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.
The authors of the New Testament point all God’s people to fix their eyes not only on a restoration of their own selves, but on a restoration of the entire creation as well. In the book of Romans, the apostle Paul would say, “For the creation waits with eager longing for the revealing of the sons of God. For the creation was subjected to futility, not willingly, but because of him who subjected it, in hope that the creation itself will be set free from its bondage to corruption and obtain the freedom of the glory of the children of God” (Romans 8:19–21). Creation itself awaits restoration just like we do, and just like us, that restoration will come with the return of Jesus.
As far back as the book of Ezekiel, God’s people were receiving visions of a restored creation. The entire end of Ezekiel’s prophecy, from Chapters 40–48, details a vision of a new land a new temple which has yet to come to pass even to this day. We may wonder whether or not God’s promises revealed to Ezekiel will ever come true. That is, until we arrive at the end of the book of Revelation. As John witnessed the end of all history, he recounted what he saw—“Then I saw a new heaven and a new earth, for the first heaven and the first earth had passed away, and the sea was no more” (Revelation 21:1).
In this life, Our relationship with beauty is always going to be complicated, fraught with contradiction and difficulty, and we will never in our earthly lifetimes experience the true, untainted beauty of God’s good creation before it was plunged into sin. But when Christ comes to make all things new, all of creation will be made new together with us, and we will be able to experience true beauty, without end and without limit, for all eternity together with Him. May that day come soon! Come Lord Jesus!
All the best,
Luke Burrow
