Some houses are measured in blocks and steel. Others are measured in years. Ask almost any family in the Caribbean or its diaspora how long their house took and you will hear a story: the foundation poured when the first child was born, the upstairs added when the last one left school, the verandah still waiting. We know what it is to live in a house that is always becoming.
It is worth reading the last chapters of the Bible with that experience in mind. Revelation 21 and 22 describe the New Jerusalem in dazzling detail: walls of jasper, twelve gates each made of a single pearl, a street of gold like transparent glass, a river clear as crystal, and a tree of life beside it bearing fruit every month. It is architecture beyond anything a builder has ever drawn. But the most important sentence in the whole vision is not about the materials at all.
The point of the city is the Resident
John hears a loud voice from heaven: “Behold, the tabernacle of God is with men, and he will dwell with them, and they shall be his people, and God himself shall be with them, and be their God” (Revelation 21:3, KJV).
A tabernacle is a tent, a dwelling. After all the gold and pearl, the heart of the vision is simply that God moves in. The whole story of Scripture has been heading here: from a garden where God walked with Adam, to a tent in the wilderness, to a temple in Jerusalem, to the Word made flesh living among us, and finally to a city where there is no temple at all, “for the Lord God Almighty and the Lamb are the temple of it” (Revelation 21:22).
That changes how we look at our own houses. We tend to judge them by what they are made of and what they look like from the road: the tiles, the grilles, the colour of the paint, whether the second floor is finished. Revelation quietly reminds us that the value of a dwelling is who lives there and how they live together. A board house where people are loved is closer to the New Jerusalem than a mansion full of cold silence.
Abraham never finished his house
The letter to the Hebrews says something striking about Abraham. He lived in the land God promised him, but he lived there in tents, moving from place to place, and never owned more of it than a burial plot. Why could he live like that without bitterness? “For he looked for a city which hath foundations, whose builder and maker is God” (Hebrews 11:10, KJV).
Abraham was not careless about where his family lived. He dug wells, negotiated fairly for land and cared for a large household. But he did not ask his tent to carry the weight of his whole hope. He knew that the permanent home was still being built, and that the Builder was trustworthy.
Many of us are asking our houses to do more than any house can. We want them to prove we have made it, to make up for a childhood of crowded rooms, to keep the family together, to keep us safe from every storm. A house can do a great deal. It cannot do all of that. When the roof leaks, when the land is in dispute, when the house that took twenty years to build is suddenly too big and too quiet, it helps to remember that we are, like Abraham, looking for another city.
No more tears in that house
The next verse in Revelation 21 is one many families have heard read at a graveside: “And God shall wipe away all tears from their eyes; and there shall be no more death, neither sorrow, nor crying, neither shall there be any more pain: for the former things are passed away” (Revelation 21:4, KJV).
Every earthly house has rooms that hold sorrow. The bedroom where a parent spent their last months. The kitchen where the bad phone call came. The front room where the family argued about the land after the funeral. Our homes are good gifts, but they are also places where the “former things” still happen. The promise is not that our current houses will become perfect. It is that God will one day make a home where none of that can follow us in.
That hope does not make us careless about the houses we have now. If anything, it frees us to take care of them without anxiety, to be hospitable in them, and to hold them loosely enough that we can share them, sell them or leave them when that is the right thing to do.
Living now in the light of then
Revelation describes the gates of the city standing open all day, with no night there (Revelation 21:25). It is a picture of total security and total welcome at the same time. Most of our homes manage one or the other: either we lock everything and trust no one, or we are so open that there is no rest. The coming city holds both together.
We can reach towards that now in small ways. A gate that is locked at night but opened gladly to a neighbour. A spare room kept ready for a relative in trouble. A table where the child who feels left out is given a seat. A house where God is not a picture on the wall but the one whose presence sets the tone of the place.
So if you are still saving for the deposit, still waiting for the upstairs to be finished, or living in a house that feels too full of memories, take heart. The finest dwelling in Scripture is still under construction, and its Builder has never left a job half-done.
For reflection
- What am I asking my house to give me that only God can give?
- What is one way our home could feel a little more like a place where God lives this week?
A prayer: Lord, thank You for the roof over us, finished or not. Help us to care for it well and hold it lightly. Teach us to look for the city You are building, and until then, make our home a place where You are welcome and where others find rest. Amen.
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