NEW HEAVEN NEW EARTH

Transcript

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Hello everyone. This is Pastor Dean Thompson with a word of hope. A new heaven, a new earth. Then I saw a new heaven and a new earth. For the first heaven and the first earth had passed away. Revelation 21 verse 1. After the conflict, after the dragon and the beasts and the long endurance of the saints, John's vision opens unto the dawn of everything. Then I saw a new heaven and a new earth. This is where the whole story has been ending, has been heading, not to the destruction of the world, but to its renewal. The Bible that begun in a garden ends not in an escape from creation, but in a remade creation, washed clean and made new. There is a crucial Greek word here that shapes the whole whole. The word for new is chainos, not naos. Neos means new in time, brand new, never existed before, a replacement for the old. John does not see God throwing away the old creation and starting over from scratch. He sees the old creation transfigured, renewed, healed into what it was always meant to be. The hope of the gospel is not an evacuation, but renovation. This matters more than it might first appear. Some imagine the Christian hope as a flight away from this world, souls escaping a doomed planet to float into a disembodied heaven. But Revelation's hope is far more earthy and more and far more wonderful. God is not abandoning his creation, he is redeeming it. The same world that has grown under decay and death will be made new. The matter of this world matters to God. He intends to save it, not scrap it. And notice the next detail, and the sea was no more. In the symbolic world of Revelation, the sea was the place of chaos, the source from which from which the beast arose, the image of all that is restless, threatening and untamed. To say the sea is no more is to say that chaos itself is finished, that the deep instability that has menaced creation since the beginning has been swallowed up. Nothing will ever again rise from the deep to threaten the peace of God's world. This is hope at its most expansive. Every loss you have ever grieved, every beauty you have watched decay, every good thing the world has spoiled, all of it is gathered up into the promise of a renewed creation. The hope is not merely what you will be, is not merely merely that you will be rescued from the world, but that the world itself will be rescued. The aching beauty of this present creation, shut through with both glory and grief, is not the final word. There is a kind of creation coming. The old world, the old made new and unbreakable. Consider how this dignifies the present. If God is going to renew this creation rather than discard it, then the world is not a disposable waiting room. The work we do we do here, caring for people, tending the earth, making things of beauty and justice is not destined for the trash heap. It belongs somehow to the new creation God is bringing. We labor not to escape the world, but in hope of its renewal. So lift your hope to the new heaven and the new earth. The story does not end in ashes, but in renewal. The same creation God called good, made new and freed from chaos forever. Whatever you have watched decay, whatever beauty you have grieved, hold on to the promise of kindness. He is not finished with this world, he is making it new. O Lord, thank you that the story ends not in ashes, but in renewal. A new heaven and new earth. Chaos gone forever. When we grieve what has decayed, lift our hope to the kindness world you are making and keep us faithful to the end. Amen. God bless you, brothers and sisters.