When God made the world, everything he made was filled with beauty. After sin entered the world, that beauty was tarnished and marred by the awful realities of sin and death. When we look at the world around us today, we see vestiges of that originally beauty still proclaiming the goodness and glory of God, but we also see the scarred brokenness of a once-beautiful world now filled with ugliness and wickedness.

Were that the end of the story, it would be a profound sadness for all of us. However, one of the key promises throughout the Bible— in both the Old and New Testaments—is the promise that creation will be restored to its former beauty and cleansed from sin and all its consequences. Early on, these promises took the form of a beautiful and fruitful land to Abraham for all of his descendants, but as the story continued throughout Scripture, the promise was revealed to be far greater than Abraham himself could have ever imagined.