“I will sing unto the LORD, for He hath triumphed gloriously: the horse and his rider hath He thrown into the sea” (Exodus 15:1).

In the book of Revelation is a startling verse about the condition of the new heaven and earth: “And I saw a new heaven and a new earth: for the first heaven and the first earth were passed away; and there was no more sea” (Revelation 21:1).

It is difficult to understand an earth with no sea. The oceans play the major role in the earth’s hydrological cycle and are used by God to sustain a complex world of marine life. The sea has also been used by God in judgment upon His enemies, as in our text and, of course, the greatest judgment our world has ever seen was a watery judgment: “The same day were all the fountains of the great deep broken up, and the windows of heaven were opened . . . (and) All in whose nostrils was the breath of life, of all that was in the dry land, died” (Genesis 7:11,22).

Evidently many sea creatures escaped the judgment of Noah’s flood and remain to this day. But the sea itself and its creatures have not been exempted from God’s curse or His righteous judgment. In the tribulation period the waters of the earth will be turned to blood, and “every living soul” in the sea will die. Through the ages, man has told and retold the story of a great flood and how it judged the world, but in the final days of our world, the sea itself will be judged, and man is required to stand, not before that which the Creator controls, but before the Creator Himself.

No one can really know why there will be “no more sea” in the new earth, but we can know that then God’s righteous judgments will be over and the water supply will be “a pure river of water of life, clear as crystal, proceeding out of the throne of God and of the lamb” (Revelation 22:1). CJH