A Pure River of the Water of Life

Then the angel showed me the river of the water of life, bright as crystal, flowing from the throne of God and of the Lamb through the middle of the street of the city; also, on either side of the river, the tree of life with its twelve kinds of fruit, yielding its fruit each month. The leaves of the tree were for the healing of the nations. No longer will there be anything accursed, but the throne of God and of the Lamb will be in it, and his servants will worship him. They will see his face, and his name will be on their foreheads. And night will be no more. They will need no light of lamp or sun, for the Lord God will be their light, and they will reign forever and ever.

(Revelation 22:1-5) ESV

If we’re going to live with the Lord God who’s going to reign forever and ever, and a pure river of the water of life is flowing, then it must be cycling because God isn’t going to constantly create new water forever.

Obviously the new Jerusalem is going to have a hydrological cycle. This is the third time that water circulation has been a prominent part of a physical system designed for our habitation.

It was therefore necessary that the patterns of things in the heavens should be purified with these; but the heavenly things themselves with better sacrifices than these.

(Hebrews 9:23) KJV

Things on Earth are patterned after things in the heavens. The Bible describes two earthly hydrological cycles. There’ll be a river of water of life in the new Jerusalem. There’s no mention of a hydrological system in our passage today, but does there need to be? From what we know about the character of God he’s unchanging and consistent, and what we know about the two worlds that have gone before, the first Earth and the Millennial Kingdom, is it anything but obvious that there’s going to be water circulation in the new Jerusalem described in Revelation 22?

In the beginning, when God said, let there be light, he made the light from the water that was part of the existing system, the deep. In one sense it could be said that God, technically, didn’t create anything. Unless, that is, we understand the nuance in the word create. God didn’t create something from nothing. What God created was sequentially more ordered and complex levels of sophistication from the material that was available.

Creation is the supernatural cause of the universe, a sequentially more complex ordering of a pre-existent body of water called “the deep” (Ex Abyssi) which obeys all physical laws including the first law of thermodynamics which states that energy can be transformed from one form to another, but can be neither made to appear from nothing nor destroyed.

Creation wasn’t from nothing (Ex Nihilo) and there’s no trace of this doctrine anywhere is the Bible. ANYWHERE. Get over it.

– Creation, definition

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