One of the common themes in fiction is the future. There are entire genres built around “what if” scenarios, imagining what could happen, with visions of peaceful utopias, where everyone lives in harmony, or dystopian nightmares where everything is pretty much the worst. And while our imaginary futures are fascinating, God has given us a glimpse of what is really going to happen. Let’s take a look together. 

The Bible ends with a vision of the future—a vision of where everything is actually heading. After Christ returns and the children of God are revealed, all of creation will be made new. All of God’s people, everyone who puts their faith in Jesus, will have new bodies, glorified as Christ’s is, forever free from the effects of sin that plague us today. But it’s not just us who will be made new. The physical world itself will undergo a similar transformation. And this transformation is so extreme that the Bible describes it as a new heaven and a new earth. There’s a lot about this that we don’t know about this new earth, but here’s what we can know:

The new earth will be a holy world and we will be entirely holy people. We will feast on the finest foods and drinks without shame or fear of overindulgence. We will have renewed and redeemed desires. We will have identities uncompromised by status-seeking and sin. But most importantly, we will live in a real world where we will delight in the presence of Jesus, whom we will see face to face for the first time and who will live with us forever (Luke 22:18; Rev. 21).

This is a world we can hardly imagine, greater than any human vision of the future. It will be the world as God intends it, the world we’re looking forward to. So we live faithfully day-by-day in this world, sharing the gospel and making God’s glory known in the world, waiting for the day that this new creation will begin.