Another Christian song that expresses the Christian hope well is one of my favourites, There is a day, by Nathan Fellingham (2001) of Phatfish. Helpfully, it doesn’t make us look forward to escaping this creation and going somewhere else, but the first lines express the Christian hope for the creation itself:
There is a day that all creation’s waiting for,
A day of freedom and liberation for the earth.
What follows is simply saturated with Scripture. Here’s the chorus:
We will meet Him in the air,
And then we will be like Him,
For we will see Him as He is, oh yeah!
Then all hurt and pain will cease,
And we'll be with Him forever,
And in His glory we will live,
Oh yeah, oh yeah!
The idea of meeting the Lord in the air as he descends from heaven to earth at his parousia (royal visit) is helpfully explained by Tom Wright:
[T]heir ‘meeting’ with the Lord doesn’t mean they will then be staying in mid-air with him. They are like Roman citizens in a colony, going out to meet the emperor when he pays them a state visit, and then accompanying him back to the city itself (Paul for Everyone: Galatians and Thessalonians, 125).
It gives a renewed perspective on all that I do on earth to think that Jesus will one day be paying a royal visit, not to take me away, but to put everything right, and to stay here for ever. “Oh yeah” indeed!