What does it mean that God will dwell with His people?

Question 10125.

When Revelation announces that God will dwell with His people, it is not introducing a new idea at the end of the Bible. It is closing a circle that opened in a garden, and the sentence is deliberately built out of language God had been using for well over a thousand years.

This is the promise underneath every other promise. Forgiveness, resurrection, a new body and a new world are all wonderful, and none of them is the prize. The prize is Him.

The covenant formula

There is a phrase that recurs across the Old Testament like a refrain. I will be your God and you shall be my people. It appears to Abraham, to Israel at Sinai, through Jeremiah in the new covenant passage, and through Ezekiel more than once.

Marriage language sits behind it. This is the vocabulary of belonging rather than of employment, and it is why the Bible can move so easily between covenant and wedding imagery. When John writes that God will dwell with them and they will be his people, he is quoting the family motto.

Read Revelation 21:3 with that in your ear and it lands differently. The loud voice from the throne is not announcing something unprecedented. It is announcing that a very old commitment has finally been kept in full.

The word behind the promise

The Greek noun John uses is skene, a tent or tabernacle, and the verb formed from it means to pitch a tent. It is the same root John reached for in his Gospel when he wrote that the Word became flesh and dwelt among us.

So the promise that God will dwell with His people is tabernacle language, and behind the Greek stands the Hebrew shekinah, the settled glory that filled the tent in the wilderness and later the temple. Israel watched that glory depart in Ezekiel’s vision, and it is one of the saddest scenes in Scripture.

Revelation 21 is the return of the glory, permanently, without a building to contain it. What went out of the east gate comes back to fill a city.

Why we lost it in the first place

Genesis 3 has God walking in the garden in the cool of the day, and the striking thing about that verse is how ordinary it sounds. This was normal. What is not normal is a man and a woman hiding in the bushes.

Sin does not principally create guilt feelings; it creates distance. The expulsion from Eden was not petty punishment but the necessary consequence of holiness meeting rebellion, and the cherubim with the flaming sword stood guard over the way back.

Every page after that is God working His way back towards us. That God will dwell with His people is the reversal of Genesis 3, and it required the cross to accomplish it.

How the promise that God will dwell unfolds

God dwelt in a tent among a wandering people, which was gracious but guarded. He dwelt in a temple in Jerusalem, which was glorious but restricted. He dwelt in a body in Nazareth and Galilee, which was astonishing and brief.

At Pentecost He came to dwell in believers by the Spirit, so that Paul could tell the Corinthians they were God’s temple and that His Spirit lived in them. That is a greater privilege than anything Israel enjoyed, and most of us treat it as background noise.

The final stage is the one John sees. God will dwell with His people in an unveiled, uninterrupted, face-to-face way, with no departure possible and nothing left to hide behind.

What comes with the presence

Look at what follows immediately in Revelation 21. He will wipe away every tear. Death shall be no more. Mourning, crying and pain are finished. Those consequences are attached to the presence, not listed separately from it.

That ordering is instructive. We tend to want the benefits without the person, a world with the pain removed and God somewhere in the background. Scripture will not let us split them. The tears dry because He is there.

There is a tenderness in that image of wiping tears that I find almost unbearable. It is the gesture of a parent with a small child, and it is attributed to the Almighty. He does not delegate it.

Seeing His face

Revelation 22:4 adds that they will see his face, and his name will be on their foreheads. Moses asked to see the glory and was told that no one may see God’s face and live. The prohibition was never permanent; it was a statement about what sin makes impossible.

John writes in his first letter that when He appears we shall be like Him, because we shall see Him as He is. The seeing and the transformation belong together, and I explore that further in my article on seeing God face to face.

The name on the forehead is ownership and identity, the counterpart of the mark of the beast. Everyone belongs to somebody, and in the end everyone will be labelled accordingly.

Israel and the church together

Some manuscripts read peoples rather than people in that verse, and the plural is worth noticing. The gates of the city carry the names of the twelve tribes and the foundations carry the names of the twelve apostles, which is as clear a picture of continuity and distinction as you could ask for.

I hold firmly that Israel and the church are distinct in God’s programme, as I set out in the difference between Israel and the church. Distinct does not mean segregated for ever. The city has room for the redeemed of every age, and God will dwell with all of them.

Presence and holiness belong together

Leviticus is not a popular book, but its logic is simple and it bears directly on this. You shall be holy, for I am holy, and I will walk among you and will be your God. The holiness requirements exist because of the walking among, not instead of it.

Take away the presence and holiness becomes arbitrary rule-keeping. Keep the presence in view and holiness becomes hospitality, the ordinary business of making a home fit for the guest who has moved in. That is a far better motive than fear and a far stronger one than habit.

Paul makes the same connection in 2 Corinthians 6:16, quoting the covenant formula and drawing a practical conclusion from it. Because God will dwell in us and walk among us, we clean the house.

Not a solitary promise

Notice the plural throughout. He will dwell with them, they will be his people, God himself will be with them. There is no version of this promise for the isolated individual, which is one reason I take a dim view of the fashionable idea that a person can follow Jesus without belonging to a church.

The destination is a city, not a scattering of private cottages with good views. Whatever you are being prepared for, you are being prepared for it alongside people, and some of them will be people you would not have chosen.

That God will dwell with a people rather than a person does not diminish the intimacy of it. It multiplies it. Every believer you have ever loved and lost is included in that promise, and so is every believer you have ever found difficult.

Living now in the light of then

Practically, this reshapes prayer. If God will dwell with His people for ever, then prayer is not a formal audience granted to a petitioner but a conversation begun early. We are not trying to attract His attention; we are getting used to His company.

It reshapes suffering as well. Paul weighed his afflictions against an eternal weight of glory and called them light and momentary, which is either the most callous sentence ever written or the verdict of a man who had seen where this ends.

The promise in the middle of exile

It is worth noticing when this promise was most often repeated. Ezekiel spoke it to a people already deported, sitting by a canal in Babylon with the temple in ruins behind them. Jeremiah wrote it as the walls were coming down.

God does not hand out the assurance that He will dwell with His people when everything is going well. He gives it to the displaced and the disappointed, which is a habit of His worth remembering when your own circumstances look unpromising.

So, now what?

Start by taking seriously what is already true. If the Spirit lives in you, the promise has begun. Paul’s argument for holiness in 1 Corinthians 6 is not that sin breaks rules but that it drags the temple of God into places it has no business being.

Then let the future do its work on your affections. If your picture of the world to come is mostly about streets and reunions, it is too small. God will dwell with His people, and everything else in that city is scenery around that one fact. Does that prospect gladden you, or does it only reassure you? The answer to that question tells you a good deal about where you actually are.

“Behold, the dwelling place of God is with man. He will dwell with them, and they will be his people, and God himself will be with them as their God.” (Revelation 21:3)