Together With Every Nation, Tribe, And Tongue
Together with Every Nation, Tribe, and Tongue
Excerpted from “Heaven and Hell”
Sermon ##39,40, September 4, 1855
Will there be more people in Heaven or in Hell? Spurgeon’s answer may surprise you. Whether or not you agree, a close reading of Scripture indicates that Heaven will be filled with great multitudes of people from every culture, every nationality, and every language.
You are those who have stayed with me in my trials, and I assign to you, as my Father assigned to me, a kingdom, that you may eat and drink at my table in my kingdom and sit on thrones judging the twelve tribes of Israel. Luke 22:28-30
Would it not be a dreary Heaven for us to inhabit, if we should be both unknowing and unknown? I believe that Heaven is a fellowship of the saints. I have often thought I should love to see Isaiah, and as soon as I get to Heaven, I would like to ask for him, because he spoke more of Jesus Christ than all the rest.
I am sure I should want to find out good George Whitefielda—he who so continually preached to the people and wore himself out with a more than angelic zeal.
Oh yes! We shall have choice company in Heaven when we get there. There will be no distinction of learned and unlearned, clergy and laity, but we shall walk freely among one another. We shall feel that we are family. The Jew and the Gentile will sit down together. The great and the small shall feed in the same pasture, and “many will . . . recline at table with Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob in the kingdom of heaven” (Matthew 8:11).
But my text has a yet greater depth of sweetness, for it says, that “many will come.” Some think that Heaven will be a very small place where there will be a very few people who went to their chapel or their church. I confess, I have no wish for a very small Heaven, and I love to read in the Scriptures that there are many mansions in my Father’s house (John 14:2, KJV).
How often do I hear people say, “The gate is straight and the way is narrow, and there are few who find it. There will be very few in Heaven; most will be lost.”
My friend, I differ from you. Do you think that Christ will let the devil beat him? That he will let the devil have more in Hell than there will be in Heaven? No, it is impossible. For then Satan would laugh at Christ. There will be more in Heaven than there are among the lost. God says that there will be “a great multitude no one could number who will be saved.” But he never says that there will be a multitude that no man can number that will be lost.
What glad tidings for you and for me! For if there are so many to be saved, why shouldn’t I be saved? Why shouldn’t you? Why shouldn’t that man over there in the crowd say, “Can’t I be one among the multitude?” And may not that poor woman there take heart and say, “Well, if there were but half a dozen saved, I might fear that I should not be one, but since many are to come, why shouldn’t I also be saved?”
Cheer up, child of sorrow, there is hope for you still! I can never know that any man is past God’s grace. There be a few who have sinned that sin that is unto death (Matthew 12:31-32), and God gives them up; but the vast host of mankind are yet within the reach of sovereign mercy. “Many will come from east and west and recline at table with Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob in the kingdom of heaven.”
Is there a biblical basis for Spurgeon’s belief that God’s eternal Kingdom will be inhabited by multitudes from all nations? I believe there is.
Most of us are unaccustomed to thinking of nations, rulers, civilizations, and culture in Heaven, but Isaiah 60 is one of many passages that demonstrate that the New Earth will in fact be earthly and full of the Earth’s nations. God’s people will have a glorious future in which the nations and their leaders will participate in and benefit from a renewed and glorious Jerusalem. It won’t be only some nations but all of them: “All assemble and come to you” (verse 4, NIV).
This will be a time of unprecedented rejoicing: “Then you will look and be radiant, your heart will throb and swell with joy” (verse 5, NIV). On the renewed Earth, the nations will bring their greatest treasures into this glorified city: “The wealth on the seas will be brought to you, to you the riches of the nations will come” (verse 5, NIV).
