It’s a good view too. The natural expression of the LOF is the dead sea. The Spiritual being the purifying of our lives from our carnal natures by the dealings and nature of God himself. The bad stuff is often the good stuff…funny that… 
and what is the meaning: I Saw the DEAD, small and Great? they are mortal?
Eric,
The dead are raised, so they have physical bodies just as we will when we are raised, and just as Jesus does. Even if they were spirits, I suspect John would be able to see them. He saw the angels, who are spirits. Nevertheless, Paul goes to quite a lot of trouble toward the end of 1 Corinthians to dispel rumors that the resurrection of the dead is of spirits only. He says that the resurrected body will be more glorious than the original body, and he calls it a spiritual body – but the point here is that it IS a body just as Jesus was raised in His body. The dead, small and great, are mortal – they experience death (the second death) which is pretty much the definition of “mortal.”
In fact, we are all mortal without the sustaining hand of God. Life comes continually from Him, through His Holy Spirit by the gift of the Son, who has life in Himself (John 1).
That said, I think it’s important to remember that Revelation is an apocrypha, which means that it’s composed of symbolism that would have been understandable to the intended readers. Perhaps this made it possible for John to smuggle it off the Island of Patmos, or perhaps he chose the apocryphal genre for some other reason. At any rate, it’s not possible to understand that book at all if we try to take it too literally. It is truth, but truth in symbol and metaphor. That knowledge is key to its meaning.
Blessings, Cindy
oh yes, that’s why nowhere said people of the first resurrection are DEAD, because they instantly going to have a immortal spiritual body, not like the one in 2nd Resurrection
I hadn’t thought of that, Eric – but I expect you’re right. It makes sense.
I must be getting old Cindy. What is fwiw and btw? These must be codes for “in” type people. Anyway the bronze laver comment will make me go and have a look at this and see where it fits. Life group is off tonight so I have a couple of hours spare! Cheers Chris
Sorry, Chris, that’s internet slang. Fwiw == for what it’s worth. Btw == by the way.
(I actually wrote someone’s dialogue in a novel as “btw” by accident, not even slightly realizing I had done so. Fortunately not published yet, but it’s been sitting there for up to 10 years and I only noticed it a week or so ago. Things like that give authors nightmares…)
Personally, I hope someone will one day explain to me what td;lr means (or whatever the abbreviation is. I know it means something like “long story short”, but I don’t get the explicit reference.)
may be lake of fire is the old earth
“Too long; didn’t read”
Do you get that a lot, Jason?
Sonia
…I know what those words mean, but when you put them together like that they don’t make sense to me…
I didn’t know what they meant, but I can’t remember if I’ve ever gotten them myself. I know there are times when I no doubt deserved it. 
Tho . . . perhaps not QUITE to the degree our brother might have it coming.
As is evident from previous posts herein, there are different ways to picture this part of “the Words of the Prophecy of This Scroll”, and quite a few ideas occur to me as I mull over the scroll’s concluding narrative sequence, loaded with so many symbols such as it is.
What if the City is sailing on the Lake of Fire?
What if She’s on a world tour, and, along the way, collecting entire nations (the same ones whose kings will bring tribute through Her gates or…?)?
But from whence these crazy musings…? I reserve that for some subsequent posts, to try breaking this down into byte-sized (or maybe multi-kilobyte-sized ) chunks.
Here [Where to?] Comes the Bride…
For fair treatment of this scene’s geography, wherever it is that we fall on the contours between literal and symbolic, one would have to begin, I think, by determining where the City Herself is supposed to be. The only unambiguous mention to this effect is that She moves from [within?] God out of the New Sky down towards the New Earth (Revelation 21:2, 10). Hereafter we are never told whether the structure actually touches down or rather levitates perpetually, like by going on a tour of the Earth, or perhaps even leaving the atmosphere (if there is such a thing in the new universe) at some point, maybe going back and forth between Sky and Earth. The only explicitly stated thing about New Jerusalem’s location is that She is a descending set of mobile architecture.
