A renewed heaven and earth. The city of God coming down out of heaven to this very planet, remade. We are remade, too. For God does not say, “I’m making all new things.” No, he says he’s making all things new. Every miracle Jesus performs in the gospel accounts is trying to illustrate this point—the blind see, the deaf hear, the dead are raised to

To all of these charges, God is unrepentant, even as he was with Job. His response to these things is basically along the lines of, “I AM WHO I AM, I do what I do. I am good. What are you going to do with me?”

one of Satan’s most powerful whisperings to us is that we are expendable.

One strain of the modernist school of art is famous for creating “masterpieces” by standing back twenty feet and hurling paint onto the canvas. In answer to those who would criticize such a careless approach, they argue that chance is the real artist at work in this life and they do not want to interfere with its creative process. Our experience of

astonishingly, God was placing the perception of his own integrity as well as the reputation of his whole kingdom on the genuineness of Job’s heart.

As Chesterton recounts in Orthodoxy, he “had always believed that the world involved magic: now I thought that perhaps it involved a magician. . . . I had always felt life first as a story; and if there is a story there is a storyteller.”

One night, as I was tucking then-seven-year-old Samuel into bed, we began talking about the future. I asked him what he wanted to do when he grows up. With a grave severity in his eye he looked at me and said, “I’m going to bring back the West.” His heart knew that he was made for noble things.

Shakespeare’s Macbeth, the Scottish nobleman who sells his soul to play the role of king in his own small story. At the end of his life he laments, I am sick at heart. . . . To-morrow, and to-morrow, and to-morrow, Creeps in this petty pace from day to day To the last syllable of recorded time; Life’s but a walking shadow, a poor player That struts

The central belief of our times is that there is no story, nothing hangs together, and all we have are bits and pieces, the random days of our lives.