We conclude our study of Revelation 21 with the life in the city of God, the new Jerusalem, in the eternal state by looking at the central person in this whole text, which is the Lamb of God. We have mentioned before how often the word “Lamb,” in reference to Christ, is used in the book of Revelation. It is the predominate use of the word throughout Scripture. I am not going to try to interpret each of these pictures, but what I want to do is just show you how prominent the Lamb of God is here.
We start with Revelation 21:9 and we find at the end it says, “Come here, I will show you the bride, the wife of the Lamb.” That is the statement concerning the new Jerusalem. It’s called the wife of the Lamb. Earlier when we looked at that, we saw that this bride seems to be both the city of God, new Jerusalem, and the people of God that are in the new Jerusalem. So, placing that together we find that the bride of the Lamb, is the church itself and those that inhabit the new Jerusalem.
Then in Revelation 21:14, it talks about the walls of the city, “And the wall of the city had twelve foundation stones, and on them were the twelve names of the twelve apostles of the Lamb.” So, we know the apostles from the gospels. There were twelve of them who are apostles of the Lamb. Some people debate on how many apostles there are and who the apostles are, but this tells us there are twelve apostles of the Lamb. These are very special apostles that are identified here as apostles of the Lamb.
In Revelation 21:22, we find the object of worship is the Lamb, “I saw no temple in it, for the Lord God the Almighty and the Lamb are its temple.” It does speak of the Father here in distinction to the Son, in that regard, but it calls the Son here the Lamb. The one who died for our sins, the Lamb of God. They are its sanctuary together, this Holy Trinity, and it speaks here particularly of the Father and the Son, or the Lamb, are its sanctuary. So, the central worship of the people of God is wrapped around this sanctuary that is composed of the Father and of the Lamb.
