Since President Donald Trump’s proposition that America should build a 2,000-mile-long border wall (and have Mexico pay for it), certain evangelicals have given themselves in support of the policy: Franklin Graham, Jerry Falwell Jr, and Robert Jeffress are three such men.
On more than one occasion, Dr. Robert Jeffress, frequent contributor to the Fox networks and pastor of First Baptist Church of Dallas, Texas, has suggested that Christians should support Trump’s wall policy because “heaven has a wall.” Most recently, he expounded the position on Fox News:
(Here, Lou Dobbs joins in the revelry suggesting the “pearly gates” portend border security.)
In addition, any number of memes on Facebook promote the same or similar idea:
At the level of phrase-turning it works. At the level of sound biblical teaching, though, if suffers like Haman hoisted on his own gallows.
Here are three simple reasons the concept of Heaven’s wall being a point of support for an American border wall—no matter where it runs—is insufficient.
1. The wall spoken of in Revelation does not surround heaven. It surrounds the New Jerusalem which comes down from God out of heaven.
The confusion on this point is common and ongoing. Most of my life I’ve heard of Heaven’s twelve foundations, walls, and the 1500-cubits-cubed-measurements. This is due to a conflation of New Jerusalem and heaven, the former being a future celestial city moved to earth, the latter being the eternal abode of God Almighty, “somewhere beyond the blue.” Nowhere does the Bible use this wall as an example of any earthly wall.
2. Heaven’s wall is not to repel invaders nor to protect the inhabitants from violence.
Given the timing of New Jerusalem’s decent to earth (based on Left Behind eschatology, anyway) there are no invaders to repel. All potential invaders are wiped out earlier in the Battle of Armageddon. Rather, the city is more concerned with purity and impurity: “Nothing unclean will ever enter it, nor anyone who does what is detestable or false” (Revelation 21:27).
In the first century context, a walled city projected security, wholeness, a kingdom, and authority. New Jerusalem exemplifies these concepts without reference to barbarians at the gate. Even deeper, the purpose of the New Jerusalem is to demonstrate the goodness and glory of God:
I did not see a temple in it, because the Lord God the Almighty and the Lamb are its temple. The city does not need the sun or the moon to shine on it, because the glory of God illuminates it, and its lamp is the Lamb. The nations will walk by its light, and the kings of the earth will bring their glory into it. (21:22-24)
Far from keeping everyone out, God is glorified by the nations that enter it.
3. The wall has twelve gates that are always open.
“The twelve gates are twelve pearls; each individual gate was made of a single pearl…Its gates will never close by day because it will never be night there” (Revelation 21:21, 25). Twelve gates, three on each side, yet no gate is for security or protection. In fact, the gates stand open for eternity.
Using a heavenly wall to support an American border wall is a big swing-and-miss by Jeffress. In rushing to presidential standard-bearing he misses the most obvious and best news about New Jerusalem’s wall: the gates are never closed. Inhabitants may come and go as they please.
Much could be said and written—indeed much has—about the significance of both the walls and the gates, but this much is true: emphasizing the walls as border protection without mentioning the gates is as deficient as concluding the open gates equal open borders. Such a position Jeffress is unlikely to support.
The spiritual reality of the New Jerusalem
The truth of what is really at play in the New Jerusalem is given in Revelation 22. It has exactly nothing to do with a border wall:
Then he showed me the river of the water of life, clear as crystal, flowing from the throne of God and of the Lamb down the middle of the city’s main street. The tree of life was on each side of the river, bearing twelve kinds of fruit, producing its fruit every month. The leaves of the tree are for the healing of the nations, and there will no longer be any curse. The throne of God and of the Lamb will be in the city, and his servants will worship him. They will see his face, and his name will be on their foreheads. Night will be no more; people will not need the light of a lamp or the light of the sun, because the Lord God will give them light, and they will reign forever and ever. (Revelation 22:1-5, all scripture CSB)
