God Never Gives
Up
A friend and I were swapping stories about our experience growing up, and he shared an anecdote about sneaking out of the house at night. (I imagine more of us have similar stories of our own than would be willing to admit it!) In the latter years of high school, my friend Reed would wait until his parents were asleep and then quietly open his bedroom window, slip outside, and go meet up with his friends to play videogames. It was harmless fun, he explained, but he was still breaking his parents’ rules, and he knew that was wrong. One night, when he returned home and slipped inside into the dark of his bedroom, he heard a low voice: “Welcome home, Reed.” It was his dad.
Reed feared the worst. Getting grounded for months. Not being able to hang out with his friends or do the things he loved. So he was stunned when his dad did not punish him. Instead, he simply said, “Your mother and I were both worried sick when we realized you were sneaking out. We thought you might be doing something dangerous. Please…just be honest with us from now on and let us know the choices you are making. We’ve made the rules we’ve made because we care about you.”
“Is there anyone among you,” Jesus asks us, “who, if your child asks for bread, will give a stone? Or if the child asks for a fish, will give a snake?” (Matt 7:9-11). His point is clear. God is not out to get us. God is not making a list, checking it twice. God is out to help us, to care for us, to provide for our needs. Jesus invites us to think about God as a loving parent. If God is love, as John tells us, then surely God would be at least as loving as a loving parent.
When Peter asks Jesus how many times we should forgive someone—“as many as seven times?” he proposes, thinking he’s pushed this thought experiment to the limit—Jesus responds, “Not seven times, but…seven times seventy,” practically blowing the roof off forgiveness, removing any limits we might put on it. He effectively says, “Forgive beyond what you can count. Forgive without end.” Now…if that is what Christ instructs us to do, then how much more so can we expect God to practice this kind of behavior?
Jesus tells a story about a prodigal son to make this point about God’s love and forgiveness crystal clear. You know the story. I won’t rehash it. I’ll just ask this: do you think there would ever come a time when the father would stop looking out on the horizon for the return of his son, a time when his love would expire, so that if his son did come home he would receive not an embrace but a cold shoulder, not a homecoming party but a pile of punishments intended to teach him a lesson? Do you think the father would ever finally give up on his son? “Forgive beyond what you can count. Forgive without end,” Jesus says. Because that’s what God does. Like the loving father in the story, God never gives up on us.
Or Does He? (The Brutal Finality of Revelation)
Or does he?
Revelation is perhaps best known for its depiction of “Armageddon” (cf. Rev 16:16)—which is to say, a final climactic battle between God and Satan, between good and evil, in which God finally vanquishes the devil and his forces once and for all, forever and ever, amen. They are all thrown into a lake of fire, John says, where “they will be tormented day and night forever and ever” (Rev 20:10). John later insists that the faithless will join them in this fiery lake: the murderers, the idolaters, the liars, and so on (Rev 21:8).
It would seem, then, that there is a limit to God’s forgiveness, an expiration date on God’s love. That there is a point in time at which the heavenly father turns his back on his children, giving up on them, consigning them to eternal hellfire. How else could we understand this clear depiction of a brutal finality, of eternal torment in a lake of fire?
Well, I think it’s worth pausing and remembering that much of Revelation traffics in extravagant symbols and imagery. For example: “Locusts that look like horses with human faces, women’s hair, and lion’s teeth. A red dragon with seven heads in the heavens that sweeps away a third of the stars with its tail. An angel in the sky with a giant sickle who reaps all the grapes of the earth and puts them in a winepress that generates a river of blood for two hundred miles.”[1] Is John’s vision of these things a direct report from the future, an exact resemblance of what will happen? Does Jesus really shapeshift to a slaughtered lamb as he approaches the throne of God? Or…could it be that John’s vision employs these rich, illustrative symbols as a way of communicating what mere propositions or abstract statements cannot?
I am convinced that the way of Jesus does not change. That the one who said, “I am the way and the truth and the life” does not suddenly exchange his way of forgiving-without-end and loving-the-enemy for the way of vengeance and retribution. I am convinced that the father of the prodigal son does not give up on him—and that God does not give up on us. The scandalous thing about the gospel is that our God is not fair, does not treat us as our deeds deserve. Rather, our God is faithful. To the end.
And so I am led to reconsider the brutal finality of Revelation as an artful and impactful depiction not of the reality of God’s punishment but of the reality of our freedom and our choice. God never gives up on us. The danger—and it is so real a danger, that John speaks in deadly serious symbol and metaphor—the danger is that we might give up on God. We might effectively choose the fiery torment rather than the embrace of God.
John’s Final
Vision
It is a curious thing to me that popular interpretations of the Bible often cut out the very beginning and the very end. (Which happen to be some of the most hopeful parts of the Bible! Why would we cut these out? It’s almost like we’re addicted to sin and suffering.)
Consider the idea of original sin. Many Christians—and many people who are not Christians but are familiar enough with it—believe that we are fundamentally flawed and sinful creatures. As opposed to the idea that we inhabit a fallen environment. As opposed to the idea that our world is polluted by sin. Consider this alternative picture of sin: just as a fish swimming in a polluted lake cannot escape the toxic effects of the pollution, so too we live in sin. Not because that is fundamentally who we are, but because that is fundamentally what we are swimming in.
What many folks miss out on is that before sin enters the picture, God looks out on all that God has created and sees that it is all “good.” At the end of every day, God looks out and sees that it is “good.” After humans have been created, God sees that it is all “very good.” The very beginning of the story, then, is not original sin, but original goodness.
