Herman Bavinck on the new creation and the new Jerusalem:
All that is true, honorable, just, pure, pleasing, and commendable in the whole of creation, in heaven and on earth, is gathered up in the future city of God--renewed, re-created, boosted to its highest glory.
The substance [of the city of God] is present in this creation. Just as the caterpillar becomes a butterfly, as carbon is converted into diamond, as the grain of wheat upon dying in the ground produces other grains of wheat, as all of nature revives in the spring and dresses up in celebrative clothing, as the believing community is formed out of Adam's fallen race, as the resurrection body is raised from the body that is dead and buried in the earth, so too, by the re-creating power of Christ, the new heaven and the new earth will one day emerge from the fire-purged elements of this world, radiant in enduring glory and forever set free from the "bondage to decay". . . . The state of glory will be . . . a re-formation that, thanks to the power of Christ . . . presents the entire creation before the face of God, brilliant in unfading splendor and blossoming in a springtime of eternal youth.
--Reformed Dogmatics, 4:720
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