The good news about what has happened looks ahead to the good news about what will happen. The same God who made the world in the first place will restore and renew it in the end.
‘The wolf shall live with the lamb, the leopard shall lie down with the kid, the calf and the lion and the fatling together, and a little child shall lead them’ (Isa. 11:6).
Because ‘the earth will be full of the knowledge of the Lord [Israel’s God, the one they called YHWH] as the waters cover the sea’ (Isa. 11:9). Or, in Paul’s words, when even death itself has been overcome, God will be ‘all in all’ (1 Cor. 15:28). This is the ultimate good news. Nothing will be lost. All that is good and beautiful, and especially all that has been done out of love for God, out of the power of Jesus’s death and new life, and by the leading of the Spirit, will somehow be part of God’s new world.
The world as it is and God as he is do seem to be out of joint. All is not well; all is not right. But it will be, and Jesus’ resurrection is the confirmation of that promise, the beginning of its fulfilment, which is then continued in the work of the holy Spirit.
God will be all in all, but that is not where we are at the moment. That will be the radical application to the whole cosmos of the truth we see in Jesus’s resurrection, which depends on the defeat of sin and death that has taken place through Jesus’ death.
Thus the good news about God is anchored supremely in Jesus.
Adapted from the eBook ‘Simply Good News’ by Tom Wright Ch7