@ViaCrucis I do not believe in an end of the earth either.
Something that occurred to me a long time ago about the notion of 'New heaven and new earth' was also seeing things in a different light by and through the spirit of Christ with-in us and that is something we experience today of a becoming a 'new creation'.
At least that is something that occurred to me years back I still look at it that way. (For the after life is a completely different realm than this. It is a spiritual realm.)
I regard two positions to be equally problematic:
1) The "All is Future" view, in which that which we are promised and hope for is a purely future thing, and thus has no real impact or effect here and now.
2) The "All is Now" view, in which the promises and hope has no future outcome in the larger external world and instead is a merely internalized spiritual reality.
Both positions are products of the modern era, innovations in teaching that do not faithfully reflect the historic understanding of the Christian Church. Namely that there is a Now-and-not-yet dimension to working of God. Our present salvation is part of our future salvation and the future salvation of all creation.
There is no new creation unless there is new creation. That is, when the Apostle says that we are new creations in Christ this does not make any sense except in connection with the hope of the new creation of the Age to Come. Our newness in Christ anticipates the newness of the world in the future. We anticipate, by our present regeneration and redemption by the power of the Spirit, that which God is going to do for all creation, which began in Christ by His resurrection from the dead.
God's kingdom is both now and not yet. The kingdom is not a future temporal kingdom that is going to be established on this old earth sometime in the future; the kingdom is the reality of God's reign already inaugurated in Jesus Christ by His death and resurrection and which is in operation through the Church here and now; and when Christ returns it will be the full and absolute reality of the universe. What we hope for is also now as grace through faith by the power of the Spirit operative in our lives by God's word and His Sacraments.
E.g. The Eucharist is both the anticipation and the foretaste of the Wedding Banquet of the Lamb; it not only draws us into the mystery of Christ's death by our receiving His flesh and blood in, with, and under the bread and wine, but it also pulls us forward to the future toward the Wedding Feast and the fullness of our communion with the Lord in the Age to Come. And in between these two things, the Eucharist becomes the visible and tangible expression of the unity of our faith as the Church, establishing the Church as Christ's Mystical Body by our communion together of Christ with one another at His Table; and then providing the basis of Christian communion, unity, and mission in the present world.
The Christian religion simply does not make sense without that paradoxical now-and-not-yet; of past and future meeting in the present to drive us in the here and now, in hope of what is to come, in light of what God has done and said.
Christ is risen, the firstfruits of the resurrection;
By the grace of God we share in the power of His resurrection now through faith;
And because Christ is risen, and we have the hope of this by the indwelling of the Spirit, the down payment and guarantee of these things, we can boldly confess in the face of death in the world that there will be resurrection, life everlasting, and world without end.
A couple years ago when my dad passed away, it was only about a week or two before Easter. It was the hardest Easter of my life, and it was also one of the most important for me personally. It wasn't the first time I had dealt with death, I lost my mom 21 years ago to cancer. I lost an aunt just a year before that, I lost my maternal grandfather two years after. In the years since I lost another aunt, my remaining grandparents, and then my father in 2019. It was, I think, the loss of my dad however that hit me hardest, as I realized I had run out of family (not literally, but it certainly felt that way).
There were two things I didn't want to do that Paschal Season, and that was pretend like death is irrelevant. So often we treat death as irrelevant, speaking as though the departed has just gone through a room next door, that death is simply a door to another kind of life, that death is the gateway to eternal paradise with God in heaven, etc. But that's not what death is. The Bible doesn't let us think this way. The Bible calls death the enemy of God, in fact the final enemy to be defeated by the Lord Jesus Christ.
Death is deathly serious. It's ugly, it's not friendly. It's not our friend.
The other thing I didn't want to do, was give death any power.
The ugliness of Good Friday needs to be taken seriously.
Because the beauty of Easter Sunday doesn't make any sense without Friday's hideousness.
The Son of God died.
The sky grew black.
The earth trembled.
Creation went silent.
Life was swallowed up in death.
Death had gained victory over God.
That is, it did, until the stone was rolled away.
And when the graves clothes lay empty in the tomb.
And we are told, "Why do you seek the living among the dead? He is not here,
He is risen."
He is risen!
How audacious! How scandalous! How ludicrous!
How wonderful. How gracious. How beautiful.
O how lovely are the hands that bore the nail marks in them, to be touched by St. Thomas who doubted (and who can blame him?).
See His hands. His feet.
Death took down a victim.
And the Victim took down death.
Where O Death is your sting?
Where O Hell is your victory?
Christ has risen from the dead.
Trampling down death by death.
And to those in the tombs, bestowing life.
The Day will come, when the tombs shall be opened, the graves fly open, the sarcophogi open wide--and the dead shall walk once more on green grass upon a world redeemed and transformed by the power of this God of Life and the Living who saves us.
God won.
God wins.
-CryptoLutheran
