The ultimate consummation, the New Jerusalem, is the consummation of the entire divine revelation, the Bible, and of all the wonderful items contained in the Bible as the complete revelation of God. How much you can get into the items of the ultimate consummation depends upon your knowledge of the truth, your ability, and your degree of endeavoring in the truth.
We have seen that one of the aspects of the Trinity contained in this ultimate consummation is that the Triune God Himself comprises the basic elements for the building up and the constitution of the New Jerusalem as the gold, pearls, and precious stones.
We can easily understand that gold refers to the Father’s nature. We must see that the gold in the New Jerusalem is a consummation of all the items of gold used as figures in both the Old and New Testaments beginning from Genesis 2. At the flow of the river in Genesis 2 there is gold (vv. 10-12). In the book of Exodus, gold was used extensively in the building of the tabernacle. Also, in the book of Zechariah is a golden lampstand (4:2). There are two golden pipes and golden oil (4:12). Then in the New Testament Paul tells us that he laid the unique foundation and that this foundation needs to be built upon with gold, silver, and precious stones (1 Cor. 3:10-12). Peter also said that the proving of our faith is much more precious than that of gold (1 Pet. 1:7). In addition, the Lord charged the church in Laodicea to buy from Him gold refined by fire that they might be rich (Rev. 3:18). These are just some of the verses we need to study in order to see the significance of the consummation of gold in the New Jerusalem.
Many of you young brothers have consecrated yourselves to the Lord with your whole life, not only your whole time. You must consider what you must do. To serve the Lord with your full time and with your whole life does not mean you need to do much work. You must realize that to serve the Lord is not to do a work nor is it to carry out a big Christian career. To serve the Lord is to minister the Lord, the Triune God, as everything from within the revelation of the holy Word with all the basic truths. This is the main thing. This is your capital. If you know more basic truths from the Bible, you have more capital. If you do not have any truth, you are a poor one with an empty hand to serve the Lord. Whenever I come to this point my heart is broken and my spirit is burning for you. According to my observation you have not done the best job in acquiring these basic truths. Even if you are still under the age of sixty you can still do a lot of studying. Even at the age of eighty I must testify that I study the Bible every day. How could we serve the Lord without the capital of the adequate knowledge and experience of the divine truths? I am very much burdened for you all in this matter.
We have just finished the Life-study of the entire New Testament and most of these messages have been published. There are many pages filled with many points of the truth for us to study. When we are ministering the Word in the meeting it is not sufficient merely to go to the pages of the Life-study to pick up a subject and to pick up some points without much study. This does not work. Even to give one message in one meeting you need the capital.
You must study the gold in the Bible from Genesis 2 through Revelation 21 to fully understand the gold in its ultimate consummation. Go to the Strong’s Concordance and take down all the verses with the word gold or golden used. Then spend a month to study these verses, to study the gold. See what is there in the divine revelation. This is the way to get the capital. After such a study you would begin to see something. You would see the gold as the base of the mountain on which the New Jerusalem is built. It is its base, its site, and its ground. The city proper is like a mountain with a height of twelve thousand stadia and the city is pure gold, like pure glass (Rev. 21:16-18). After such study then you would know the ultimate consummation of the significance of gold used as a divine figure in the Bible.
As we have seen, gold in the New Jerusalem signifies the Father’s nature. Gold is a sign of the nature of God the Father, not a sign of work or doing. Gold is a matter of essence and nature. It is a substance which no one can improve and which no one can produce. Please do not think that I have exhausted everything of the spiritual, divine, heavenly, and holy significances of all the items in the Bible. I cannot do that and I am not that all-inclusive. What I am doing is to open up the mines for you to go in and dig. Even in these messages I have spoken quite a number of points which were not covered in the Life-study messages. I have also seen more in the last eight years concerning the New Jerusalem since I wrote the notes to the Recovery Version of Revelation in 1976. This again shows us that we must get into the depths of all the truths in the Bible.