New Heavens, New Earth

Isaiah 65:17–25; Romans 4:6–13

I am about to create new heavens and a new earth, God declares through Isaiah. The former things shall not be remembered or come to mind. This is not an incremental improvement. It is not renovation. It is creation—the same verb used in Genesis 1, bara, which belongs exclusively to God. No one else creates from nothing. No one else makes all things new.

Isaiah paints the picture: no more infant mortality, no more labor that comes to nothing, no more lives cut short. The wolf and the lamb shall feed together. Before they call I will answer, while they are yet speaking I will hear. It is a vision so beautiful it aches—because we know how far our present world falls from it.

"Even the darkest night will end and the sun will rise." —Victor Hugo, Les Misérables

Paul, writing to the Romans, picks up the thread from a different angle. He speaks of Abraham, who believed God when every physical fact argued against belief. Abraham did not weaken in faith when he considered his own body, which was already as good as dead. The promise was absurd—a child, nations, descendants like stars—but Abraham trusted the One who makes the promise rather than the evidence against it.

This is the shape of Lenten faith: holding the vision of the new creation while walking through the old one. It is not denial. It is not pretending things are better than they are. It is the stubborn, sometimes aching insistence that the current arrangement is not the final word. That the God who creates from nothing is not finished.

Simone Weil, the French philosopher and mystic, wrote that the beauty of the world is Christ’s tender smile for us coming through matter. She saw creation not as a barrier to God but as a translucent medium through which divine love shines. Even now—even in the broken, groaning, wolf-eating-the-lamb world—beauty breaks through. And every act of beauty is a sign of the new creation already arriving.

The desert mothers and fathers lived in the harshest landscapes imaginable—scorching sand, minimal food, no comfort. Yet their writings overflow with hope. They were not escapists. They were realists who believed that the most real thing in the universe is not the desert but the God who makes deserts bloom.

Today, hold both truths at once: the world as it is, and the world as God promises it will be. Let the tension between them become a prayer. The former things have not yet passed away. But the One who creates new heavens and a new earth is already at work—in you, in the ordinary soil of this ordinary day.

Wendell Berry, the poet and farmer, is associated with a way of seeing the world summed up like this: The world is not altogether a bad place. It just needs somebody to tend it, somebody to pick up after it. This is the eschatological faith of Isaiah rendered in Kentucky dialect—the conviction that creation is not disposable but redeemable, that the labor of tending and planting and harvesting matters because the God who made the earth has not given up on it. The new creation is not the destruction of the old but its transfiguration. The fields will still be fields. The mountains will still be mountains. But everything will be healed.