In a similar manner, popular interpretations of the Bible’s end fixate on Revelation’s bombastic imagery of famine, death, pestilence, and war, the dragon and the beasts waging a battle against heaven and earth. But these images—which rightly convey the seriousness and magnitude of our world’s sin, of the fact that we reap what we sow, and if we sow injustice and violence we can expect plenty more of that—these striking images are not the end of the story. They give way to a final scene that is perhaps as surprising or scandalous as the opening scene of our original goodness.
Remember how when Jesus taught us to pray, he said, “Thy kingdom come, thy will be done, on earth as it is in heaven” (Matt 6:10)? Well, that’s actually what we see in our scripture today. A fulfillment of our Lord’s prayer. At the end, the faithful do not teleport up to heaven. Listen again to John’s vision: “I saw the holy city, the new Jerusalem, coming down out of heaven from God…and I heard a loud voice from the throne, saying, ‘See, the home of God is among mortals’” (Rev 21:3). God’s kingdom come…on earth as it is in heaven.
The voice from heaven elaborates: “Death will be no more; mourning and crying and pain will be no more…. See, I am making all things new” (Rev 21:4-5). What catches my attention here is that all of the goodness described here is actually goodness that many of us have already known. Even that first declaration—“See, the home of God is among mortals”—recalls what John tells us in his gospel, namely that in Jesus Christ God took on flesh and made his home among us (cf. John 1:14). And the end of death—that is assured to us in the resurrection of Jesus Christ. And the tears wiped from our eyes and the end of mourning and pain—these are things that many of us have tasted, even if only in a temporary way. Who among us has not felt the comfort and strength and healing that comes when a loved one gives us a genuine embrace and stays by our side in a time of need? Who among us has not felt the comfort and strength and healing that comes, unexpectedly, in a quiet moment when, by some small sign or perhaps simply in the very emptiness of our souls, we sense the steady, faithful presence of God with us?
“See, I am making all things new,” intones the voice from the throne (Rev 21:4-5). “Am making…” Not “will make…” Present tense, not future tense. The good news of this final scene is not something that will happen later. It is something happening now, here, in you and me and the world around us. God is the One who is “at work” in us, as Paul says in Philippians (Phil 2:13). The limitations of storytelling mean that there has to be an end, there has to be a sense of finality in what is being told. But this language—“I am making all things new”—suggests to me that the reality of God’s kingdom coming is that it comes not at the instantaneous click of God’s fingers but rather as a process in which God’s “steadfast love,” which “endures forever,” permeates our lives and our world to the point that God is in all and all is in God.
No Condition
but Our Thirst
The early church leader, Origen of Alexandria of the third century, wrote: “Jesus Christ is the kingdom of God in person.” Christ has inaugurated the reality of God’s kingdom in the flesh and invited us to step into it. To receive it as a gift. Indeed, I can’t help but notice that John repeatedly hears an invitation for all who are thirsty to receive the gift of living water (Rev 21:6; 22:17).[2]
John’s final vision of God’s kingdom coming down to earth has several peculiarities. For one, there is no sea—which is likely meant to symbolize the absence of chaos, for in the ancient near east the sea represented disorder and confusion. Another oddity is that God’s kingdom has walls and gates, except—“its gates will never be shut” (Rev 21:25). The gates are open for all eternity. It is a beautiful symbol that aligns perfectly with what Jesus shows us about God, namely that God never gives up on us. The father of the prodigal son never stops hoping, looking out on the horizon for his child. And so the invitation to drink from the water of life is presented explicitly without condition or qualification. The only condition is that a person be thirsty enough to receive the gift. “Let everyone who is thirsty come.” God never shuts the gate on us. The only danger is that we—thinking we are self-sufficient, thinking we can do it on our own, thinking we can find joy and fulfillment in the way of control rather than in the open-handed way of care—the only danger is that we might shut the gate on God.
What parent, if their “child asks for bread, will give a stone? Or if the child asks for a fish, will give a snake?” How much more so does God desire to give us what is good, what we need, what will nourish us and help us to grow?
Friends, we already know the good news. We have experienced it—in flashes, in glimpses, in bits and pieces. We know enough in Christ to know what matters: God loves us and does not give up on us. If we are thirsty, there is water to quench our souls. Not just in some other place or time called “heaven,” but in the here and now. For see, God “is making all things new.”
Catherine of Siena, a Christian mystic of the 14th-century, put it better six hundred years ago than anyone else I could find. So I’ll close the book on this final book of the Bible with her words. Contending against the idea that the gospel is about anything other than this life, right here, right now, she writes: “It is hell all the way to hell. And it is heaven all the way to heaven.”
Prayer
Who looks upon us with tender eye,
With a heart that is broken and eternally open
…
Grant that we might know our deepest thirst,
For union with you (and thereby also with your creation).
May our thirsty souls find fulfillment
In your way of love and forgiveness.
May we, by your grace,
Find heaven here on earth.
Amen.
[1] Brian Zahnd, “War of the Lamb,”
https://brianzahnd.com/2016/05/war-of-the-lamb/, accessed October 19, 2026.
This quotation collapses the sentences into a single paragraph. Originally each
sentence stood as its own paragraph.
[2] “To the thirsty I will give water as a gift from the spring of the
water of life” (Rev 21:6) and “Let everyone who is thirsty come. Let anyone who
wishes takes the water of life as a gift” (Rev 22:17).
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