Nuggets from An Urgent Call to a Serious Faith—The Reality of Heaven for the Believer

The Bible begins with God creating the universe and it ends with Him destroying it entirely and creating afresh a “new heaven and a new earth” (Revelation:21:1And I saw a new heaven and a new earth: for the first heaven and the first earth were passed away; and there was no more sea.
See All...). From beginning to end, history is the eternal God fulfilling His immutable purpose. Once we get a clear view of the cosmic proportions of God’s plan, we lose any delusions as to our own greatness and are delivered from all mistaken notions that we can somehow fulfill human destiny by our own efforts.

Of course that very delusion fuels the humanist’s cosmic aspirations. As part of SETI (Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence), President Carter, a professing Christian, cast this message into the cosmos aboard the Voyager spacecraft. It was addressed to any space-faring civilization that might chance to intercept Voyager:

This is a present from a small distant world…attempting to survive our time so we may live into yours. We hope someday…to join a community of galactic civilizations. This [is] our hope and our determination…in a vast and awesome universe.—Jimmy Carter, President of the United States, The White House, June 16, 1977

Far from hoping to join a community of galactic civilizations, the Christian looks forward to the destruction of the present cosmos and the creation by God of a new universe that will be inhabited by a new race of twice-born children of God, who have received Jesus Christ as Savior and Lord and have been made new creations in Him. Once that tremendous fact grips one’s heart it becomes clear why salvation must be by grace alone; it is nothing that we deserve or could accomplish, but it must be entirely God doing for us what we could never do for ourselves.