By David ReayMonday 1 Jul 2019LifeWords DevotionalsFaithReading Time: 2 minutes
Yet what we suffer now is nothing compared to the glory he will reveal to us later. For all creation is waiting eagerly for that future day when God will reveal who his children really are. Against its will, all creation was subjected to God’s curse. But with eager hope, the creation looks forward to the day when it will join God’s children in glorious freedom from death and decay. For we know that all creation has been groaning as in the pains of childbirth right up to the present time. (NLT)
For many believers, heaven is imagined as a place ‘up there’, a place of golden streets and lots of hymn singing. This picture is a result of our reading some biblical descriptions too literally. Whenever the Bible tries to describe heaven it is trying to describe the indescribable and so stretches language and metaphor to the limit.
We may get a better idea from texts like this. It seems the world is not going to be simply destroyed with the result of our floating off to some faraway place. It seems that our created world, which God made and called good, will undergo radical renovation. When we become who we were made to be, this world will become what it was made to be. When we went wrong we dragged creation down with us. When we get put right, we lift creation up with us.
All that is good and beautiful in our world will be perfected in the new heavens and new earth. All true pleasures will be fulfilled. At the moment we only have a taste of such perfection but one day it will be our constant experience. We will be in relationship with one another and our God. We will appreciate our world as we have never appreciated it before.
Of course we scratch our heads about the details of how this will work out. But if we imagine heaven as being like this earth will the bad removed and all the good intensified and purified, we won’t go far wrong.
Blessings
David