Ps. 69.34-36 (new heaven and new earth)

Let the heavens / and the earth / praise him
the seas / and all that move in them.
For God / will save Zion
and build the towns / of Judah
his servants / will live there / and possess it
and the offspring / of his servants / will inherit it
and those / who love his name / will dwell in it. 

These concluding lines can seem almost explosive in their impact. In a flourish everything is gathered and aimed at this very particular outcome and, more importantly perhaps, all of creation itself now zeroes in on this future, and particular act of God. It is here (or…’there’) that the light of redemption attains to its fully glory. It is this vision for which the righteous ones who ‘seek God’ have already been espied praising God. These verses begin with utter expansiveness: heaven—earth—sea. The totality of the created order has begun a liturgy to God. Important to note however is the fact that this absolute praise (the entirely of the created order) finds its genesis not in its own generality but in the very particular redemption of Zion and the establishment of the Land. All of creation looks to Zion and the Land and finds in its redemption its own source of liturgy to God. Perhaps, however, there is more to this. The term “heaven and earth” is mentioned in many other places as referring to Jerusalem and, particularly, the Temple (Jesus alludes to this when he says, “heaven and earth will pass away, but my words will remain”). The Temple was a microcosm of the macrocosm. All of ‘heaven and earth’ were contained and found their ‘source’ in the Temple. Hence, it may be that what we see here is that ‘heaven and earth’ rejoicing alludes to the restoration of the Temple and that in the Temple’s restoration, in some way, all of creation is centralized, as if the Temple were the mouth of creation. Further, the inclusion of the ‘seas’ does not necessarily detract from this interpretation as there were massive basins in the Temple that represented the taming (or, creating) of the primal chaos seas, now ordered and participating within the ‘house of God’. Second, in this we may have overstated the reason for their praise—God performs two actions in these verses: save’s Zion and builds the towns of Judah. The people perform three: live and posses it, pass it on as an inheritance, dwell in it. The point is this: that creation’s joy is not simply in God’s action. Their joy is also found in man’s dwelling in God’s established Land in perpetuity (inheritance) and safety (live and dwell) and in their guarding it (possess it). In other words—in their becoming-Adam. God, as in creation, ‘redeems’ from the water and ‘establishes’ his Temple; his “image” then, priest-like, guards and protects it, in perpetuity. This dynamic between God and his image is what causes the “cosmic liturgy” of the ‘heavens—earth—sea”. This future orientation to the liturgy is also found in the concluding line where the righteous are referred to as “those who love his name”. Throughout the psalm, the righteous have been called those who ‘seek his name” and those who “wait for God”. Here, their seeking and their waiting is fulfilled. Now, they obtain what they wait for and find what they seek; now, they “love his name”. This also coheres with the only other instance of the ‘name’ in the psalm—when the psalmist says that after his deliverance he will “praise God’s name in song” (vs. 30). Understood from the vantage point of Revelation, this psalm expands dramatically. There—we see a ‘new heaven and new earth’ descending from heaven; this is a ‘heavenly Jerusalem’, that is also square, indicating it is the ‘holy of holies’ and the place where God’s presence is most unencumbered by rebellion. All of the images are compressed into an astonishing unity: land, Temple, Jerusalem, ‘heaven and earth’, new Adam-priest(s), the sea actually dries up (no more chaos). And, most importantly, this unity finds expression in the overwhelming sense of liturgy that saturates the entire book, all centered on the unified reign of God through the ‘lamb on the throne’.