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Friday 27 January 2012

Best of 2011 #12 The end. And it turns out to be a beginning

As December rolled to a close, I read the final chapters of Revelation. Tired after the exertions of Christmas, it felt like the end of a double marathon. But it also felt like a new beginning.

Day 366: The new heaven and the new earth

I loved the way that John brought back some familiar scenes and ideas into his last chapters. Echoes of the vision of Ezekiel, traces of the tender words of Isaiah, the longing for the return of Jesus expressed by Paul in 1 Corinthians - these are all there in the last chapters of Revelation.
But above all there's a sense that everything is starting again. That what has gone before was the dress rehearsal, the real play is about to begin. C.S.Lewis understood this perfectly, when he ended the Chronicles of Narnia with these words: "All their life in this world and all their adventures on Narnia had only been the cover and the title page; now at last they were beginning Chapter One of the Great Story which no one on earth has read: which goes on for ever: in which every chapter is better than the one before.

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