Rev. 20–22: The Ending Is Good News
Opening Hook
If someone asked you to describe “heaven” and “hell” in one sentence each, you might say something like: heaven is where good people go as a reward, and hell is where bad people go to be punished. That’s the popular version, and it’s a fairly natural way to imagine it. But it’s not actually what Revelation describes. Tonight we get to the ending of the story — and it’s better news than either the popular picture or the “scary predictions” stereotype would suggest.
Core Teaching
Revelation’s final chapters (20–22) describe what’s often called the New Jerusalem — a new heaven, a new earth, and a city coming down from God. A few details are worth slowing down on, because they change the whole picture.
“New” means something more than “recent.” When the text says God is making “a new heaven and a new earth,” it’s not simply saying “a fresh copy of the old one.” It signals a change in quality — this is permanent, in contrast to a world that was always temporary. Many long-standing hopes from the Old Testament — that God would live with his people, that suffering would end, that everything would be made right — reach their fulfillment here.
God himself moves in with his people. “Look! God’s dwelling place is now among the people, and he will dwell with them” (Revelation 21:3). This is the promise that runs through the entire Bible, from the garden of Eden onward: not primarily a reward for good behavior, but restored closeness — God present with people, undivided, forever.
No more tears, death, mourning, crying, or pain. Not because these things are declared illegal, but because their source is gone. Loss, grief, and fear all come from separation, insecurity, and death — and all of that has been undone.
Here’s the detail that reframes everything: the New Jerusalem is described as a perfect cube. That might sound like a strange architectural choice until you realize there’s only one other object in the entire Old Testament with that exact shape: the Holy of Holies, the innermost room of the Jewish temple, where God’s presence dwelled so intensely that only one person — the high priest — was allowed to enter, and only once a year, under strict conditions. Everyone else stood outside, at a distance, kept back by need and by holiness. The New Jerusalem takes that most exclusive, most restricted space in the ancient world and makes it the shape of the entire eternal city. Every single person who’s there has the access that used to belong to one man, one day a year. That’s not a minor detail — it’s the whole point: total, unrestricted nearness to God, for everyone who is there.
So what about hell? Revelation doesn’t spend nearly as much space on it, and it isn’t described primarily as a torture chamber for the specifically wicked, in contrast to heaven’s reward for the specifically good. It’s simpler, and in some ways more sobering, than that: hell is what it looks like to be apart from God, permanently. Nearly everything we consider good in life — hope, love, peace, purpose, forgiveness — ultimately traces back to God, whether or not we usually notice that. We experience these things now because this is the season in which God is drawing people toward himself. Revelation pictures a point where that season ends, and people are, definitively, with God or without him. Without him, what’s left is what naturally remains without any of those things: not fire and pitchforks as the main image, but the emptiness of unforgiveness, bitterness, isolation, and fear, with nothing left to interrupt it.
It’s worth saying clearly: Revelation doesn’t use hell as a scare tactic to frighten people into believing. That approach — manipulation through fear — is explicitly associated in the book with the beast, not with God or the church. God, by contrast, doesn’t force anyone into closeness with him. If someone doesn’t want that closeness, in the end, they aren’t forced to have it — but that means they also don’t get what only comes bundled with it.
So What
Two things are worth sitting with here. First: whatever else you make of Revelation, its actual ending is not annihilation, punishment for its own sake, or a frightening cosmic drama with an uncertain outcome. It’s restoration — nearness to God restored to everyone who wants it, on the most generous terms imaginable. Second: hell, in this picture, isn’t really a separate threat bolted onto the story. It’s what’s left over when someone finally, permanently gets the distance from God they may have been quietly choosing all along. That reframes the whole question, less as “will I be punished?” and more as “do I actually want to be close to the one every good thing comes from?”
Discussion Questions
- How does this picture of heaven — intimacy with God available to everyone, not a reward earned by good behavior — compare to what you’d always assumed?
- Does describing hell as “the absence of God, and everything that goes with that absence” change how you think about it, compared to a picture of active punishment?
- If every good thing you enjoy now ultimately traces back to God, does that change how you’d answer the question “do I want to be close to him”?