Week 52 Revelation 21
I finished reading Revelation today.
I wondered about the city – New Jerusalem – that John saw in his closing vision. It was nicely-balanced & geometric & huge cube that measured 1500-miles on all sides. My question was about it’s population-holding capacity. It seemed small. I decided to compare the earth and the Cubical New Jerusalem.
The surface area of the earth is pretty close to 197,000,000 square-miles. By contrast the surface area of a 1500-mile square is 2,250,000 square-miles – big enough to cover most of western Canada…but still only about 1/90th of the earth’s surface.
Will that be enough space for the people in the New Jerusalem?
It’s a hard calculation. For instance: how many people will there be? Let’s say that the total number of all people who have ever lived on earth is ~100,000,000,000. John makes it pretty clear that not everyone will be there. But – for argument’s sake – if they all did would there be enough room?
I also haven’t factored-in the vertical dimension of New Jerusalem – 1500-miles high. Mount Everest is less than six-miles high so the Cube is way higher. How would that vertical space be utilized?
And I really don’t even know whether people will live in the Cubical New Jerusalem. Maybe its the central facility on the New Earth and people will visit.
So John is short of details (but I assume space won’t be an issue).
Note: see the Cube in Revelation 21:16. Numerical calculations from Wikipedia “Earth” December 30, 2024 and Universe Today (https://www.universetoday.com/25756/surface-area-of-the-earth/).