Chapter 18
The Language of Heaven — and the City Without a Temple
Revelation 19:1-8 · 21:22-22:5
18 min read
At a glance
The line that has all three [kingdom, power and glory] together is not sung in this book [Revelation]. It is said.
From the silence to the city
1Rev 18:22-23
Babylon
the music falls silent; last of all the voice of bridegroom and bride falls still
2Rev 19:1-6
a great multitude
hallelujah: three times "as", and none of them is it
3Rev 21:22
the city
a temple I did not see: the Lord God is her temple, and the Lamb
4Rev 22:5
his servants
"they shall reign for ever and ever"
ναόςtemple16× Revelation
a place
absent
a Person
15 times a place, the last of them in order to be absent; the sixteenth time He is a Person.
CALCULATED, over 140,987 words, by lemma
- CALCULATED No verse of Revelation has βασιλεία, δύναμις and δόξα together; the only line in the New Testament with all three is Matt 6:13b. The counterexample: Rev 12:10 has kingdom and power, and in the third place salvation; the measurement counts words, not thoughts. The textual standing of Matt 6:13b is accounted for in chapter 10.
- CONSTRUED That the last ναός is a Person, and that the silenced city and the hallelujah answer each other.
I. The Sound
The last thing he was told about the fallen city was what would never sound there again.
So Babylon ends: the music falls silent, the lamp goes out, and the very last voice to fall still there is that of a bridegroom and a bride. The old man on the island wrote it down as it was told him — a silence without end.
And then, he writes, after this, he hears it.
The word with which it bursts out is not even Greek. It is Hebrew, copied over into Greek letters, the oldest cry of the psalms: hallelu-Jah — praise Jah. In the whole New Testament that word stands on this page alone. The language of the old song did not get lost along the way; it turns out to have been kept, and it turns out to be the language up there.
The sound goes on. A second time it rings out, above the smoke of the city rising up; a third time, as the elders and the four living creatures fall to the ground. Then a voice comes from the throne: "Praise our God, all his servants, and you who fear Him, the small and the great." The small are named first.
And then it swells into something his language can no longer reach.
Three times "as". The man who for half a century found words for everything — for the throne, for the Lamb, for the fall of a world city — tries three times, and three times he has to swerve into a comparison, and none of the three is it. A multitude, no; waters, no; thunders — not that either. There is no sound on earth this resembles. He hears heaven singing at full voice, and the only thing his pen can make of it is that it resembles nothing he knows.
And the song itself looks ahead: "Let us rejoice and exult and give Him the glory, for the wedding of the Lamb has come, and his wife has made herself ready." The city that fell lost, last of all, the voice of bridegroom and bride; the first thing heaven sings after that is a wedding.
John writes. He has seen nothing yet — he hears. And he writes down what he hears with the only word he is given: as.
II. What They Sing Of
It is not the first time he has heard heaven sing. All through the book there has been singing — around the throne, at the opening of the scroll, at the seventh trumpet — and each time the same words return, in ever different order and ever different company: glory, power, honor, wisdom, thanksgiving, salvation. Anyone who has written them all down, as he has, by now knows the vocabulary of up there by heart.
But one line they never sing.
The kingdom occurs in the songs, and the power occurs in them, and the glory occurs in them — scattered, in shifting pairs, from the first vision to this hallelujah. Together, in one line, the three stand nowhere in this entire book. One song comes close: it sets the kingdom and the power side by side, and in the place where the glory could stand, salvation stands. It comes no closer.
So the line that has all three together is not sung in this book. It is said. On earth, with folded hands, by a child finishing its prayer before going to sleep:
The measurement says no more than this: that up there the words are sung scattered, and that in the closing line of the prayer they stand together. Why that is so, no verse says, and no one needs to fill it in. One thing remains, and it is enough: the child who says that line is speaking no foreign language. Every word of it is sung where the child is headed. It merely says them — alone in doing so — in one breath.
The old man on the island has both languages in his ear: the song he cannot describe, and the prayer he once, with 11 others, heard modeled for him.
DossierWhat They Sing Of
The hymns of Revelation, with the words they contain:
(CALCULATED: checked verse by verse for the forms. ⚠ The table has been compiled by hand from the known hymn passages and is not exhaustive.)
The zero measurement: in the whole of Revelation there is not a single verse in which βασιλεία, δύναμις and δόξα occur together — the search ran on the stems βασιλει-, δυναμ- and δοξ-, across all the verses of the book. (CALCULATED.) The only line in the New Testament that has the three together is Matthew 6:13b — the closing line of the prayer.
The counterexample belongs here, and it is the strongest there is: 12:10 has two of the three — kingdom and power — and puts σωτηρία, salvation, in the third place. Whoever wishes may read the same thought there in other words; the measurement counts words, not thoughts, and it does not settle that question. (The limit of the measurement itself.)
⚠ The textual standing of Matthew 6:13b — that the closing line is missing from part of the tradition — is accounted for in chapter 10 and is not weighed again here. (The juxtaposition of zero measurement and closing line is CONSTRUED; no verse states it.)
III. The Man Who Measured the Temple
Visions earlier a reed was pressed into his hand, like a measuring rod, and a voice told him what he was to measure.
So he measured that building, he himself, boundary included: up to here, yes; beyond that, no. And all through the book the building stayed in view — voices came out of it, angels went out of it, and at the heaviest moment it filled with smoke from the glory of God, and the text adds: no one could enter the temple until the seven plagues were completed. Even in heaven the temple remained a place where people stood outside, waiting.
And then he stands in the city that has come down, and he looks around him, and he writes down a sentence that begins with what is missing.
Twice the word falls in that one sentence: once to say that the building is not there, and once to say who stands in its place.
