Isaiah’s and Peter’s new heavens and new earth are covenant-world language for the New Creation order — not a requirement that physical matter be deleted before hope begins.
Isaiah 65–66 announces new heavens and a new earth, with Jerusalem as a joy and no more the sound of weeping in the restored order. The imagery sits inside prophetic restoration: former troubles forgotten, a people blessed of the LORD, cosmic language for a new covenant world.
Isaiah’s audience hears world-remaking speech the way the prophets always speak of major covenant transitions — sun dark, heavens shaken, new creation — without the demand that the primary referent be the extinction of geology.
Second Peter 3 answers scoffers about the promise of His coming. The world that then existed perished by water; the present heavens and earth are stored up for fire; according to His promise we wait for new heavens and a new earth in which righteousness dwells (2 Peter 3:5–13).
In a fulfilled horizon, the “coming” and the fiery judgment align with the end of the old covenant world — the order that persecuted the church and clung to the house Jesus said would fall. Righteousness dwelling is the New Covenant reality, not a blank planet after history ends.
New covenant world. Righteousness at home. Old order dissolved.
Cosmic vocabulary for a real transition — the one Jesus dated to that generation’s crisis.
Physical mortality continues. The gospel never claimed that dust no longer returns to dust. What ended is the condemned Adamic-covenant administration as the defining world of standing before God. New creation is present in Christ (2 Corinthians 5:17) and publicly confirmed when the old house vanished.
You live in the world where righteousness has a home in the people of the Messiah. Waiting for Isaiah’s language to mean “nothing has begun until matter is remade” postpones what the apostles announced as already underway.