It seems to be a difficult thing to sense the will and direction of God in bringing forth the new creation; or is this impossible since God is not bringing forth new creation but actively ushering in the complete destruction of the old. I think the Bible is clear about God’s future design for this present earth which includes a redeemed people who are part of God’s new creation.
To engage life with hope for the future enables a faith filled paradigm that dares to believe that God is actively working to bring forth the new. I long to see believers once again engaged in bringing forth imaginative creations in visual arts, music, and any other non vulgar medium that allows creativity to flow.
N.T. Wright writes, “But the Christian imagination – shrunken and starved throughout the long winter of secularism – needs to be awakened, enlivened and pointed in the right direction…Christian’s need to sense permission, from God and from one another, to exercise their imaginations in thinking ahead into God’s new world and into such fresh forms of worship and service as will model and embody aspects of it. We need to have this imagination energized, fed and nourished, so that it is lively and inventive, not sluggishly going around in small circles of a few ideas learned long ago…
Genuine art is thus itself a response to the beauty of creation, which itself is a pointer to the beauty of God. The beauty of creation, to which art responds and tries to express, imitate, and highlight, is not simply beauty which it possesses in itself but the beauty which it possesses in view of what is promised to it… If Christian artists can glimpse this truth, there is a way forward to celebrating beauty, to loving God with all the soul, without lapsing into pantheism on the one hand or harsh, negative ‘realism’ on the other. Art at its best draws attention not only to the way things are, but to the way things are meant to be.”
