Ocean
The sea used to be scary.
The penultimate chapter of scripture says that the creation to come will have no seas. Revelation 21:1 says, “Then I saw a new heaven and a new earth, for the first heaven and the first earth had passed away, and the sea existed no longer.”
When this was written, the sea was a place of dark mystery. Storms came from the sea. Loved ones—ship passengers, sailors—were lost at sea. Creatures unseen lived beneath the sea and unknown lands lay beyond it. The new creation that is promised at the end of scripture will have none of this. When the Creator lives here with us and forever personally rules his restored and reordered creation, the dark mystery will be gone by divine decree.
But I have just been on vacation by the ocean. I loved it and I let myself feel restored.
Is Revelation 21:1 out of date?
No, the new creation will have none of my experience of the sea either. I went on vacation to be restored simply because life is wearying, inevitably so. The life I cannot help but lead compromises me, wears me down, fills me with rising dread over the accumulation of my failings. The ocean restores me by giving me contact with something great enough that I lose myself easily.
The Creator is greater still. In the world that is to come in which he lives with us, this sense of the sea that I have just experienced will also be obsolete. In the sense of something great and restorative, the whole world will be ocean.