With this verse begins the closing passage of the book of God: the revelation of the things beyond the end. Now the veil lifts for the last time, and we behold the new universe. He who in the beginning created the heaven and the earth now reveals to the gaze of faith His second and final world. It would be idle to say that there cannot be a literal meaning to our text. Assuredly it may please the Creator to order His new universe so that there shall be there scenes which answer to our earth and no scenes which answer to our sea. But it is plain that the main purpose of the phrase is spiritual. We are to put before us as we read not so much a state in which we shall never look out on a waste of tossing waters, as a state in which the sea of the soul shall be for ever gone.
I. We read here that all tumultuous agitations and vehement changes shall be over there. Again and again in Scripture we find the sea made the picture of human agitation. In the new universe this sea shall be no more. Its waves shall be silent at last and for ever; none of the sinful agitations, none of the upswelling passions, whether of persons or of nations, shall break in through the endless duration of the new universe upon that perfect life and perfect rest of holiness and joy.
II. We read here that there shall be no more separation. In the days when God caused the Bible to be written even more than now, the sea was a separating thing. Every year in those old days, before the mariner's compass had made new paths on the deep, well nigh from Michaelmas to Easter, the sea, in the Roman term, was "shut." The fierce, dreadful waters were scarce traversed by a single sail. Land from land, friend from friend, was barred those long months by the severing sea. Here at best heart to heart is like isle to isle, with deep waters between, even when these waters are oftenest crossed; there heart to heart will make, as it were, one bright, beautiful, continuous continent of sympathy and mutual joy, together for ever with the Lord.
H. C. G. Moule, Fordington Sermons,p. 107.
I. Let us consider this great and blessed promise as the revelation of a future in which there shall be no more painful mystery. We look out upon the broad ocean, and far away it seems to blend with air and sky. Mists come up over its surface. Suddenly there rises on the verge of the horizon a white sail, that was not there a moment ago; and we wonder, as we look out from our hills, what may be beyond those mysterious waters. And to these ancient peoples there were mysteries which we do not feel. What should we see if depth and distance were annihilated, and we beheld what there is out yonder and what there is down there? And is not our life ringed round in like manner with mystery? Surely to some this ought to come as not the least noble and precious of the thoughts of what that future life is, "There shall be no more sea," and the mysteries which come from God's merciful limitation of our vision and some of the mysteries that come from God's wise and providential interposition of obstacles to our sight will have passed away.
II. The text tells us of a state that is to come when there is no more rebellious power. In the Old Testament the floods are often compared with the rage of the peoples and the rebellion of man against the will of God. Our text is a blessed promise that, in that holy state to which the apocalyptic vision carries our longing hopes, there shall be the cessation of all strife against our best Friend, of all reluctance to wear His yoke whose yoke brings rest to the soul. The opposition that lies in all our hearts shall one day be subdued.
III. The text foretells a state of things in which there will be no more disquiet and unrest. Life is a voyage over a turbulent sea; changing circumstances come rolling after each other, like the indistinguishable billows of the great ocean. On the heavenly shore stands Christ, and there is rest there. There is no more sea, but unbroken rest, unchanging blessedness, perpetual stability of joy and love in the Father's house.
A. Maclaren, Sermons in Manchester,2nd series, p. 325.
References: Revelation 21:1. Homiletic Quarterly,vol. i., p. 98; vol. xii., p. 77; H. J. Wilmot-Buxton, Waterside Mission Sermons,2nd series, No. 15; Spurgeon, Evening by Evening,p. 356; R. A. Bertram, Christian World Pulpit,vol. ii., p. 136; Ibid.,vol. iv., p. 332; P. W. Darton, Ibid.,vol. xxxii., p. 73.Revelation 21:2. G. E. L. Cotton, Sermons to English Congregations in India,p. 179; J. B. French, Christian World Pulpit,vol. xxv., p. 195.Revelation 21:3. H. P. Liddon, Ibid.,p. 1.