I'm preaching on regeneration from Titus 3 this Sunday, and as I studied for it I was reminded of something I read several years ago by Brian Habig, who was the RUF minister at MSU back in the late nineties.  Enjoy.

A couple of years ago, I led a group of students to Bucharest, Romania. It was my second trip there.

Prior to the advent of communism, Bucharest was known as "the Paris of the East" and graced its portion of the globe with classical architecture and Old World charm. Now a visitor has to search for remnants of the city's prior glory. It's not too much to say that if George Lucas asked the folks at Industrial Light and Magic to create the bleakest computer-generated, post-communist landscape they could imagine, they would be hard-pressed to outdo the real appearance of Bucharest. All the city's major boulevards are now lined with mile after mile of sterile, lifeless apartment buildings. To build the massive People's Palace (second in size only to the Pentagon as a government building), Ceacescu tore down sixteen residential blocks – sixteen blocks of homes, and presumably churches, that are now gone and forgotten.

After several days of immersion in the gray city, and of watching busses and trolleys packed with unsmiling city-dwellers, our group began to talk about Bucharest – not just its people, but the physical city itself. We agreed that we found ourselves hungering for this place to be redeemed, but not generically so. We wanted a New Bucharest. Bucharest had been created, Bucharest fell, and now Bucharest – the real, material place – needed a particular redemption.

This is precisely what God has in store for the earth. The future that the Bible offers to Christians is one that can be, and ought to be, described as "earthy." Both the Old and New Testaments depict the future home of God's people not as a generic heaven, but as the new heavens and the new earth (Isaiah 65:17; Revelation 21:1). Of course, we want more detail than that. The Bible offers less than we'd like, but it offers enough to help us long for home.

First, Jesus described the setting as a converted earth. (He does this in Matthew 19:28 with a term that's hard to translate – the NIV reads "the renewal of all things.") Think of it this way: when a non-Christian becomes a Christian, he or she is a new creation but is still recognizable as the same person. The New Earth will be a new creation, but it will still be recognizable as the earth.

Second, Jesus declares about this place, "Behold, I am making all things new" (Rev. 21:5). Note: he does not say, "Behold, I am making all new things." If you have fallen in love with trees or dogs or coffee in this world, Jesus assures you that trees and dogs and coffee will endure.

Third, the New Earth is an earth that is no longer cursed (Rev. 22:3). In short, everything that hindered or opposed truth, beauty, and goodness (particularly, all the ways that our own sin did) will be eradicated. Everyone on the renovated globe will no longer be alienated from God, from others, from the rest of creation, or even from themselves. The Christian will finally realize that longed-for experience: complete comfort in one's own skin, in the company of those just as comfortable in theirs, and perfect love between them to round it all out.

Lastly, and this may sound a bit weird, the New Earth will be made of the materials of the very earth we now occupy. Scripture depicts the end of this earth not as a complete annihilation at God's hand, but rather, as a great purging and recasting of the same material by the Great Artist who first created it all from nothing. The apostle Peter writes:

But the day of the Lord will come like a thief, and then the heavens will pass away with a roar, and the heavenly bodies will be burned up and dissolved, and the earth and the works that are done on it will be exposed (or, "found").

This fact made such an impression on one group of Christians that they mentioned it in one of the earlier creeds to emerge from the Protestant Reformation: "Finally we believe, according to God's Word, that when the time appointed by the Lord is come (which is unknown to all creatures) and the number of the elect is complete, our Lord Jesus Christ will come from heaven, bodily and visibly.... He will burn this old world, in fire and flame, in order to cleanse it" (Belgic Confession, 1561).

Isn't this what the Christmas hymns have been telling us all along? "He comes to make his blessings known far as the curse is found." Or, better still, "calls you one and call you all to gain his everlasting hall." That certainly sounds more like the House of Rohan than like Science Fiction City to me. And it makes me long for my earthy home