A new earth.
The idea is that God will be sure to take care that a man's surroundings match the man himself. He will have a new earth for regenerate men. He will have heaven for those who can be "holy still." The fundamental idea of the verse is that nature itself must be transformed to be in harmony with regenerate Israel. Long life shall be one of the marked peculiarities of the "new earth." Cheyne quotes the following similar passage to Isaiah 65:20 from the Book of Enoch: "And they shall not be punished all their life long, neither shall they die by plagues and judgments; but the number of their days shall they complete, and they shall grow old in peace, and the years of their happiness shall be many, in everlasting bliss and peace, their whole life long." Some take this text as a poetical representation of the new condition into which the returned exiles entered; and in that view we have an ideal picture of what ought to have been. We, however, take the more general principle that God makes a new earth for the new-born man; everything to him becomes new. And God makes a new earth for his sanctified Church—does make it, in a sense, now, and will make it, in a larger sense, by-and-by. In what sense, then, can we be said to want a "new earth"?
I. NOT IN THE SENSE OF A CHANGED WORLD OF THINGS. It is not possible for us to conceive of anything better, more restful, more satisfying, than this paradise of earth, which God has made and decked for us, with its hills, and vales, and streams, and seas, and flowers, and trees, and hoar-frost, and harvest-fields, and spring-time greenery, and autumn tinting. We love our earth, fair earth, and do not want it changed.
"'Twas a fair scene—a land more bright
Never did mortal eye behold!…
Those valleys and their fruits of gold
Basking in heaven's serenest light;
Those groups of lovely date trees bending
Languidly their leaf-crown'd heads,
Like youthful maids, when sleep descending
Warns them to their silken beds;
Those virgin lilies, all the night
Bathing their beauties in the lake,
That they may rise more fresh and bright
When their beloved sun's awake."
(T. Moore.)
We can, indeed, only conceive of heaven as like earth, all of it as beautiful as some of the earth is to us. Poetry anticipates that
"There, on a green and flowery mound,
Our weary souls shall sit."
And Scripture figures heaven as a city in a paradise. No sense of wanting relief from the ever-exquisite associations of earth comes to us. Even earth's dark things, her night, her winds, her storms, her winter, are precious to us, and we scarce would have them otherwise.
II. BUT IN THE SENSE OF A CHANGED WORLD OF BEINGS. There are lands where
"… every prospect pleases,
And only man is vile;"
and it is just that "vileness of man" which has made earth so sad, life so bitter, and death so terrible. Could we clear the human race away, as with another flood or fire, and start again the cleansed earth with a race in whom righteousness should dwell, then, verily, we should want no other heaven—earth would be heaven. Illustrate these points:
1. The good man makes a new earth of his sphere.
2. The good parents make a new earth of their home.
3. The holy Church helps to make a new earth of social life.
4. The well-principled statesman tries to make a new earth of the nation.
5. Those who believe in God and know his redemption strive to make a new earth of the sorely smitten heathen lands. We all want that new earth in which holiness shall be every-where-holiness the glorifying sunshine that makes earth to be summer-time always; holiness shall jingle from the very bells of the horses. Call that new earth what you may please, it will be heaven.—R.T.