In search of New Jerusalem
Published On December 24, 2015 » 2471 Views» By Bennet Simbeye » Features
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LETS FACE ITThe celestial City of New Jerusalem that the aged and blind Apostle John saw in a vision on the island of Patmos was reportedly spotted by the ultra-powerful Hubble Telescope operated by the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) on December 26, 1994.
NASA has maintained silence on the matter ever since.
Was that sighting truly the biblical city of the forthcoming New Heaven and the New Earth?
This Christmas, let us think about that heavenly city and what Scripture and science have to say about it because Jesus Christ came to make it possible for us, and those who have died before us, to live there forever and ever.
Revelations 21:1-4 (New American Standard Version) reports:
“Then I saw a new heaven and a new earth; for the first heaven and the first earth passed away, and there is no longer any sea.
“And I saw the holy city, New Jerusalem, coming down out of heaven from God, made ready as a bride adorned for her husband.
“And I heard a loud voice from the throne, saying, ‘Behold, the tabernacle of God is among men, and He will dwell among them, and they shall be His people, and God Himself will be among them, and He will wipe away every tear from their eyes; and there will no longer be any death; there will no longer be any mourning, or crying, or pain, for the first things have passed away.”
The discourse continues from verse 10 onwards:
“And he carried me away in the Spirit to a great and high mountain, and showed me the holy city, Jerusalem, coming down out of heaven from God, having the glory of God. Her brilliance was like a very costly stone, as of a stone of crystal-clear jasper.
“It had a great and high wall, with twelve gates, and at the gates twelve angels; and names were written on them, which are the names of the twelve tribes of the sons of Israel.
“There were three gates on the east and three gates on the north and three gates on the south and three gates on the west.
“And the wall of the city had twelve foundation stones, and on them were the twelve names of the twelve apostles of the Lamb. The one who spoke with me had a gold measuring rod to measure the city, and its gates and its wall.
“The city is laid out as a square, and its length is as great as the width; and he measured the city with the rod, fifteen hundred miles; its length and width and height are equal.
“And he measured its wall, seventy-two yards, according to human measurements, which are also angelic measurements.
“The material of the wall was jasper; and the city was pure gold, like clear glass.
“The foundation stones of the city wall were adorned with every kind of precious stone.
The first foundation stone was jasper; the second, sapphire; the third, chalcedony; the fourth, emerald; the fifth; sardonyx; the sixth, sardius; the seventh, chrysolite; the eighth, beryl; the ninth, topaz; the tenth, chrysoprase; the eleventh, jacinth; the twelfth, amethyst.
“And the twelve gates were twelve pearls; each one of the gates was a single pearl. And the street of the city was pure gold, like transparent glass.
“I saw no temple in it, for the Lord God the Almighty and the Lamb are its temple. And the city has no need of the sun or of the moon to shine on it, for the glory of God has illumined it, and its lamp is the Lamb.
“The nations will walk by its light, and the kings of the earth will bring their glory into it.
“In the daytime (for there will be no night there) its gates will never be closed; and they will bring the glory and the honour of the nations into it; and nothing unclean, and no one who practices abomination and lying, shall ever come into it, but only those whose names are written in the Lamb’s book of life.”
Apparently, Weekly World News were the first to carry the story and images released by Dr Marcia Masson who quoted highly placed NASA insiders as having said that the telescope beamed hundreds of photos back to the command base at Goddard Space Flight Centre in Greenbelt, Maryland, on December 26.
“The pictures clearly show a vast white city floating eerily in the blackness of space,” the report said, quoting Dr Masson’s NASA sources as saying the city was definitely Heaven “because life as we know it couldn’t possibly exist in icy, airless space.”
The then President Bill Clinton and his number two Alan Gore were reported to have taken keen interest in the matter and to have asked for daily briefings.
Dr Masson said: “The Hubble Space Telescope was designed to photograph images as far away as the edge of the universe but a lens flaw prevented it from doing so until shuttle astronauts corrected the defect during a recent mission.
