“Nevertheless we, according to His promise, look for new heavens and a new earth, wherein dwelleth righteousness” (II Peter 3:13).

For thousands of years, the followers of God have battled against “principalities, against powers, against the rulers of the darkness of this world” (Ephesians 6:12) led by Lucifer, that old serpent, the arch rebel and self-appointed accuser of the saints of God. Although assured of the ultimate victory through our Lord Jesus Christ, Christians have often suffered cruelly at the hands of Lucifer and his followers.

As Christians, the aching longing in our hearts for peace is really none other than the Holy Spirit, Himself, grieving at sin, and our own new, holy nature “groaning” to be free in its expression of the divine nature. It is the nature of the child of God to “hunger and thirst after righteousness” (Matthew 5:6). It is the normal thing for one “raised” up and already seated “in heavenly places in Christ Jesus” (Ephesians 2:6) to long for the shackles of the “body of this death” (Romans 7:24) to be loosened. Under ordinary circumstances, our spiritual being—“the new man, which after God is created in righteousness and true holiness” (Ephesians 4:24)—knows that we are “strangers and pilgrims on the earth” (Hebrews 11:13). Such knowledge openly declares that we “desire a better country, that is, an heavenly: wherefore God is not ashamed to be called their God: for He hath prepared for them a city” (v.16).

If we have lost sight of the place that Jesus has gone to prepare for us, we become both forlorn and despoiled. But if we treasure the great truth that we will spend eternity with our Lord in His “new heavens and a new earth, wherein dwelleth righteousness,” we are comforted and encouraged, recognizing that both sin and all its effects will be absent. HMM III