greek · new — not recent, but new in kind

Greek had two words for "new." Neos meant new in time — recent, freshly made. Kainos meant new in kind — unprecedented, qualitatively different from what came before. A neos car is a recently built one; a kainos car would be a vehicle unlike any ever made. When the voice on the throne says "behold, I am making all things kainos," the claim is not that God is redecorating creation. It is that what comes next is a kind of thing that has not yet existed — a world not rebuilt but remade.

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