“When they finished their work, the telescope trained its enormous glass eye on the outer reaches of the universe.
“From what I understand, the first images it received were nothing more than kaleidoscopic bursts of colour and light.
“As adjustments were made and the focus sharpened, NASA analysts couldn’t believe their eyes.
“After checking and rechecking the data, they concluded that the images were authentic.
They also theorized that the city couldn’t possibly be inhabited by life as we know it.
“The only logical explanation was that the city was inhabited by the souls of the dead. As one of my sources put it, ‘We found where God lives.’”
The space agency was believed to have forwarded photographs to Pope John Paul II at his request, but Vatican sources would neither confirm nor deny it.
PERFECT
From a biblical perspective, the city is a perfect cube, 1500 miles in all directions, and a part of the New Earth.
Its form, structure and dimensions, with the materials of which it is made, defy the greatest advances humankind has ever made in architecture.
The city is the theme of thousands of songs that God’s people have sung through the ages, in hope of a resurrection of the dead. To those who have trusted in Jesus Christ for their eternal salvation, the city is reality and there is no debate about it.
After all, Jesus Christ historically lived on the earth, was crucified, and did rise from the dead just as He said He would. No scientific or archeological proof has ever been demonstrated that He is still interred anywhere on earth since his death and resurrection in AD 33.
But there is something in human nature that insists on remaining in darkness. In Luke 16, Jesus Christ tells of a rich man who lived in opulent splendour, who completely ignored a poor and diseased beggar until both died.
Jesus does not present this as a parable or a symbolic tale, but narrates it as real life.
The rich man, possibly a millionaire, in death opens his eyes to find himself in unspeakable torment in the flames and darkness of Hades.
The man sees Abraham with the beggar who is no longer poor or diseased, in Heaven “far away.”
The millionaire asks Abraham to send Lazarus to the millionaire’s five brothers on earth to warn them of Hades so that they do not end up there.
Abraham says this: “If they do not listen to Moses and the Prophets, they will not be persuaded even if someone rises from the dead.”
Jesus Christ rose from the dead and many proofs of that have been adduced, which are on-going even through transformed lives of real human beings—but people prefer their own salvation on their own terms; choosing their own way to their own heaven by their own standards.
Abraham’s statement, possibly made in Old Testament times when the books of Moses and the Prophets had been written, implies that even if modern men and women see what appears to be Heaven or the City of God photographed or videoed on the outer limits of our galaxy or the universe, they will dismiss it and not be wooed towards faith in Christ.
This further implies that God will not show this generation such ‘a sign’ if the Cross of Jesus Christ is not sign enough that there is a Heaven where God wants everyone to go to, and a Hell where Lucifer wants all people to end up.
The Mail Online reported in October this year that thousands of Chinese had seen a ghostly alien city floating over Foshan in the Guangdong province of China. A few days later people in the province of Jiangxi, China, also reported seeing a similar cloud city.
FATA MORGANA
Weather experts have explained all these phenomena as natural mirages, an optical illusion called Fata Morgana.
The said Fata Morgana “can be seen on land or sea and involves the optical distortion and inversion of distant objects such as boats, which can appears as skyscrapers because the images become stacked, when rays of light bend as they pass through air of different temperatures such as in a heat haze.”
Some analysts said the image over China was the result of a secret government hologram project to test how the public would react to a major paranormal event.
The Paranormal Crucible YouTube channel said the Chinese event could be: “A temporal vortex, or a possible parallel universe materializing briefly into our own reality. It is also possible, considering China’s technological achievements that a top secret holographic technology was tested over a heavily populated area in an effort to gauge the public reaction.”
If you are a Christian, the holographic technologies in place today should concern you, because in the 1990s fears arose that a fake Second Coming of Jesus Christ would be broadcast across the skies, throwing world Christianity into convulsions as many would conclude that they had been left behind and missed the New Jerusalem. We will explore this in weeks to come, as God allows.
