Daily Devotional For December 2, 2025
And I saw a new heaven and a new earth. For the first heaven and the first earth had gone away, and there was no more sea. Rev 21:1.
According to this text, the New Earth will be quite different from the earth as we know it. But how can we be sure the earth will survive the End in a meaningful form? The studies of science are certainly not encouraging. They suggest that the universe is headed either for collapse and fiery meltdown or expansion and a big freeze. Neither option sounds attractive to me. But why worry about that? Long before the universe could come to an end, scientists anticipate a solar explosion that would leave no trace of earth.
So what hope is there that a new heaven and a new earth might replace the old ones? Scientist-theologian John Polkinghorne believes that there is only one source for such hope, the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob.1 He points out that we are not the first generation in which people were skeptical of the promises of God. Jesus faced skeptics too.
Like many in our time, the Sadducees did not believe in an afterlife. They tried to trap Jesus with an ingenious story about a woman who was the wife of seven brothers, one after the other (Matt 22:23-26). Each had died without children, leaving to the next the duty of marrying his widow. So, said the Sadduccees, “Whose wife will she be at the resurrection, considering she was married to all seven (Matt 22:28)?” In other words, if there was really life after death, how could God untangle a relational mess like this?
Jesus was not caught off guard. He cut right through their smokescreen. He reminded them of what God said to Moses at the burning bush: “. . . Have you not read what God said to you, ‘I am the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob?’ He is not the God of the dead but of the living (Matt 22:31-32 NIV).” Jesus’ argument may be puzzling at first, but it is a powerful one. The patriarchs mattered to God when they were alive. Would they not still matter to Him after their deaths? Would God simply discard them at their deaths? Wouldn’t He rather retain their identities in His heart until he could make them alive again?
Our best hope for the future, therefore, is not in science or human ingenuity, it is in the faithfulness of God. This world and the life that is in it was put together by God. If He did it once, He can do it again. To know Him is to trust Him. If He has promised a resurrection, He will be faithful to carry out what He promised. The Old Testament promise (Isa 26:19) is reinforced by the resurrection of Jesus. If God raised Jesus from the dead, we know that He will raise the followers of Jesus as well (1 Cor 15:20-23). His faithfulness is our best hope.
Lord, You are the faithful God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. You have proven faithful in the little things of my life. I will trust You to be faithful when the End comes.
1 John Polkinghorne, The God of Hope and the End of the World (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2002), 82-83, 94-95.