THE BOOK OF REVELATION: A TALE OF TWO CITIES AND THE TRIUMPH OF THE NEW JERUSALEM
Charles Dickens began his famous novel with the haunting lines, “It was the best of times, it was the worst of times.” Those words echo strangely well when we approach the book of Revelation. In those early years of the gospel age, judgment and mercy walked side by side. The old order trembled, and the new creation dawned. It was indeed the worst of times for a rebellious Jerusalem that rejected her Messiah, yet the best of times for a Church born from His cross, breathing the life of the Spirit, and destined to shine as the true Jerusalem of God.
Revelation itself is a tale of two cities. One city is never explicitly named, yet John identifies it as “where our Lord was crucified” (Revelation 11:8). No other place fits this description but earthly Jerusalem. The other city, unveiled at the climax of the vision, is the “new Jerusalem, coming down out of heaven from God” (Revelation 21:2).
The first city is judged, shaken, and removed; the second is revealed, redeemed, and established. The logic is simple and scriptural: if a “new Jerusalem” replaces something, then something old has passed away. The city that killed the prophets and rejected the Son was about to face judgment, just as Jesus Himself foretold in Matthew 23 and 24.
This contrast aligns beautifully with Paul’s teaching in Galatians 4. There Paul speaks of two Jerusalems—one “from below,” enslaved under the old covenant, and the other “from above,” which “is free, and is the mother of us all” (Galatians 4:24–26). In Paul’s inspired allegory, earthly Jerusalem represents bondage, legalism, and a covenant growing old and ready to vanish away (Hebrews 8:13). The Jerusalem from above represents the gospel, grace, and the Church, born through the promise. John sees in vision what Paul taught in doctrine: the passing away of the old covenant city and the triumph of the heavenly one.
The destruction of earthly Jerusalem in AD 70 becomes, in this reading, the historical hinge upon which Revelation turns. God was not merely judging a city; He was testifying that the age of shadows had yielded to the age of substance. The temple made with hands was removed, because the true dwelling place of God—His redeemed people—had arrived in fullness. The new Jerusalem John saw is not a literal city of stone but the Bride of Christ, the Church, adorned with the righteousness of the Lamb (Revelation 21:9–10). She is the city that cannot be shaken, the holy habitation where God dwells with His people forever.
And here the message becomes intensely practical and devotional: this city is the Church, the Body of Christ, Jew and Gentile one in Christ, the assembly of the redeemed gathered to the presence of the living God. Hebrews 12 declares that believers have already “come to Mount Zion and to the city of the living God, the heavenly Jerusalem” and have joined “the general assembly and church of the firstborn who are registered in heaven” (Hebrews 12:22-23). The new Jerusalem is not future only, but present; not earthly, but heavenly; not of stone, but of souls redeemed by the Lamb. To belong to Christ is to belong to His city—a kingdom that cannot be shaken, a people in whom God Himself dwells, a bride destined to share His glory forever.
BDD
