Guest Post: Ideas About Landscape

A Guest Post by Alison Moffitt. Originally Posted Here.

We're home now. During our long drive we saw lots and lots of beautiful landscapes and I spent a lot of time mulling over the things I saw.

Often I get sad thinking about how the beautiful landscapes I love now might disappear when Jesus comes back. When he makes the new heavens and the new earth, who's to say it will look like the same?

But then maybe when we are completely and finally sanctified and standing with Christ we won't want to look at these landscapes anymore. We turn a blind eye to it now - it's easy to forget that these beautiful landscapes are marred by sin. How many people have been dispossessed for others to take and shape the landscape? How many workers have been oppressed to clear fields and build the dams that divert the water further up the catchment? How many habitats have been ruined and how extensive the environmental degradation for the sake of turning a profit? When you think about it, many of the beautiful landscapes we revel in now are tainted with the greed and opression of past generations.

I'm sure that in the new creation we will have landscapes which are just as beautiful as the ones we love here, but where no one's blood is crying out from the soil.

For behold, I create new heavens and a new earth,
and the former things shall not be remembered or come into mind.
But be glad and rejoice forever in that which I create;
for behold, I create Jerusalem to be a joy, and her people to be a gladness.
Isaiah 65:17-18