Will we have ethnic and national identities? Yes. Is the risen Jesus Jewish? Certainly. Will we know he’s Jewish? Of course. Our resurrected DNA will be unflawed, but it will preserve our God-designed uniqueness, racial and otherwise. The elders sing to the Lamb: “You are worthy. . . . Your blood has ransomed people for God from every tribe and language and people and nation. And you have caused them to become a Kingdom of priests for our God. And they will reign on the earth” (Revelation 5:9-10, NLT). Who will serve as the New Earth’s kings and priests? Not people who were formerly of every tribe, language, people, and nation. Their distinctions aren’t obliterated—they continue into the present Heaven and then into the eternal Heaven.
Tribe refers to a person’s clan and family lineage. People refers to race. Nation refers to those who share a national identity and culture. Some scholars argue that the image of God has a corporate dimension: “There is no one human individual or group who can fully bear or manifest all that is involved in the image of God, so that there is a sense in which that image is collectively possessed. The image of God is, as it were, parceled out among the peoples of the Earth. By looking at different individuals and groups we get glimpses of different aspects of the full image of God.”b
If this is true, and I believe it may be, then racism is not only an injustice toward people but also a rejection of God’s very nature. On the New Earth we’ll never celebrate sin, but we’ll celebrate diversity in the biblical sense. We’ll never try to keep people out. We’ll welcome them in, exercising hospitality to every traveler. Peace on Earth will be rooted in our common ruler, Christ the King, who alone is the source of peace: “Glory to God in the highest, and on earth peace among men with whom He is pleased” (Luke 2:14, NASB).
Peace on Earth will be accomplished not by the abolition of our differences but by a unifying loyalty to the King, a loyalty that transcends differences—and is enriched by them. The kings and leaders of nations will be united because they share the King’s righteousness, and with him they will rejoice in their differences as a tribute to his creativity and multifaceted character.
Consider this prophetic statement: “The kingdom of the world has become the kingdom of our Lord and of his Messiah, and he will reign for ever and ever” (Revelation 11:15, NIV). Scripture doesn’t say that Christ will destroy or even replace this world’s kingdom. No, the kingdom of this world will actually become the Kingdom of Christ. God won’t obliterate earthly kingdoms but will transform them into his own. And it’s that new earthly kingdom (joined then to God’s heavenly Kingdom) over which “he will reign for ever and ever.”
On the New Earth, “the nations will walk by [Christ’s] light, and the kings of the earth will bring their splendor into [the New Jerusalem]. On no day will its gates ever be shut. . . . The glory and honor of the nations will be brought into it” (Revelation 21:24-26, NIV).
Pastor and author Bruce Milne says of this text, “Nothing of ultimate worth from the long history of the nations will be omitted from the heavenly community. Everything which authentically reflects the God of truth, all that is of abiding worth from within the national stories and the cultural inheritance of the world’s peoples, will find its place in the New Jerusalem.”c
Tribes, peoples, and nations will all make their own particular contribution to the enrichment of life in the New Jerusalem (Revelation 5:9; 7:9; 21:24-26). Daniel prophesied that the Messiah would be “given dominion and glory and a kingdom, that all peoples, nations, and languages should serve him” (Daniel 7:14). Just as the church’s diversity of gifts serves the good of others (1 Corinthians 12:7-11), so our diversity will serve everyone’s good in the new universe.
Consider what it will be like to worship with Masai, Dinka, Hmong, Athabascan, Tibetan, Waodani, Icelandic, Macedonian, Moldovan, Moroccan, and Peruvian believers. In the sweeping breadth of his redemptive work, I believe that God may resurrect not only modern nations but also ancient ones, including, for instance, Babylon and Rome. Are ancient Assyrians, Sumerians, Phoenicians, Babylonians, and Greeks among God’s redeemed? We know they are, for no nation, past or present, is excluded from “every nation, tribe, people and language” (Revelation 7:9, NIV).
Hundreds of nations, thousands of people groups, untold millions of redeemed individuals will gather to worship Christ. And many national and cultural distinctions, untouched by sin, will continue to the glory of God.
a George Whitefield was an eighteenth-century minister who helped spread the Great Awakening in Britain and the American colonies.
b Richard Mouw, When the Kings Come Marching In (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1983), 47.
c Bruce Milne, The Message of Heaven and Hell (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity, 2002), 321.
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