Sometimes people talk as if the Christian story ends in the first century. It does not. In fact, if you read what Jesus said, you quickly discover that He often spoke of His future return. So then, the Resurrection is not the end of the story. Indeed, the end of the story has yet to occur. Christianity is a religion that is in the middle of its story. As far as time on Earth is concerned, the Bible talks as if we are now in the last days. Peter spoke this way at Pentecost (Acts 2:16ff). So if history were a book, perhaps we are now in chapter 38 of 40 (or something like that), but God is not finished with the Earth.
“Heaven and Earth shall pass away,” Jesus said (Mt 24:35). In church, I have been preaching on the book of Revelation, which gives us a series of visions of the future of Earth. The book certainly has its share of passages that are difficult to interpret, but it also has many major themes that are clear. One of those themes deals with the destruction of this Earth. No matter how you interpret Revelation, it is rather plain that God speaks as if this Earth comes to an end. And Revelation is not the only place in the Bible that talks this way.
Thus, Christians see Earth as something like the Titanic. It is big. It is proud. It has its own sort of glory. But it is going to the bottom of the sea. People run around on it trying to get the best cabins or even to become captain, but if they build their life around the Titanic, they will go down when the ship goes down. And they will have no hope.
The idea that this Earth is mortal is, in many ways, common sense. It fits what we see everywhere else. Everything physical wears out and falls apart. Your bodies wear out. Your car wears out. Your pants wear out. Your computer dies. Your home falls apart. Even the rocks on a canyon wall wear away. Why do we somehow think that Earth is different? Nothing physical lasts. And this Earth will die. This fact is part of the Christian story. The Bible predicts it.
Now if you remember back to the beginning of the story, you will recall that sin entered the world and corrupted everything. The man was cursed. The woman was cursed. The land was cursed. Yes, that’s right. The land was cursed. The beautiful world that God had made was corrupted, and God insists on His beautiful world again. But this world is not that world. This world is so corrupted that God cannot merely tweak a few things and voila — Eden. No. This world is so corrupted that for God to get the world He wants, He must actually destroy this one and remake a new one. And He will. But in the meantime, in between the first Eden and the future Eden, God wants to save people from the Titanic. This is why He waits. This is also why He focuses so much on sin, for sin is why everything is corrupted in the first place.
So God, through Christ, makes His people new and clean and changes their lives so that they no longer live for the luxuries and the culture of the Titanic. But sadly, many people will not listen to God. They think that the Titanic is where they will be happy, so they chase their own happiness apart from God. Unfortunately, they will receive the very thing they choose. But they will not like it. They were made for God, not Earth.
After God destroys this world, Scripture says that He makes a new heaven and a new Earth. This place is holy, clean, bright, beautiful, glorious. It has no tears or pain or sorrow, and it is the place where God dwells and where we see Him face to face. It is the place God originally intended you and me to dwell in. But for you and me to dwell there, we must be different from what we are now, for our current bodies are corrupted with sin. Our current bodies could not handle glory. Thus, God must remake our bodies in order for them to fit this new world. This, too, is common sense. Just as a creature on Earth must fit its environment or it will suffer, so must we fit this new environment or we will suffer. So God gives us new bodies.
We must understand that people who do not accept the cleansing and power of Christ are turning down the ability to live in glory. If they were to experience this future, glorious world in their current state, they would not like it. That is correct. Most people would not like heaven if they found themselves there. They would be like polar bears forever confined to the tropics. The light of glory would penetrate their insides and they would forever be begging for mercy. We must understand that there is a real sense in which hell is merciful.
And when this heaven and earth have passed away, and God has created a new heaven and earth, and He has buried all of our sin and transformed our current bodies into glorious ones, then, and only then has the Christian story on this Earth ended.
But when that happens, we shall begin a new story in the presence of God, an everlasting story where each moment is grander and more wondrous than the best wedding celebration you could imagine. And that everlasting story is the whole point of the law and the prophets and the Cross and the Resurrection and the rest of the Christian story we have described. You see, this story of Christ that we think takes up so much history is just a brief preface. The real book is yet to come.