What if God has taken up His nomadic Bedouin ways again and combined those with the culture, from some of His many peoples, of constructing rigidly permanent dwellings on portions of land? In the Exodus from Egypt, in the desert night’s darkness, Israel is guided by God in the form of a colossal column of blazing fire. Maybe the nations of Rev. 21:23-24 are described as walking by New Jerusalem’s Light because the City is always on the move, and the nations are following Her around. John first sees the Bride coming from the Heaven and then hears a voice say:http://img12.deviantart.net/960a/i/2016/112/9/f/apokalypsis_21_3_by_pyrotekhnologos-d9zssvh.jpg
If the distinction between New Jerusalem and “the nations” is genuine, then in this analogy the nations are a new Israel while the new city, which houses God and the Lamb, is Israel’s Tent of the Presence, or Tabernacle. The word translated “nations” in the Book of the Revelation is, throughout the rest of the New Testament, almost always translated “Gentiles” (and sometimes even “heathen”) in most English Bibles. In a New Covenant paradigm, Paul is the writer best known for reinterpreting the distinction between Jew and non-Jew as one between anyone who is trusting in Christ vis-à-vis anyone who is not. The Bride is generally understood to be Christ’s Congregation, so that the “Gentiles,” if my assessment is correct, should mean those who have not come into the Congregation.
Aliens
There’s also a parallel between this idea and Israel’s relationship with foreigners in the Torah. According to the Instruction [Torah] of Moses, Edomites (the brothers of Israel) and Egyptians (Israel’s erstwhile hosts) may join Israel’s Congregation after 3 generations, but Moabites and Ammonites are forbidden from ever doing so, not even down to the 10th generation, even though they are Israel’s second cousins; and on top of that Israel is to never even wish them well 
… But as it happens, Israel’s most famous king, David, was the great-grandson of a Moabite after whom an entire book of the Old Testament is named, an honour enjoyed by no other non-Israelite (except maybe for Job, who himself makes for a fascinating case-study). And this Moabite, Ruth, joined Israel’s Congregation less than 2 generations after Moses’ death. Moreover David’s daughter-in-law Naamah was an Ammonite princess! Her son Rehoboam, the fourth king of Israel, who was thus of both Moabite and Ammonite descent, became an ancestor of Jesus Christ.
Flames from the Ancient of Days
The Big White Throne scene is clearly derived from Daniel 7, which features what seems to be a courtroom scene engulfed in the flames pouring out of the Ancient of Days, Who, with the exception of his hair and clothing, is composed exclusively of blazing fire, just as is his throne and the wheels thereof. Combining this with Rev. 20-21 I would have to agree with ChrisB (and others previously hereon) who have said that God is the Lake of the Fire. Additionally it would seem that everything—the living and the dead, the sky and the earth, and even the new city—are immersed in it. The description of the Lamb’s Wife in Rev. 21:9-23 reads like an elaboration of 1 Corinthians 3, esp. vv.10-17, in which Paul prophesies that the quality of God’s Temple, “which is you”, will be tested in fire and that only the durable materials used thereon will survive the flames. Among the materials which Paul mentions, wood, hay and straw are absent from New Jerusalem’s composition. Not even silver seems to make the cut, although crystal and glass—which are associated with an entire Sea of Fire in front of the Throne in Rev. 4:6—seem to serve as its proxy.
So I’m thinking that not only is the New Jerusalem inadvertently submerged in the Lake of the Fire (because, well, the divine fire is everywhere), but God Himself, via the Throne, is the source of the fire, just like in Daniel 7. By the time we get to Rev. 22 we see that, for the City’s inhabitants, this stream of fire appears as a crystalline river of life-water, even as the flames in which everything is engulfed are experienced inside the structure as Lamb-light (there’s a lamplight pun intended in there) pouring from the inside out in 21:23-24. It’s a reversal of what we would expect in our current cosmology where we maintain a safe distance from the light- and life-source that is the sun because to make contact with it would mean sublimation. In the new city it is proximity to the source of life and light that keeps us from injury. It is also a fulfilment, for the whole world, of the Aaronic blessing of Israel for YHWH to “make His Face shine upon you” (Numbers 6:25).
For other reasons, it seems more and more obvious to me that the stream of fire/ river of life is the blood of the Lamb, and the Big White Throne is His Cross, which also is the Tree of Life. But that is a whole 'nutha thread.
http://img13.deviantart.net/b9fb/i/2016/118/9/9/genesis_0_by_pyrotekhnologos-da0ifdu.jpg
I think that this is spot on. There is another element to it presented in The Unveiling [Apocalypse] of Christ, however. In Revelation 1.16, the “one who is like a son of man” has a countenance which is “like the sun shining in his strength." If we’re taking any of these aspects of the Apocalypse at all literally, as is evidently the case on many points previously discussed in this thread, then the temperature of this character’s face, at its coolest, must be almost 5,500°C (about 9,900°F)!
