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Nobleton Community Church
29084 Sentinel Street PO Box 224
Nobleton, Florida 34661
Rev. Paul V. Lehmann, Pastor
813-389-8683
Nobletoncommunitychurch.org
info@nobletoncommunitychurch.org
OUR VISION IS:
To experience SPIRIT-FILLED WORSHIP AND PRAYER
To be involved in EVANGELISM, DISCIPLINING AND TRAINING PEOPLE
To use our SPIRITUAL GIFTS
To SERVE AND REACH PEOPLE FOR CHRIST, BOTH
“ACROSS THE STREET AND ACROSS THE WORLD”
Nobleton Community Church
Date February 15, 2026
Text Revelation 21: 1–27
Pastor Paul Lehmann
Angels and white light and pretty trees and so forth, —we’ve heard these afterlife visions before. But this vision of heaven in our text, isn’t what we were expecting.
We read in Revelation 21 verses 3 and 4 (a little before our text); “See, the home of God is among mortals. He will dwell with them; they will be his peoples, and God himself will be with them; he will wipe every tear from their eyes. Death will be no more; mourning and crying and pain will be no more, for the first things have passed away.”
We read these words at the funerals of friends and family because they are so wonderfully comforting. They lift our heads. They console us in our grief. They make meaning of the brokenness we experience every day.
There are some who say; Hevane is just a religious myth invention of the pre-enlightened who needed something to deal with the loss of their loved ones. They say that belief in an afterlife belongs to the flat-earth world, where religion controlled the narrative, not science and reason.
We’ve heard this from: Atheists and secularists as well as scientists and naturalists. They think that Christian faith is merely a crutch for the needy. “The opiate of the masses,” Karl Marx taught. But then, when a person has a near-death experience, things can change.
Dr. Eben Alexander, a Harvard-trained neurobiologist, is no slouch when it comes to his credentials as a scientist and researcher. That’s one reason why his book, Proof of Heaven, is so interesting. He wrote it after returning from a trip into a coma from which his colleagues thought he’d never return. But he did.
It was on November 10, 2008 he woke up with splitting headaches that instantly devolved into seizures. An ambulance rushed him to the hospital. The same hospital where he worked. His only communications were screams and repeated, haunting shrieks for “help.” Ekoli, that virus first discovered at Kikwit in the Bandundu Province of the Congo, then known as Zaire, had attacked his brain in an ultra-rare form of bacterial meningitis. He fell into a coma, and his colleagues gave him a near-zero chance of survival. If he did survive, he’d be a brain-damaged shell of his former self for life.
At work one day, comatose in those same beds the next. The happy ending to this tragedy is that Alexander made a full recovery from his coma, something all of his colleagues admitted was an impossible medical miracle. An afterlife experience during that coma turned a skeptic into a faithful Episcopalian. (It was never declared that he became a committed Christian. Even though he now believes heaven is for real, he also believes in the reality of psychic experiences, such as telepathic communication.) He may just not understand how the Holy Spirit can and does “speak to us” and reveals things to us by his spiritual gifts.
Anyway, Alexander claims that all previous medical explanations for his experience could not apply in his case. Hospital tests showed those well-held medical conventions had no physiological possibility in his comatose situation. He used to believe, as many in the science community believe, that after-death, or out-of-the-body experiences of heaven, were just subconscious hallucinations created by the neocortex based on memories of what the person had previously heard or imagined about the afterlife. In his case the Ekoli infection was spread across his entire cortex, the outermost layer of the brain responsible for all of our higher functioning. Brain scans during his coma showed zero electrical activity in the cortical areas that could access memories, create dreams, or imagine visual and audio sensations. He now claims that all previous medical explanations for his experience could not apply in his case. Hospital tests showed those well-held medical conventions had no physiological possibility in his comatose situation. His vision of heaven could not have happened within his physical brain. Science proves that it couldn’t, and in his book, he disproves all previously held explanations that he and others have always held.
That scientifically unexplainable afterlife experience convinced him of the existence of heaven and of a loving, personal God.
There are many accounts besides his that also give us some idea of the realities of heaven. Perhaps some of you have read the book “Heaven is for Real” about little Four-year-old Todd Burpo, with Lynn Vincent writing it, or have seen the movie that was made about this. His appendix burst, and toxic poison was all through his little body. Abscesses developed, and he went through 2 surgeries. During his time in the ICU, there was a lot of prayer for his recovery while waiting for him to come out of his sedation. It was during this time that his parents learned later that this little boy in his spirit went to heaven. His first recollection before that was that he saw both his dad and mother in the hospital chapel praying. In heaven, he saw a sister that his mother had lost during her pregnancy. He knew nothing about this before. He met his grandpa, “Pops,” who died when his dad was his age, so he never knew him. When his dad showed him a picture of Pops when he was old, he said, “no he didn’t look like that.” His dad showed him a picture of Pops when he was young, and he said quickly, “Yes, that’s how he looked.” He even saw the throne of God. Not knowing that Hebrews tells us that Jesus sits at the right hand of God, when his dad asked him where Jesus was, he told his dad; well, suppose that you are on God’s throne, Jesus sat there, and he pointed to his dad’s right.
When you read about little Todd’s experience, it is encouraging, exhilarating for our faith, and totally believable.
These accounts are a natural starting point for a discussion of our text in which John, in a vision, not a coma, sees a new heaven and a new earth.
