"This earth..."

Hopefully you noticed my tag line: "Reflections on the journey from this earth to the next." I'm hoping "this earth" will catch some eyes. I almost put "this world" -- that's the way we talk, normally. By putting "this earth," I wanted to highlight that we too often talk as if heaven is our ultimate destination. In popular images, we picture the afterlife as floating on clouds, disembodied spirits living in a spirit world. To an extent, that will be true for a while, but after a time, the dead will no longer be disembodied spirits -- we will have physical bodies. They will be different from what we have now -- probably in ways we can't now imagine, besides not being affected by sin or age -- but they will be bodies.

These bodies may exist for a time in heaven, but the day will come when our new bodies will not live in heaven but on a new earth. The new earth will be a place without sickness or death or mourning. There will be no tears, and there will be no sin.

We live in a fallen world, and somehow the evil of this world gets transformed in our minds as matter being evil in itself. It is not. God made our material world and our material bodies and said, "It is good." Then Man rebelled, resulting in a fall not only for himself but for creation. One day this will be fixed by the power of the cross. Wrong will be made right, evil will be no more, and once again, God will be able to say, "It is good."