Why Heaven's Streets Are Pure Gold

Gold Souk in Dubai is wall to wall gold. Shop after shop of it, glowing under the lights. Standing there, my mind went straight to the streets of heaven.

Revelation 21:21 says, "And the twelve gates were twelve pearls; every several gate was of one pearl: and the street of the city was pure gold, as it were transparent glass." Transparent gold. Nothing hidden in it, nothing mixed into it.

Gold does not come out of the ground looking like that. It comes out mixed with rock and dirt, and fire is what separates the two. People love to run that picture straight into your life and tell you to go work on your own purity. This is exactly where the gospel says something better.

2 Corinthians 5:21 says, "For he hath made him to be sin for us, who knew no sin; that we might be made the righteousness of God in him." Read that again. You were not slowly polished into purity. You were handed His, in one exchange, at the cross.

So what do you do with the days you fall short? 1 John 1:9 says, "If we confess our sins, he is faithful and just to forgive us our sins, and to cleanse us from all unrighteousness." That is not you earning your way back into favour. That is you agreeing with what the blood already handled, and the Holy Spirit is the one who keeps making it real in how you actually live.

The gold was never the point of heaven anyway. God is. And the purity you are walking around in right now was never yours to manufacture, it was His to give.