SKENE 30: the grand finale

But, behold! Look! One final metamorphosis, one final paradox, awaits us: “I saw the holy city Jerusalem, new Jerusalem, coming down ---”. The Greek verb here is ‘katabaino’; we have seen that ‘kata’ means ‘down’, and ‘baino’ simply means to ‘come’ or ‘go’, so that the compound verb means to ‘come down’. This leads us to a small paradox, before we come to the bigger one. Throughout the NT people always ‘go up’ to Jerusalem, and ‘go down’ from it – like the “certain man who went down from Jerusalem to Jericho” (Luke 10.30). Jerusalem is the capital city, the city of David, and one always ‘goes up’ to the capital, as one ‘goes up’ to London. Moreover, Jerusalem is on the top of Mount Sion, and the Temple is on the top of Jerusalem, so that people ‘go up’ to the Temple to pray (the Pharisee and the tax-collector in Luke 18.10), and ‘go down’ from it afterwards – the tax-collector “went down justified to his house” after his prayer of repentance. But now, instead of people going up to Jerusalem, Jerusalem is coming down to the people. This smaller paradox is the key to the greater one. Throughout this study, we have become accustomed to the idea that the ‘skene’ is an image of all that is earthly, and so transient, the mere shadow of which heaven is the glorious reality. Abraham lived in a tent on earth, but was sustained by the promise of a celestial city. God lived among his people in the wilderness in a tent, but that tent was just a copy of the model shown to Moses on Mount Sinai; God’s true and eternal sanctuary is in heaven. Jesus lived in the tent of a human body, but a human body is mortal, and after his death his mortal body “put on immortality” (to use Paul’s terminology in 1 Corinthians 15. 53), and he ascended (‘went up’) to heaven. On this journey, Jesus was our forerunner, the “firstborn from the dead” (Col 1.18), and so Peter and Paul both refer to the human body as a tent, the Tabernacle, or Temple, of the Holy Spirit during life, but soon to be taken down, and replaced, in Paul’s words again, with “a permanent home in heaven from God, not-made-with-human-hands, but everlasting” (2 Cor 5.1). Right at the beginning of this study, we saw that ‘skene’ was used to refer to the theatre and its backdrop, thus giving us the English derivations ‘scene’ and ‘scenery’. So it is, perhaps, appropriate that we have been able to watch God’s drama of salvation unfolding scene by scene in the various uses of ‘skene’ in scripture. But just when it seems that all is now clear, and that the curtain is about to come down, God springs on us this great ‘coup de theatre’: the drama does not end with man going up to heaven to live for ever with God, but, on the contrary, it ends with God coming down from heaven to live with man – in a tent which is now a great city. This city is described in glorious detail, shining with the brilliance of a precious jewel, with the glory of God himself. Its streets are, indeed, paved with gold, gold that gleams like glass, and God himself gives it light, so that it needs neither sun nor moon – let alone street-lamps. God is no longer “in light inaccessible hid from our eyes”, nor is his glory a terrifying and all-consuming blaze from which we need a veil to protect us. But there is something in this city that John did not see, the only time in the book this word (‘eidon’) is used in the negative: he did not see a temple in the city, “for the Lord God almighty is its temple, and the Lamb” (Rev 21.22). And, just as the church is not a building but a people, so the new Jerusalem is not, essentially, a city but the church, the people of God with whom he has always wanted to dwell. And the people of God are the bride of Christ, “adorned for her husband” (v.2). This, then, is the apotheosis of the ‘skene’: its final destiny is to be the wedding marquee for the celebration of the marriage-feast of the Lamb and his bride, the church.