The Future Destiny Of Man: The New Heavens And The New Earth Series

I’m not going to die, I’m going to live forever. Christ Jesus our savior has done it. So we have a future. We are the blessed ones, who need not fear death, but we get to live forever. Imagine it: To live forever.

From Isaiah 25 verses 8 and 9, God gave Isaiah a preview of the future, he said, “ he will swallow up death forever. The Sovereign LORD will wipe away the tears from all faces; he will remove his people’s disgrace from all the earth. The LORD has spoken.

9 In that day they will say, “Surely this is our God; we trusted in him, and he saved us. This is the LORD, we trusted in him; let us rejoice and be glad in his salvation.”

So in the next life, which the Bible calls the new heavens and the new Earth, we will rejoice. And we’ll be happy. C.S. Lewis said, “Joy is the serious business of heaven.” That is the truth.

The new heavens and the new earth. This is what we labor for day in and day out. This is why we live differently than the world. This is why we deny ourselves when so many others indulge endlessly. This is why we preach the gospel. This is why we stay up to the wee hours of the morning praying for strangers. This is why we dedicate our lives, our souls, our hope, our futures to a Jesus Christ we’ve never met face to face. We live day by day for this hope of immortality itself, to gain access to the fountain of youth, the tree of life, in a place where all is made right.

Jesus spoke often of this place. In fact Christ is our way there. He is our escape hatch from this broken reality we see around us. I know I can feel it in my life, that things are not the way they should be. It’s like a splinter in the mind, driving us mad. We can sense there is something wrong with the world. Even non-Christians would admit this fact. We can sense it.

Thankfully there is a way out of this broken reality, where there are so many problems. There is a doorway to a new place, a new heavens and earth where there is no war, no famine, no corruption. And Jesus Christ the savior of the world came into the world and told us all about it. There’s room for me, there’s room for you.

Jesus said,”My Father’s house has many rooms; if that were not so, would I have told you that I am going there to prepare a place for you?

And if I go and prepare a place for you, I will come back and take you to be with me that you also may be where I am.

You know the way to the place where I am going.”

So Jesus was crucified. He resurrected from the dead. And then he ascended to heaven. That was two thousand years ago. And at some point in the future Christ will return in the same way that he left. And His word says that every eye will see him.

Jesus promises in John 14:2-4 that he left to prepare a place for us in this new world, and He will return to bring us there.

Jesus will bring people from the east, like China, India, even North Korea, and people from the west, like Europe and us here in the United States, and the North and South, like Russia, the continent of Africa, and all across the planet. And it says in Luke chapter 13, verse 30 that the first will be last and the last will be first.

I love that. What that means is that people who seem really important in this life won’t be the important ones in the next.

Heaven is a real place. It’s a reality. God declares it in his word, so we should believe that it is true. Let’s consider the state of affairs. This is the future destiny of the human race. We’re really right now in a tangent reality destined for destruction. This fallen Earth we live on right now is a contingent reality, subject to change.

If we could look at a timeline of humanity’s past, we’d see that humanity was created at it’s first phase as the centerpiece of a perfect universe, on a perfect Earth, in communion with a perfect heaven. In fact it says that on this perfect Earth, in Genesis, God himself walked among the garden of Eden where the first humans lived. The second phase begins when the fall event occurs. Humanity turns away from God, betrays god and tries to play god for themselves. This event is magnified from the choice of the first humans and it explodes outward, in what we know as the fall, the curse upon creation, and the Earth itself becomes fallen, the human heart becomes fallen, and this is the reality we live in now. Things are messed up, as a reaction to the first human’s attempt to play god and desire a world without god.