Thoughts Heavenward

We are homesick for Eden.  We're nostalgic for what is implanted in our hearts.  It's built into us, perhaps at a genetic level.  We long for what the first man and woman once enjoyed -- a perfect and beautiful Earth and free and unstained relationships with God, one another, animals, and the environment.  Every attempt at human progress has been an attempt to overcome what was lost in the Fall.  If God's plan were merely to take mankind to the present Heaven or to a Heaven that is the dwelling place of spirit beings, there would be no need for new heavens and a New Earth. . .[God] isn't going to abandon his creation; he's going to restore it. We won't go to Heaven and leave Earth behind.  Rather, God will bring Heaven and Earth together into the same dimension, with no wall of separation, no armed angels to guard Heaven's perfection from sinful mankind (Genesis 3:24).  God's perfect plan is "to bring unity to all things in heaven and on earth under Christ" (Ephesians 1:10, NIV). . .If the present Earth, so diminished by the Curse, is at times so beautiful and wonderful and if our bodies, so diminished by the Curse, are at times overcome with a sense of the Earth's beauty and wonder, then how magnificent will the New Earth be?  Spurgeon speaks eloquently of what awaits this Earth:  'Her curse shall be removed, her stains taken away, and this world shall be as fair as when God first formed her from his mind.'  Earth cannot be delivered from the Curse by being destroyed.  It can be delivered only by being resurrected.  Christ's resurrection is the forerunner of our own, and our resurrection will be the forerunner of the Earth's. 

~Randy Alcorn, We Shall See God, pp. 180 - 181