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. Revelation 22:5
In the celestial City, we regain the tree of life but so much more. Our relationship with God will be more personal than the relationship God had with Adam and Eve in the Garden. If Adam and Eve had understood the character of God they wouldn’t have hidden when they sinned. They didn’t know the intensity of love God has for his people or the depth of his grace. God is a personal God who wants us to know him intimately. Maybe this is why God allowed evil to enter the world because it was the only way we’re going to understand that God was prepared to send his own Son to earth, to a cruel death because he wanted to restore the relationship broken by Adam’s sin. How would we have known that, if we had never left the Garden?
Some years ago Grace Hawthorne & Buryl Red wrote a song called, Would You. The song asks a series of questions explaining we’d never know what something was like if we hadn’t experienced its opposite. Would we know what love, hope, friendship were like if we hadn’t experienced their absence? God wants a relationship based on truth so we had to know the full consequences of sin.
God allows suffering because he has a greater purpose in mind than our immediate comfort. He’s preparing a celestial city where he can dwell with his people and never again be separated from them. We will gain more than we ever lost.
