Joni And Friends Daily Devotional 14 May 2024 Message
TOPIC: The New Earth
“The creation was subjected to frustration, not by its own choice, but by the will of the one who subjected it, in hope that the creation itself will be liberated from its bondage to decay and brought into the glorious freedom of the children of God.” – Romans 8:20-21
One day the earth will be liberated. The whole creation, like us, is “groaning as in the pains of childbirth right up to the present time” (Rom. 8:22). I sense this whenever I see smog, a junkyard, or dead raccoons in the road. When I drive the coastal mountains just a stone’s throw from my home and marvel at the jutted, jagged rocks and canyons, I’m vividly aware I’m in the middle of earthquake country. Mudslides and aftershocks happen all the time around here. These hills are restless.
Even though this little jewel of a blue planet has been scarred and denuded, abused and polluted, it will not be abandoned. God doesn’t waste things; he redeems them. And today’s passage reveals the Lord’s intentions for this blue marble of his. The earth upon which we trod is the earth that Christ will bring into his glorious freedom. You can hear it in the sighing of the wind. You can feel it in the heavy silence in the mountains. You can see it in the woeful eyes of an animal. Something’s coming…something better.
If you want to know what this something is, study Revelation and Isaiah. “The wolf will live with the lamb” (Isa. 11:6), and “the burning sand will become a pool” (Isa. 35:7). We will have a part in liberating the new earth—perhaps uplifting the poor of Kurdistan, reforesting the hills of Lebanon, or planting trees along the Amazon. We may clear the slums of Rio de Janeiro, get rid of nuclear waste, and teach the nations how to worship God and how to beat their swords into plowshares.
God won’t abandon earth. He will redeem it.
PRAYER: Thank you, God, that eternal life with you is rock-solid real. Heaven is not a never-never land of thin, ghostly shapes that I poke my finger through only to discover that my loved ones are spacey spirit-beings I can’t really hug or hold. The new earth will be peopled with people and animals, mountains and valleys. It will be real and concrete and…liberated!
Joni and Friends Daily Devotional 14 May 2024 written By Joni Eareckson Tada
Joni Eareckson Tada is an American evangelical Christian author, radio host, artist, and founder of Joni and Friends, an organization “accelerating Christian ministry in the disability community”.