Hope for Eternity

You can wrap your reading of the Bible in an hour with Revelation 21. Amazing stuff:

Then I saw a new heaven and a new earth, for the old heaven and the old earth had disappeared. And the sea was also gone. And I saw the holy city, the new Jerusalem, coming down from God out of heaven like a beautiful bride prepared for her husband.
I heard a loud shout from the throne, saying, "Look, the home of God is now among his people! He will live with them, and they will be his people. God himself will be with them. He will remove all of their sorrows, and there will be no more death or sorrow or crying or pain. For the old world and its evils are gone forever." (Revelation 21:1-4)

A promise of heaven one day, of God living fully with us, of all our sorrows being gone, of being in a new world, seems like one of those dreams that will never see reality. It seems too idyllic to be anything but wishful thinking.

But look at it this way - if we walked away from God, but he reached out to us and sent his own Son to die a gory death for us and rise again, then why shouldn't we expect something amazing at the end of it all. Here, take a look at this photo. I took it at Susan Lake, high in the Purcell mountains of British Columbia just over a week ago:

Fabulous, isn't it? The beauty, the bigness, the color. All of this evolved through some blind working of blind chance, right? Or God made it, and Jesus is alive. And one day Revelation 21 will be a reality.