Creation to New Creation, From Genesis to Revelation

My buddy Michael W. Pahl has a cute little book called The Beginning and the End: Rereading Genesis’s Stories and Revelation’s Visions (Eugene, OR: Cascade, 2011). Here’s a good quote from the book:

One can almost hear the music swelling majestically as the curtain is opened for this final scene. A new heaven and a new earth emerge from the darkness into the light of center stage, and a city – no, a bride!-appears in the new heaven, floating gracefully down toward the pristine new world below. A loud voice booms offstage, filling the theater with its authority, with its splendor, with its exhilaration: “Look! God’s dwelling place is now among the people, and he will dwell with them! They will be his people, and God himself will be with them and be their God!” it is a powerful climax to the turbulent, provocative drama of Revelation, But this climactic visions of Revelation is also set up as the conclusions of the storeis told back in Genesis, for here one sees most spectacularly the way Revelation weaves together themes from Genesis 1-3.