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new creation

"...then the LORD God formed the man of dust from the ground and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life, and the man became a living creature."  (Genesis 2:7 ESV) 

 "But our citizenship is in heaven, and from it we await a Savior, the Lord Jesus Christ, who will transform our lowly body to be like his glorious body, by the power that enables him even to subject all things to himself."  (Philippians 3:20-21 ESV) 

 The future hope of the Christian is "spiritual" in the sense that God's Spirit will indwell, give life to, glorify, and mediate all creation with God's holy presence.  But the new creation will not for that reason be primarily immaterial or ethereal (like harps and clouds), though there is an immaterial dimension to it. 

 Jesus in his resurrected body -- better, in his resurrected Self -- ate meals with his disciples, walked and talked with them, and allowed them to touch his wounds from the cross.  This was real and physical and deeply spiritual.   

 The new creation likewise will be real, concrete, physical, relational, and spiritual.  There is not a complete break -- a total discontinuity -- between the old creation and the new.  Herman Bavinck writes, 
All that is true, honorable, just, pure, pleasing, and commendable in the whole creation, in heaven and on earth, is gathered up in the future city of God-renewed, re-created, boosted to its highest glory. 

The substance [of the city of God] is present in this creation. Just as the caterpillar becomes a butterfly, as a carbon is converted into diamond, as the grain of wheat upon dying in the ground produces other grains of wheat, as all of nature revives in the spring and dresses up in celebrative clothing, as the believing community is formed out of Adam’s fallen race, as the resurrection body is raised from the body that is dead and buried in the earth, so too, by the re-creating power of Christ, the new heaven and the new earth will one day emerge from the fire-purged elements of this world, radiant in enduring glory and forever set free from the ‘bondage to decay’ (Rom. 8:21). More glorious than this beautiful earth, more glorious than the earthly Jerusalem, more glorious even than paradise will be the glory of the new Jerusalem, whose architect and builder is God himself. (Reformed Dogmatics, IV:720)



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