God’s Peoples in the New Jerusalem: Revelation 21:3 Reconsidered

다국어 초록 (Multilingual Abstract)

This article argues that John envisions God’s peoples, rather than God’s people, in the New Jerusalem (Rev. 21:3), comprising both God’s servants as the central people of the new city and the repentant nations as its “peripheral” dwellers. In so doing, this study foregrounds the fact that the saved status of the nations is restricted to a certain extent by their “marginalization” in the city, although its literal meaning must be balanced by its symbolic meaning due to the fact that Revelation belongs to the genre apocalypse. First, the nations enter the New Jerusalem to walk by its light (Rev. 21:24-26), while God’s servants worship and see his face in the city (Rev. 22:3-4). Second, the nations are entitled to the leaves of the tree of life, which are for their healing (Rev. 22:2), whilst presumably God’s servants derive benefit from the fruit of the tree.
The “marginalized” status of the nations in the New Jerusalem, in comparison with God’s servants who take center stage in the New Jerusalem, is related to their predominantly negative image before the introduction of the city (Rev. 11:18; 19:15; 20:3, 8), on the one hand, and to the tension of Jewish apocalyptic tradition regarding the eschatological fate of the Gentiles between Gentile subservience to Israel and Gentile full participation in eschatological salvation, on the other hand. Thereby John hardly treats the nations once complicit with Babylon and its oppressed on exactly the same footing, probably in reflection of apocalyptic justice.

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