What is meant by Revelation 21:26 which tells us that “People will bring into it the glory and the honour of the nations” into the New Jerusalem? Do the products and achievements follow us into the eternal age? Kuyper does not close off this possibility, saying that neither the totality of this creation will carry over, nor will nothing at all. “We have to imagine”, he writes, “that all the forms in which the fruit of common grace blossoms now will one day perish, but the powerful germ that lies at the foundation of all of these things will not perish but abides, and one day will be carried into the new kingdom of glory”. He likens this life to the nursery which we will one day leave, as he explains; “one could say that here on earth we did little else than play, but nevertheless, when our toys are one day destroyed, the fruit of this playing whereby we developed will be seen in eternity.” But because this ‘playing’ of humanity has been so utterly formative to its maturing “If we will be human beings there, just like here we were born and exist as human beings, then it is absolutely necessary that these various constituent parts of our human life transfer together into eternity.” Kuyper argues that personal and communal / national development are separate and progress separately and certain judgements can be made about the relative ‘honour and glory’ of nations can be made. But ultimately that which will be carried over is “the progressive communal development that our entire human life achieved and will achieve in the history of the nations. And we are told that this profit, which of course is nothing else than the fruit of common grace, does not simply perish and is not simply destroyed in the universal cosmic conflagration, but such profit will have an abiding significance for the new Jerusalem, that is, for the new earth”
Light in Public Life