Revelation 21 gives us an expanded picture of heaven that is wonderfully earthy. It’s tangible. Concrete. We can wrap our minds around it. It’s not a vision of angels and harps. It’s more what we see when we walk out the doors of our homes. Well, maybe not the home in this area. It’s a city! We may not see a city like this one either, but at least it is comprehensible.
Some people don’t like cities. You are probably one of them, or else you wouldn’t live in the Nobleton area. However, I remember my good friend, Harvie Conn, and a late professor who taught at Westminster Theological Seminary courses on Urban Missions. I took a course from him back in 1987. He said at a conference. “If you prefer the isolation of the countryside, you’d better get used to the city, because someday you will be living in one. One that is perfect.” He went on to describe what is in our text.
John has a vision of the arrival of the New Heavens. Like the long-awaited bride who enters the aisle in first view of her husband -to-be, the New Jerusalem emerges from the sky in beauty and splendor. This breathtaking city is nothing like New York, Paris, London, Shanghai or Beijing.
It is 1,500 miles long, wide and tall (Rev. 21:16, great perimeter walls made of jasper (vs. 12, 18), foundations encrusted with countless precious jewels (19,20). Some commentators say that there is no way that this city—a giant cube—is literally that large. They say that it symbolizes perfection—a perfect cube, like the Holy of Holies in the tabernacle, he indicates the perfection of the Church, and the holiness of the body of Christ. But I’ve got news for those doubters. It needs to be that large in order for the millions of Christians who will be living there for the rest of Eternity.
The city itself and its streets are made of pure gold (vs. 18,21). Despite how literally or symbolically you read Revelation, we can all agree that this city is intended to blow away any concept of a structure or structures we could ever imagine. But the wonder of this city isn’t in what it’s made of; it’s what it represents. God could have created anything for eternity. God is God! But in choosing this New City as our eternity in the New heavens, God sent some clear messages about life then and now.
We read that there will be no temple in this city, a fact that would stun the original Christians with their Jewish roots. But there is no more need for a temple in heaven—Jesus is the new mediator of forgiveness and relationship with God, not a building.
Then it is more than that, there’ll be no need for forgiveness! There will be nothing unclean in this new city. Nothing accursed, that is, here on this earth now, because of the fall when Adam and Eve disobeyed God.
But it has been noted, an even greater implication. The temple was understood as the place where heaven met Earth. It was the house of God, the place where his very presence intersected human existence. Heaven needs no temple because the presence of God is literally experienced everywhere and without end.
Many of us battle for holiness in a seemingly constant area of brokenness in our lives. Others experience God as distant, wanting a “personal relationship with Christ” to feel more personal. We can trust that our very design stirs those kinds of desires within us because we have been created to have those needs met eternally.
Also, the Heavenly City (The New Jerusalem), represents the fulfillment of human purpose! Almost any commentator will say that we must read this text in light of Genesis 1-2. Look at how it all began, and how it will all end.
Eden was a pristine garden, and people were put there with a “cultural mandate” to do as God did: create and cultivate (Gen. 1:26-28). Fill the earth, subdue it, bring order, make beauty, take care of the garden, create culture, raise generations, create civilization. And eventually, write computer code, pen a novel, manage workers, design a city park, teach long division, Algebra, and advanced Mathematics. Build schools and hospitals, discover medicine, and do surgery. But all within a sinless and perfect society. We have managed to do some of these things after thousands of years, after much sin, strife, debauchery, wars, and evil.
We see in Genesis 11 that it was all beginning to happen. Migration of peoples. Shared language. Brick making—but then eventually they said, “Come let us build ourselves a city, and a tower with its top reaching the heavens, and let us make a name for ourselves (vs 4), but that phase is where it all went horribly wrong. The Genesis 1 cultural mandate was cannibalized in the service of SELF.
But here in Revelation 21, this city is the true fulfillment of Genesis 1. Heaven is the evidence that human purpose in the image of God comes to God-honoring fruition. Why a city in the middle of the garden of heaven? Because it is the product of what is intended man to do,–being like Him, creating and cultivating for millennia of history. We add to his creation and fulfill our purposes for his good pleasure. Chapter 22 should be pleasing to those of you who are longing for a place more like the “Garden of Eden” instead of just this big, gigantic city. “Then the angel showed me the river of the water of life, as clear as crystal, flowing from the throne of God and of the Lamb down the middle of the great street of the city. On each side of the river stood the tree of life, bearing twelve crops of fruit, yielding its fruit every month. And the leaves of three are for the healing of the nations. No longer will there be any curse. The throne of God and of the Lamb will be in the city, and his servants will serve him. They will see his face and his name will be on their foreheads. There will be no more night. They will not need the light of a lamp or the light of the sun, for the Lord God will give them light. And they will reign for ever and ever. “
The 70+ years that God gives us on this earth are merely the introduction to the story, not the story itself. We are citizens of heaven (Phil. 3:20), in the present tense, and our lives today can be the proof of heaven as we live, and our prayer is, “Your kingdom come, Your will be done, on earth as it is in heaven.”
In Luke 22:15, Jesus said to his disciples: “I have eagerly desired to eat this Passover with you before I suffer. For I tell you, I will not eat it again until it finds fulfillment in the Kingdom of God.” We continue to eat the bread and drink the cup in remembrance of Him, until that day that we shall see Him.