How will we all fit?

... That was the question I was asked by a member of our church one Wednesday morning, during our midweek Communion service.

We had just had readings on the great Christian hope - that one day, Jesus will return to this earth and renew it. It will be freed from its bondage to decay, all pain and suffering will go, and we'll live with Christ on earth together. Our ultimate hope is not in heaven, but on earth - life as it was meant to be.

But then comes the question: How will we all fit? After all, the earth feels overcrowded at the moment. If we're all to be here, and if everyone who's died will join us, surely the earth won't be big enough for us all.

I said several things to this:

The numbers aren't as big as you'd imagine

We're not talking about every human being who has ever lived, but those who lived and died trusting the Lord Jesus to save them from sin for that wonderful future.

That reduces the numbers a little. But not much - once you remember that Jesus pictured the kingdom like a small amount of yeast that eventually works its way through the whole dough, or a mustard seed that eventually grows so big that even big birds can shelter in its branches. The picture there is of the gospel gradually spreading through the whole world, until you could even say that the character of most nations is Christian. (Yes, we've still got work to do - we're not quite there yet!) If the picture is of the vast majority of the human race being saved (taking the long view historically) then we haven't reduced the numbers much.

The more significant way the numbers are reduced is because of how exponential population growth works. I won't bore you with the mathematics, but experts calculate that there are more human beings alive now than all those who have died up to this point. We hear that everyone who has died will come back to life, and imagine that means a population hundreds of times bigger than we have at the moment. In fact, if everyone who has died came back to life, the earth's population would not even double.

Uninhabitable regions

33% of the earth's land surface is currently desert. A few people live in the Sahara, but not many.

The biblical picture of the land is a flourishing well-watered garden. Sadly, often through human abuse, desertification is a real phenomenon. Increasing swathes of land are not fit for growing crops, and can only support the smallest populations.

We are told that Jesus will free this earth from its bondage to decay, reversing the curse of the fall that makes the ground a hard place to grow food. Do we really think that he will leave a third of the land to be infertile sand? It seems far more likely that the Sahara will be turned into lush, green pasture land, capable of supporting large populations.

There are also areas that are nearly uninhabitable for other reasons - tropical rainforest, for example.

I will make rivers flow on barren heights, and springs within the valleys.I will turn the desert into pools of water, and the parched ground into springs. I will put in the desert the cedar and the acacia, the myrtle and the olive.I will set junipers in the wasteland, the fir and the cypress together, so that people may see and know, may consider and understand, that the hand of the Lord has done this, that the Holy One of Israel has created it. (Isaiah 41:18-20)

No longer any sea

Then there's this detail:

Then I saw ‘a new heaven and a new earth,’ for the first heaven and the first earth had passed away, and there was no longer any sea (Revelation 21:1)

Now, I know that "the sea" here is figurative. It possibly refers to chaos / evil / all rebellion against God, which will be utterly banished. Or, possibly, it refers to the giant bath that was placed in the first temple, and so is a representative way of saying that God will live on earth - without any need for a temple, or for ceremonial cleansing.

But, it makes you think, doesn't it? What if all the water on the earth became fresh, not saline? What if, instead of covering 71% of the earth's surface in vast oceans, the water was in rivers, streams and fresh water lakes where we could live nearby and use the water as a source of life. That would create vast swathes of inhabitable land.

The sovereign God

There's one last thing to say. This is one of a number of similar "how" questions. The sun currently has a limited life. Yes, it's measured in billions of years, but one day it will grow old, burn out and die. How can the sun give light and warmth to the earth forever, without either going cold, or growing so large it swallows us up?

The answer to all these questions is to remember that God is the sovereign God, who "has life in himself". The sun gives us warmth, the rain gives us the water we need - but ultimately it is God who sustains all life, and who uses the natural world to do so.

The God who created the earth itself, who formed billions of stars from nothing at all, is more than capable of transforming the solar system, and this planet, into somewhere that is glorious. Somewhere that is uncannily like the world we know and love now, and yet somehow transformed into something even better, even bigger, even richer.

We probe the "how" questions, but at the end of the day we may not get all the answers. But we still have the God, whose mind, plans and power are bigger than any of us can imagine. The real question is not whether the earth is big enough, but whether God is big enough. And he most certainly is.

As for George, who asked the question: He's now able to ask Jesus directly, and I'm sure he'll get better answers than I was able to give him.