HOLE
In August 2007, Senior Science Writer Robert Roy Britt of Mail Online reported: “The universe has a huge hole in it that dwarfs anything else of its kind.
The discovery caught astronomers by surprise.
“The hole is nearly a billion light-years across. It is not a black hole, which is a small sphere of densely packed matter. Rather, this one is mostly devoid of stars, gas and other normal matter, and it’s also strangely empty of the mysterious ‘dark matter’ that permeates the cosmos. Other space voids have been found before, but nothing on this scale.”
Astronomers do not know why the hole is there. Light travels at 299,700 kilometres a second, and a light year measures the distance light travels at that speed in a year. If that hole is a billion light-years across, what is it? Is that the gate to Hell?
Last month, the Indonesia capital city Jakarta was startled by rumbling mysterious trumpet sounds that echoed in the sky of Condet region, East Jakarta.
The recorded strange sounds, audible in the local area from 0600hrs to 0700hrs, have gone viral on the Internet. This phenomenon has been reported in the US, Canada, Australia, Germany, Ukraine, Belarus, Colombia and other places.
The sounds are debated, but they remind us of Revelations 8 which speaks of seven trumpets that will announce global disasters as the Antichrist and his One World Government rule the globe. All these signs are food for thought—and decision.
LIMIT
Scientists do not have it all wrapped up, and they are not able to conclusively explain all things in the sky or even on the earth.
Take a look: Quantum mechanics has revealed that “our material world is based upon an invisible world of subatomic particles that is totally non-material. And over 95 per cent of our universe consists of dark matter and energy that is beyond scientific observation.”
Scientists say dark matter is a hypothetical kind of matter that cannot be seen with telescopes but accounts for most of the matter in the universe. Dark matter has not been detected directly, making it one of the greatest mysteries in modern astrophysics.
Dark matter’s existence is inferred from effects of gravity on visible matter in space, and on radiation.
If even natural factors are beyond scientific explanation, what about spiritual matters?
In a season when most of the world revisits the Incarnation of Jesus Christ in Bethlehem, it should interest you that scientists speak of an unseen but very evident reality called ‘the implicate order’ and the observable one we know as ‘the explicate order.’
In other words, scientists hold that the expansive natural realm that science and technology can interpret and attempt to measure is upheld and sustained by another intangible but very present realm. And someone thinks there is no God.
DISCOVERIES
Molecular biologists have become increasingly thrilled as they discover more about the microscopic world of DNA. At first, scientists learned that a tiny molecule called DNA is the “brains” behind each cell in our bodies as well as every other living thing. DNA (deoxyribonucleic acid) contains information that defines everything about a person or other creature.
Scientists say the coding behind DNA reveals intelligence that is beyond human imagination.
A mere pinhead of DNA contains information equivalent to a stack of paperback books that would encircle the earth 5,000 times.
DNA operates like a language with its own extremely complex software code.
Microsoft founder Bill Gates says that the software of DNA is “far, far more complex than any software we have ever developed.”
That the whole of creation should operate as orderly and efficiently as it does, from the inexhaustible universe within the DNA to the ever-expanding universe being explored by the Hubble Telescope, can only point to an all-knowing Creator.
Dr Don Batien argues in the 2003 version of his The Answers Book that: “The immense complexity of the human brain, its creative power and reasoning with capacities vastly beyond that required for sheer survival, is perhaps the most ‘obvious’ evidence for creation.”
A Child was actually born in Bethlehem 2000 years ago, and He was born to bear all the blame for your sins and die for your salvation on a cursed tree.
He rose from the dead after three days and after another 40 days ascended to Heaven.
He is Christ Jesus, King of kings and Lord of lords.
He will return for all who have repented of their sins and received Him in their hearts as Lord and Saviour, to transport them to the New Jerusalem.
While you live, come to Him in faith, repenting of your sins for He has said in John 6:37, “And the one who comes to Me I will certainly not cast out.” Email: all.information@ymail.com

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