Everything in the world—everything in your world—is groaning and travailing under the burden of sin and unbelief. Everything can be improved. Everything needs more of the King’s beauty, goodness, and truth so that it can realize the “very good” possibilities God has invested in it. Your world already shows much evidence of Christ’s rule, but still it groans. It groans in neglected spaces of creation’s natural environment. It groans to refract righteousness, peace, and joy in everyday conversations, ways of working, neighborly relations, local culture and institutions, and creative acts of beauty and goodness of all kinds.

God So Loved the World.

A Christian Guidebook: What Does It Mean to Be Saved? (4)

For He has not put the world to come, of which we speak, in subjection to angels. Hebrews 2.5

The parched ground shall become a pool,

And the thirsty land springs of water;

In the habitation of jackals, where each lay,

There shall be grass with reeds and rushes. Isaiah 35.7

The World to Come

The writer of Hebrews reminds his readers that a new world is coming, a world in which people who know the Lord, their eyes firmly fixed on Jesus and their lives increasingly conformed to His image, will take up the ancient mandate of God to bring to light an order of beauty, truth, goodness, righteousness, peace, and joy in the Holy Spirit in the land of the living (Heb. 2.5-9; cf. Ps. 27.13, 14; Rom. 14.17, 18).

The coming of this new world features in various places in the book of Isaiah. Once “the King in His beauty” (Is. 33.17) has begun to advance His rule on earth, change will occur everywhere—in creation, culture, societies, and nations. Isaiah envisioned waste places, impoverished and stricken nations, enfeebled and impeded individuals, and all manner of flora and fauna being quickened, renewed, healed, and restored as the reign of the King spreads according to the promises of God’s Word (Is. 34.16, 17). When God reveals His glory to His people and brings His salvation to them (v. 4), even the land they inhabit will be transformed.

God’s salvation is for the world. It was because of His love for the world that He sent Jesus to accomplish salvation, that not only might people be saved, but the world might not be barren, wasted, and unfruitful, though populated with people who are sick with sin in various ways. God intends that His goodness and fruitfulness might abound everywhere. His chosen and redeemed people are the instruments for this transformation, as they work to bring the full scope, power, and promise of God’s great salvation and Kingdom into those sectors of the world they occupy.

As the writer of Hebrews observed in those early days of our great salvation, we don’t yet see this new world fully in place. But it is coming. Jesus embodies it, and we who believe are being transformed in our souls and lives to refract His image in the world. And as we do, the great salvation of God, promised by Isaiah and others, begins the amazing work of making all things new.

Seeing the World as God’s

We need to make sure the vision of salvation which we cherish is as large as the world God intends to save, beginning with our ownworld. The world in our day already reflects in many ways the remarkable progress of the Kingdom of righteousness, peace, and joy in the Spirit, realized through the words and deeds of centuries of faithful believers in Jesus Christ.

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