Stefan at A God-man in Christ wrote five posts on New Jerusalem last week (Jan. 7-11). In this post and the next I present links to these posts with brief excerpts. The excerpts include links to his prior posts about New Jerusalem.
Our Unique Goal is to Live and Work out the New Jerusalem
What is the goal of your Christian life and work? What are you living for, and what is the ultimate goal of everything that you do?
God’s unique goal in His divine economy is the New Jerusalem, and He does everything for the obtaining of this holy city. The unique work God is doing today is to work Himself into man and to make man the same as He is in every aspect (except His Godhead) so that man may match God and live one with God for eternity.
Today all the believers in Christ are undergoing the process of transformation, in which the old man is being discharged and something new, Christ Himself, is being manifested by replacing everything old with Himself (2 Cor. 3:18). The consummation of this process is the New Jerusalem – we should do only one work today, which is to make God’s chosen people beings in the New Jerusalem (Rev. 3:12)!
Our work should be to live out and work out the New Jerusalem by cooperating with the Lord and allowing Him to work Himself into us and dispense Himself into every part of our being so that we may be made God in life and nature but not in the Godhead.
New Jerusalem is the Consummation of the Building up of the Body
The New Jerusalem as the consummation of all that God is doing is rich in meaning and profound in all its aspects. One aspect of the New Jerusalem is that it is the consummation of the organic building up of the Body of Christ in all the local churches.
Every genuine believer in the Lord is a member of the Body of Christ today and will be a part of the New Jerusalem as the consummation of the union of God with man, the mingling of God with man, and the incorporation of God with humanity. As we are built up in the Body with all the other members, God can gain the reality of the Body as the foretaste and precursor of the New Jerusalem!
New Jerusalem is the Ultimate Consummation of the Lampstands in the Scriptures
New Jerusalem is the ultimate consummation of all the lampstands (Exo. 25:31-39; 1 Kings 7:49; Zech. 4:2-6) in the Scriptures.
In the beginning of Revelation there are the many local churches as the golden lampstands identical in expression and nature (Rev. 1:1, 12, 20), and at the end of Revelation there is the New Jerusalem as the unique golden lampstand to shine God forth for eternity (Rev. 21:2, 10-11)!
The New Jerusalem is a universal golden lampstand holding the Lamb (as the lamp) shining out God (as the light within the lamp, see Rev. 21:18, 23; 22:1, 5). It is “the aggregate” of all the lampstands, the totality of today’s lampstands, as a consummate universal golden lampstand to shine forth God’s glory in the new heaven and new earth for eternity.
Photo courtesy of U.S. BLM, Oregon office.
New Jerusalem - the Consummation 
Tom Smith
/ January 15, 2013I appreciate this post because it helps us to focus on what’s really important. If the very God who chose us before the creation of the world and created us for His will has unique goal, surely it must be our goal as well. Otherwise, our entire life could be a wasteful detour. Since the New Jerusalem is God’s unique goal, it should also be the unique goal of our Christian living and work. Thanks for such an enlightening and calibrating post.
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Don
/ January 15, 2013We love the Bible and New Jerusalem is the conclusion, the goal, of the Bible. Everything we appreciate in the Bible today leads to this goal. I have found this true many times in preparing posts and seeing our foretaste of New Jerusalem in verses that are for today.
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