For those Christians longing to leave the bad, physical earth and fly away to their "home on God's celestial shore," cultural and societal concerns take a distant second to things like personal relationships with Jesus. This sort of passive indifference was a major concern to Paul Marshall when he wrote his excellent book, Heaven is Not My Home: Learning to Live in God's Creation. Why do Christians seem so apathetic about the many components of our earthly life?

There are doubtless many reasons for our passivity, but one crucial one is that we don't take God's world seriously. We have accepted the heretical idea that the body will pass permanently away after death, and that we will only reappear as some type of disembodied wraith. But the Bible will have none of this. When Jesus rose from the dead, he had fish for lunch and overcame the despair of doubting Thomas by telling him to put his finger in his all-too-fleshly wounds. The creeds of the Christian Church universally affirm, 'I believe in the resurrection of the body.'

It is also an unbiblical idea that the earth doesn't matter because we are going to go to heaven when we die. The Bible teaches that there will be 'a new heaven and a new earth.' Our destiny is an earthly one: a new earth, an earth redeemed and transfigured. An earth reunited with heaven, but an earth, nevertheless.

If we think that the earth and everything on it is simply going to disappear, why labor long and hard to write something, perform something, build something, create something that will only be consumed by fire? If we think that being human is only a passing and trivial phase of life, why take the present seriously? Why not regard ourselves merely as apprentice angels, stuck for the moment in an earthly waiting room but better suited to and anxiously awaiting life on some disembodied, heavenly plane?

God created a world that was good. And although sin has horribly marred His creation, it has not, nor will it ever be, victorious. If even one part of God's creation is not touched by His redemptive work, our faith is entirely in vain. But God's redemption is holistic, a redemption of His whole creation, including this world. And that has enormous implications for how we live in this world, our home.