NEW FROM THE OLD

N. T. Wright, one of my favorite theologians and authors, writes, “It is striking how the earliest Christians, like mainstream rabbis of the period, clung to the twin doctrines of creation and judgment: God made the world and made it good, and one day he will come and sort it all out. Take away the goodness of creation, and you have a judgment where the world is thrown away as so much garbage, leaving us sitting on a disembodied cloud playing disembodied harps. Take away judgment, and you have this world rumbling on with no hope except the pantheist one of endless cycles of being and history. Put creation and judgment together, and you get new heavens and new earth, created not ex nihilo but ex vetere, not out of nothing but out of the old one, the existing one.”

There will clearly be an ending as there was a beginning. What is comforting to me is that the ending will be a new heaven and a new earth created out of the one we now live on. I am thinking of several people and a good number of cities and states and countries that could use a massive remodel. It will come out of the ashes of the existing one.

“Do not judge by appearances, but judge with right judgment.” Jesus