In this house that absence has been written about before. In every city of the ancient world there stood a temple — a place you went to in order to meet God, "a building that marked the distance". That is what a temple is, every temple, the measured one too: distance, set in stone. Whoever goes there is saying that God lives somewhere else than he does.
This city has none. Nothing is missing from her; it is the distance that is missing. The man who once had to measure out the boundary — up to here, yes; beyond it, the nations — stands in a city without inside and outside. And the nations, who back then fell outside the measuring, now walk in the light: "and the nations shall walk in her light."
ExpertTemple, 16 Times
ναός, "temple", stands 16× in Revelation, spread over 13 verses: 3:12 · 7:15 · 11:1 · 11:2 · 11:19 (2×) · 14:15 · 14:17 · 15:5 · 15:6 · 15:8 (2×) · 16:1 · 16:17 · 21:22 *(2×)*. (CALCULATED over the Textus Receptus, 140,987 words, per lemma.)
The last two stand in one sentence — καὶ ναὸν οὐκ εἶδον ἐν αὐτῇ, ὁ γὰρ Κύριος ὁ Θεὸς ὁ παντοκράτωρ ναὸς αὐτῆς ἐστι, καὶ τὸ ἀρνίον (21:22): first as a negation, then as a Name. 15 times in this book the temple is a place; the sixteenth time He is a Person. (The count CALCULATED; the last sentence is CONSTRUED.)
Attribution. The reading itself — that the temple was "a building that marked the distance", and that its absence means the distance has been removed — belongs to Revelation Unsealed (on Revelation 21-22). What this chapter adds is the count: that the word runs through the whole book and, in the last of the 13 verses, falls twice, once in order to be absent.
IV. The Address
The prayer of this book begins with an address: which art in heaven. And from the start one thing was true of that address: everything that came from behind it came down. The bread came down. The Son came down. And now the city has come down as well, the last in the row, and the row is complete.
Here it says where that movement was heading all along. In the city there is no longer a room where God lives apart, and so there is nothing left to bridge. The address of the prayer changes; not because the Father has moved house, but because the distance is gone.
And what happens in the city to the petition for bread can be seen in its main street. In the middle of the street, on either side of the river, stands the tree of life,
There is no longer any need to ask for it — not because the petition would have become too small, but because the provision is built into the city. It grows there. A child asks for bread as long as bread has to come from outside; in the Father's house it is on the table, and it never runs out.
So one thing after another comes home. The gates are not shut by day, and there is no night. What threatened his children in the old world, He left out when He built; all that is no more has been counted elsewhere. His servants shall see his face, and his name shall be on their foreheads — a whole book has been written elsewhere about that forehead, and those pages stay there. And then the close, the last verse of the vision, the last thing John is given to write about the people in the city:
The verb of the hallelujah — the Lord God, the Almighty, has assumed the kingship — stands here again, and it stands in the future tense, and it is about them. The child who every evening asked whether the kingdom would come is not shown to a spectator's seat at the end of Scripture. It is given a throne room without walls, and a verb in the plural.
ExpertTwo Counts
ἀλληλουϊά stands 4× in the whole New Testament — and all four in Revelation 19: verses 1 · 3 · 4 · 6. (CALCULATED.) The word the church sings most often stands, in the Scripture of the New Covenant, on one single page — the page on which heaven sings at full voice. It is the Greek transcription of the Hebrew הַלְלוּ־יָהּ, "praise Jah".
βασιλεύω, "to reign", stands 7× in Revelation: 5:10 ("we shall reign") · 11:15 ("He shall reign") · 11:17 ("You have assumed the reign") · 19:6 ("He has assumed the kingship") · 20:4 · 20:6 · 22:5 ("they shall reign"). (CALCULATED, per lemma.) The movement is in the forms: He shall — You have — He has — they shall. What begins as a promise becomes thanksgiving at the trumpet, an accomplished fact at the hallelujah — and in the last verse of the vision the verb passes to the servants, for ever. (The forms DOCUMENTED; that the series is a movement, CONSTRUED.)
⚠ In 11:17 and 19:6 the aorist ἐβασίλευσας/ἐβασίλευσεν stands — strictly concordant "You have reigned" / "He has reigned"; the form is rendered here as ingressive ("assumed the reign / the kingship"), because the aorist marks the accession, not the duration. (A choice of rendering, accounted for; the concordance remains visible in the one root word.)
V. The Voice Still Missing
The old man has now heard everything and seen everything. The song that resembled no sound on earth, the city where his measuring rod had nothing left to do, the face his servants shall see. His book is almost full.
One voice is still missing from it.
For the whole song at the beginning was about her — the wedding of the Lamb has come, and his wife has made herself ready; and it was given her to clothe herself in fine linen, pure and shining. Heaven sang about the bride; multitudes, waters and thunders sang about the bride. She herself has not yet said a word in this entire book.
One page remains. On it she speaks.
HeartThe Language of Home
Tonight, when you pray this prayer and come to the last line — for thine is the kingdom, and the power, and the glory, for ever — do not hurry.
Every word of that line is sung in the place where you are expected. The kingdom is sung there, and the power, and the glory — by a voice for which John needed "as" three times and which he still could not describe. You do not know that voice yet. But the words you already know.
This is how a child learns the language of its father: at home, in small things, years before it knows all that the words carry. It repeats them after its father, every evening, in the dark, with folded hands — and in doing so, without knowing it, it practices the language of a house where it has never been and which is nevertheless its own.
A day is coming when the distance is gone — a day on which even the "as" is no longer needed. And on that day nothing will need to be translated for you. You will hear the multitude, the waters, the thunders — and you will understand it, at once, all of it. For it is the language your Father said to you first, for you to repeat, and you have been speaking it all your life, every evening, at the close: thine is the kingdom, and the power, and the glory.
For ever. Amen.