The idea here echoes the shining of Moses’ face as he came down from Mt Sinai and Israel was too horrified to look upon him, so he had to cover his face with a veil to shield the people from the Light. The sequence of the appearance of the divine figures in The Unveiling of Christ follows a reverse pattern from this, in which Jesus is revealed only through cryptic and ambiguous imagery and language together with a few familiar titles but never directly identifying himself by his personal name until the 6th verse before the entire scroll [book] is about to end. At this point he has finished apocalyptising—i.e., taking off the veil—and the entire cosmos is filled with the Light from His Face (cf. the source of the new city’s sunlight in Rev. 22.5). At this point He is no longer speaking to just the writer of the book as in Ch. 1, but he is addressing the entire world, in which there is now no one who does not recognise Him.
The Big White Throne scene begins at Rev. 20:11, where the earth and the sky (or “heaven”, as it is frequently translated) ran away from the [sun-hot?] Face of the enthroned one “and no topos [place] was found for them.” The next time earth and sky are mentioned, a few verses later, they are the final models thereof, fresh from the oven or kiln, as it were, with their older versions dismissively said to have passed away.
So what we’re presented with here is the universe as we know it basically ceasing to exist. If there is absolutely nowhere for earth and sky to hide from the Face of the enthroned one, they must have just evaporated (or more properly sublimated) from the “fervent heat” (2 Peter 3.10) coming from His Face at His appearance. Better yet than this, I think, is that this is another way of saying that “He Who sits on the throne” is absolutely everywhere, taking up all of space and time. Where could Earth and Heaven possibly go to hide from Him (cf. Psalm 139)?
This then begs the question of what topos [surface] it is that the small and the great Dead Ones are standing on in front of the Throne (or “before God”, per certain manuscripts) in Rev. 20:12. The next 2 verses show that at this point the sea somehow still exists, as do Death and Hell, or rather Hades, the realm of the dead which was under the earth… But now there’s no more earth inside which to contain this nether realm.
This alludes to Job 26:6, which personifies the conditions of death and dissolution as Sheol (Hades/ Hell, meaning something like “the hidden” in all these 3 languages, viz. Ancient Hebrew, Ancient Greek and Old English) and Abaddon, saying that before God they (similarly to Adam and Eve) lie naked and uncovered/unveiled. In Rev. 9:11 Abaddon also features in his own cameo. Going by the way in which Death is usually paired with Sheol/Hades, it might be fair to deduce from this that Abaddon is none other than Death. Certain ancient apocrypha actually do make this connection and describe Jesus’s resurrection as a violent jailbreak in which Christ becomes the liberator and new owner of Abaddon’s prisoners. (In Rev. 6:8 Hades too is personified in what is certainly one of the most glossed-over symbols from this scroll.)
In the Big White Throne scene, Death and Hades are the first persons, or things, to be pitched into the fiery lake. So the answer to the question of what the Dead Ones are standing on boils down to a very small number of interesting options.
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They’re standing on thin air. This is likely only insofar as we can (or the scroll’s original readers could) conceive of air without sky. In the Hebrew and Greek cosmologies of the time, if the bowl-shaped dome of sky which was placed as a cover over the earth was removed, it would undoubtedly have resulted in the poisonous salt-waters of Tehom (Tiamat), the Abyss (Khaos), flooding the universe back into the state in which it was at Genesis 1:1. So it would essentially be an act of de-creation. This, however, is far more severe than that, because it pushes us into Genesis “Zero”: a fairly indescribable [non-]condition in which there are no heavens and no earth to flood anyway. On top of all that, there seems to have been a similar understanding then to what is known now about air, that it was a fluid, a combination of substances whose existence was somehow sustained by the existence of the bowl which covered the earth, creating an atmosphere. If whatever held the atmosphere together above were removed, and the earth upon which the atmosphere sat was likewise taken away, there could hardly be any atmosphere, or air; only a nowhere.
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They’re standing on the sea. Even though there is no longer an earth, in Rev. 20:13 there apparently is still a sea, oozing dead stuff. But skipping ahead just a couple of verses to 21.1, the sea does not exist anymore, perhaps having suffered the same fate as the earth and the sky immediately after delivering its dead contents. (On the previous page of this thread Jason has a very interesting explanation for why or how the sea has suddenly disappeared by this point in the sequence.)
