Will You Be Amazed? - Randy Alcorn

Many assume heaven will be unlike earth. But why do we think this? God designed earth for human beings. And nearly every description of heaven includes references to earthly things—eating, music, animals, water, trees, fruits, and a city with gates and streets.

The Bible speaks of the new heavens and the new earth—not a nonheavens and nonearth. "New" doesn't mean fundamentally different, but vastly superior. If someone says, "I'm going to give you a new car," you'd get excited. Why? Not because you have no idea what a car is, but because you do know.

A new car doesn't mean a vehicle without a steering wheel, seats, doors, and tires. If it didn't have those, it wouldn't be a car. The new car is a better version of what you already have. Likewise, the new earth will be a far better version of this earth. That's why we can anticipate it. If we think of heaven as a place where disembodied spirits float around—which is never depicted in the Bible—we can't get excited about it. It's not a nonearth we long for—it's a new earth. And we long not for a nonbody but for a new body (2 Corinthians 5:1-4).

It's as Lord Digory explained to the children in C. S. Lewis's Chronicles of Narnia, "Our own world...is only a shadow or copy of something in Aslan's real world."

The promise of new heavens and a new earth is introduced in Isaiah (65:17-19; 66:22). In the New Testament, John tells us more about it (Revelation 21), and Peter speaks of the earth being burned, followed by "a new heaven and a new earth, the home of righteousness" (2 Peter 3:10-13). I understand this not as the absolute destruction of the planet, but the scorching of the surface and everything on it. It's as if an artist wiped paint away and started a new and better painting, but on the same canvas. As our resurrection bodies will be a superior recreation of our old ones, so the new earth will be the old earth liberated from sin and decay (Romans 8:19-22), radically and beautifully transformed.

Our beloved, Jesus, and our home, heaven. What a person! What a place! (What more could we possibly ask for?)

Meanwhile, we should live our lives on earth in light of eternity, as our spiritual forefathers did, anticipating the great city that awaits us.

—From In Light of Eternity by Randy Alcorn, in a chapter entitled "Will You Be Amazed?" (pp 31-32).