Revelation 21:1

"And there was no more sea." (Rev 21:1)

Like many of you, I love water. One of the things I loved about living in Scotland was that you were never far from a loch or the open sea. Living in East London, I miss the open water. Because of my love for water, I used to feel perplexed every time I read in Revelation 21:1 ‘and there was no more sea’. I just couldn’t imagine a Heaven with no ‘sea’; but what could this mean?

​I knew it couldn’t be literal; how could something of such awe inspiring beauty be missing from Heaven? For years I bemoaned my lack of understanding of this verse, then one night I opened my ‘Morning and Evening’ by Spurgeon and there it was!! I want to share with you what he wrote:

“In the new dispensation there will be no division—the sea separates nations and sunders peoples from each other. To John in Patmos the deep waters were like prison walls, shutting him out from his brethren and his work: there shall be no such barriers in the world to come.

Leagues of rolling billows lie between us and many a kinsman whom tonight we prayerfully remember, but in the bright world to which we go there shall be unbroken fellowship for all the redeemed family. In this sense there shall be no more sea. 

The sea is the emblem of change; with its ebbs and flows, its glassy smoothness and its mountainous billows, its gentle murmurs and its tumultuous roarings, it is never long the same. Slave of the fickle winds and the changeful moon, its instability is proverbial. In this mortal state we have too much of this; earth is constant only in her inconstancy, but in the heavenly state all mournful change shall be unknown, and with it all fear of storm to wreck our hopes and drown our joys. The sea of glass glows with a glory unbroken by a wave. No tempest howls along the peaceful shores of paradise."

​At last, my question was answered! The ‘sea’ represented barriers and instabilities. And, guess what? There’s none of those in Heaven!! No more divisions between individuals, no more depressions, no more mood swings, and no more ‘blues’ that humans often experience!

Now every time I read this verse, I read it with a sense of triumph rather than tragedy. I’m looking forward to a Heaven with ‘no more sea’. Aren’t you?

Pauline Anderson