The Ruins of Warsaw and the Promise of Rebuilding

In January 1945, when Soviet forces entered Warsaw, they found a city that was 85% destroyed. The Nazi regime had systematically demolished it block by block after the Warsaw Uprising. Photographs from that winter show nothing but skeletal facades and mountains of rubble stretching to the horizon. The city's residents — those who survived — wandered streets they could no longer recognize. Everything familiar had been erased.

Yet within months, something remarkable began. The people of Warsaw started rebuilding their Old Town not from blueprints alone, but from the 18th-century paintings of Bernardo Bellotto, who had captured the city's streets and facades in extraordinary detail. Brick by brick, they raised their city from ash. By 1953, the Old Town stood again — not as a museum piece, but as a living neighborhood where children played, merchants sold bread, and families gathered around tables in homes they had built with their own hands.

Isaiah 65 offers a vision even more staggering than Warsaw's resurrection. The Almighty declares, "I am about to create new heavens and a new earth." In God's restored city, people will build houses and actually inhabit them, plant vineyards and actually eat their fruit. No more weeping. No more lives cut short. No more labor that ends in someone else's profit.

Warsaw's rebuilding required paintings to remember what was lost. But God's new creation needs no reference to the former things — because what is coming will be so complete, so whole, that the old devastation will simply cease to come to mind.