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They’re standing on an ever-swelling Lake of Fire. If there’s no universe in existence anymore, no sky or air in which to levitate or clouds to sit on, no earth to stand on, no sea to float in, no Death to hide in, no Hades to sleep in, we still have this: the only part of the cosmos which seems to survive this scene intact and transition unchanged into the new universe of the next chapter, where it receives a final mention in v. 8. Paralleling this is Daniel 7, in which flames pouring directly out of the Ancient of Days form a river of fire in front of him and his throne. In addition to the Ancient One’s millions of ministers, one hundred million individuals stand before Him (being judged or simply in attendance?), apparently right on top of or inside the river’s flames, or at least on the bank(s) of the river. Additionally, in a very literal translation of Rev. 20.12, John would be seeing the Dead Ones standing “in the face of God.” (Moreover, at the event that I call the Feast of All Nations, told of in Isaiah 25, God is the Chef although He’s incidentally the only person in attendance explicitly described as consuming anything. And what He eats—or rather devours—is Death. This connects Him, the Consuming Fire, directly to the Lake of Fire, into which Death is thrown.)
Based on all that, it’s quite difficult for me not to understand the Lake of Fire as being absolutely everywhere in the cosmos. It might even be the thing that destroys the sky, the earth and the sea in this sequence, and the same thing from out of which sky and earth are resurrected.
The 1st few verses of Rev. 21 thus parallel the 1st few chapters of Genesis, becoming a rewound version of them.
In Gen. 1-2, Skies, Earth, Beast, Man and Woman are born of Wind (God’s breath or “Spirit”), water, Word, clay and some torn-off bone and flesh.
In Rev. 21, Sky, Earth, Bride, Ethnoi “Nations”] and Kings are born of God, of His Fire which burns with Divinity (Theion, “Sulphur” or “Brimstone,” in which Beast is now submerged), of His Voice and of their own tears.
If the New Jerusalem really is sailing on a fiery lake which covers the entire earth then there is another parallel with Genesis, linking it to Noah’s Flood, except that in this case those who are drowned in the flood are already dead. For reasons I’m gonna elaborate elsewhere, I think it’s a misunderstanding to perceive the dead who are being judged in this scene as having resurrected. I understand the scene to be depicting an array of corpses, akin to Ezekiel’s valley of dry bones.
The Roman Empire & the Great Sea
Beyond the pearl gates and Golden Street that have so preoccupied Western imagination, the most amazing feature of the new city, from my perspective, is Her size. The base of the structure, at 144 million square stadia, is twice the surface area of the Mediterranean Sea. For most of the ancient cultures of the Mediterranean Basin, that is the largest water body that they ever interacted with, for which reason they called it the Great—or Big—Sea, and imagined it as the source of all the world’s marine life, including the gods thereof. It might be that the sea has ceased to exist by Rev. 21 because New Jerusalem’s cosmic edifice has replaced it and will now be the world’s water supplier. That is, assuming, however, that we’re supposed to imagine the New Earth as being the same size as and possessing fairly similar topography to the current one.
On another hand, the base of New Jerusalem is almost the surface area of the entire Roman Empire in John’s time, but not quite as vast. However, the Bride’s height, which is equal to Her width and breadth, outstrips that of any building back then or even right now. Mt Everest and the rest of the Himalayas would have to be tripled about three times in size to be even vaguely visible if the entire New Jerusalem was visible in the same viewfinder. The shadow cast by the new city would cover absolutely every nation, people, tribe and tongue that the Hebrews, Romans and Greeks then thought to be in existence. The point of this seems to be a polemic against the Roman Empire: that there is a rival kingdom on the rise—currently invisible and being prepared and outfitted at much higher elevation—whose immense size, scope and splendour outweigh and outmatch Rome’s power and grandeur thousands of times over. If this structure were to touch down upon the empire right now, nothing but powder would remain beneath Her twelve foundations after the landing (see Matthew 21:42-44 & Luke 20:17-18). In the new universe, however, Jerusalem is not a war machine, and even though Her wall renders Her a formidable fortress, She is not used as a fortress, even in spite of all the undesirables outside Her gates.
Her trajectory is a downward one. The Dead swim together down there below, dehydrated in dark fire. From the City flows the Drink of Life, and the Light of Truth shines. Maybe no one has to continue being robbed or killed, or wasting away out in the wilderness. Abundant Life arrives contained in an indestructible, inexhaustible reservoir, a container so tall that its roof seems to literally scrape the sky even while its feet, prepared with the gospel of peace, touch the ground… or at least approach it.