It’s a Cinderella story—everything really will work out in the end, and there is a story that will follow, as yet untold. Cinderella lives—dwells—happily ever after, which means she gets married, has a quiver of beautiful children, forgives all who wronged her, “watches over the affairs of the household…her children arise and call her blessed; and her husband also, and he praises her” (Prov. 31:27-8). That’s the kind of newness that the Bible describes; it is the next chapter after the stories of this age are resolved fittingly and in glory.

If you read 2 Peter 3:7, in which the world burns and the heavens melt, you may think that the end of the world is a kind of cosmic reset, but that’s not actually what’s going on. Like the Flood before it, the end that awaits the present world is not only judgment and destruction, but renewal and restoration. What does Jesus mean when he says he “will make all things new” (Rev. 21:5)? He does not mean that he will make all new things.

The “newness” of the New World is not a reboot or a blank slate. It does not begin in the same way as Genesis 1, with Adam and Eve in the garden, new and naked and ignorant, in a wilderness world wild and ready for cultivation. It does not erase what came before; it is not a re-spawn or reset. I think we understand this from a relational perspective; that is, that there’s no “severance.” We know that we will recognize our former spouse, our loved ones, that we will be reunited with the church catholic. The old stories will be remembered and shared and everything we did will matter.

But what is true of us as human personalities is also true of the world as a whole.

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