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by
Randy Alcorn
Started reading
September 1, 2020
Happiness in Heaven is not based on ignorance but on perspective.
parting is not the end of our relationship, only an interruption.
Paul Marshall writes, “Our destiny is an earthly one: a new earth, an earth redeemed and transfigured. An earth reunited with heaven, but an earth, nevertheless.”
are homesick for Eden.65 We’re nostalgic for what is implanted in our hearts. It’s built into us, perhaps even at a genetic level. We long for what the first man and woman once enjoyed—a perfect and beautiful Earth with free and
relationships with God, each other, animals, and our environment. Every attempt at human progress has been an attempt to overcome what was lost in the Fall
Revelation 21 makes it clear—it’s the New Earth. That’s where the New Jerusalem will reside when it comes down out of Heaven. Only then will we be truly home.
Eldredge says, “We can only hope for what we desire.”67 To this I would add a corollary: We can only desire what we can imagine. If you think you can’t imagine Heaven—or if you imagine it as something drab and unappealing—you can’t get excited about it. You can’t come with the childlike eagerness that God so highly values (Mark 10:15).
order to have a biblical worldview, we must have a sense of our past, present, and future, and how they relate to each other. Without understanding God’s original plan for mankind and the earth, we cannot understand his future plan. Without the bookends of past and future in place, the book itself—our present lives—won’t stand up.
The following chart shows the three phases of Earth’s history: humanity’s past
history.
God’s redemptive plan climaxes not at the return of Christ, nor in the millennial kingdom, but on the New Earth. Only then will all wrongs be made right. Only then will there be no more death, crying, or pain (Revelation 21:1-4
God’s redemptive goals are far less modest than we imagine. He surrenders no territory to the enemy.
died not merely to make the best of a bad situation. He died so that mankind, Earth, and the universe itself would be renewed to forever proclaim his glory
preached that Christ “must remain in heaven until the time comes for God to restore everything, as he promised long ago through his holy prophets” (Acts 3:21
“At the renewal of all things, when the Son of Man sits on his glorious throne, you who have followed me will also sit on twelve thrones, judging the twelve tribes of Israel” (Matthew 19:27-28
The word paligenesia, translated “renewal” in Matthew 19:28, comes from two words which together mean “new genesis” or “coming back from death to life.”
A "new genesis" is the promise of Jesus.
as together we fell, together we shall rise. God will transform the fallen human race into a renewed human race and the present Earth into the New Earth.
Calvin writes in his commentary on Romans 8:19, “I understand the passage to have this meaning—that there is no element and no part of the world which is being touched, as it were, with a sense of its present misery, that does not intensely hope for a resurrection.”
As mankind goes, so goes all of creation
possible effect could our redemption have on galaxies that are billions of light years away? The same effect that our fall had on them. Adam and Eve’s sin did not merely create a personal catastrophe or a local, Edenic catastrophe; it was a catastrophe of cosmic—not just global—proportions.
The second law of thermodynamics, entropy, tells us that all things
deteriorate. This means that everything was once in a better condition than it is now. Children and stars can both be born, but both ultimately become engaged in a downward spiral. Even the remotest parts of the universe reveal vast realms of fiery destruction. On the one hand, these cataclysms declare God’s greatness. On the other hand, they reflect something that is out of order on a massive scale.
seems possible that even the second law of thermodynamics (at least as it is popularly understood) may have bee...
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Man is the instrument for the redemption of the earthly creation.
John Piper writes, “What happens to our bodies and what happens to the creation go
together. And what happens to our bodies is not annihilation but redemption. . . . Our bodies will be redeemed, restored, made new, not thrown away. And so it is with the heavens and the earth.”
Paul doesn’t use analogies of death and destruction. He uses the analogy of childbirth: “The whole creation has been groaning as in the pains of childbirth right up until the present time” (Romans 8:22).
Romans 8 contains a powerful theology of suffering. There’s the groaning of those dying without hope, and in contrast, the groaning of those in childbirth. Both processes are painful, yet they are very different. The one is the pain of hopeless dread, the other the pain of hopeful anticipation. The Christian’s pain is very real, but it’s the pain of a mother anticipating the joy of holding her child.
“Make permanent the works of our hands.”
"Only one life will soon be passed; only what's done for Christ will last."
