Rolled Up Like a Scroll

“And the stars of heaven fell to the earth, as a fig tree drops its late figs when it is shaken by a mighty wind. Then the sky receded as a scroll when it is rolled up, and every mountain and island was moved out of its place,” Revelation 6:13-14.

Ever try to imagine this event?

C. S. Lewis described a similar end to the world of Narnia in Chapter 14 of The Last Battle. He imagined a meteor shower heavy as rain which left the sky empty of stars. The empty blackness began at the zenith and moved down toward the horizon before the last stars disappeared. Stars in the world of Narnia are people, and some of them alighted near those witnessing this event.

What will it be like in our world? Perhaps we will see the sky split, and the two edges roll back to reveal God’s heaven. Or maybe it will be like a curtain rising for Act I of a marvelous play.

Ten times the Bible says that God stretched or stretches out the heavens. Suppose the visible, apparently expanding universe is really just a curtain—a curtain whose fabric is another dimension, so that as astronomers probe its flexing folds, they see larger and farther—much like a microscope allows them to see smaller and closer.

We tend to think that the world we see, touch, and measure is real, and that all that we cannot see is not real. But the Bible says quite the opposite. What is now invisible is the true and eternal. When the amazing universe in which we live rolls up, the real world—of which this world is only a shadow—will be revealed. See 2 Corinthians 4:18, 5:1.

The Last Battle ends with the loved characters of the Chronicles finally in Narnia—the true Narnia. They are running, and the cry urging them on is, “Further up and further in,” and as they go they see all they knew and loved in the old world, only now larger and more alive and more wonderful, and Narnia just keeps opening up larger and more wonderful the further they go.

Hundreds of years before John wrote The Revelation, Isaiah prophesied the rolling up of the sky: “All the host of heaven shall be dissolved, and the heavens shall be rolled up like a scroll; all the host shall fall down as the leaf falls from the vine, and as fruit falling from a fig tree,” Isaiah 34:4. God has been planning this for a long time. Jesus said He was going to prepare a place for us (John 14:2). It took Him only six days to make this world. No way to imagine what we will see when the sky is rolled back!