For some people, it’s the allure of a new car; for us, it’s the allure of a new coffee machine.

Among our assorted ways to brew coffee, a drip coffee maker is conspicuous in its absence. I didn’t think we needed a new drip coffee maker, until one caught our attention. It “combines the art of hand-brewing with the convenience of automation, so every cup is smooth, rich, and perfectly balanced.” The review promised that this coffee maker simply brews exceptional coffee exactly the way you like it—single brew or batch. Suddenly, I envisioned this coffee maker, in its newest color of chocolate malt, on my kitchen counter, replacing the old coffee maker that was perfectly fine twenty-four hours ago.

The allure of the new is as old as humankind. In the newly fashioned garden, the serpent offered the man and the woman something new, something better, something different from what God had designed for his first image-bearers. And image-bearers ever since have been lured by the same offer of the new, the different, the bigger, the better—only to be caught in an endless, dissatisfying loop we strive to fill with the next new, different, bigger or better things. Just ask the Preacher: “Vanity of vanities, says the Preacher, vanity of vanities! All is vanity.” (Ecclesiastes 1:1)

That loop is the God-shaped vacuum often attributed to French philosopher Blaise Pascal. In fact, Pascal described the loop as an infinite abyss that “can only be filled with something that is infinite and unchanging—in other words, God himself. God alone is our true good.” (from Pensées #425)

It is out of his overflowing goodness and lovingkindness that God fills the abyss and breaks the loop with all things new. To his people in exile, under the old covenant, he says, “Remember not the former things, nor consider the things of old. Behold, I am doing a new thing; now it springs forth, do you not perceive it? I will make a way in the wilderness and rivers in the desert.” (Isaiah 43:18-19)

To those of us who might feel a pull toward that infinite loop of wanting something new, something different, something better, the Apostle Paul reminds us, “Therefore, if anyone is in Christ, he is a new creation. The old has passed away; behold the new has come.” (2 Corinthains 5:17) In commenting on this verse, Kent Hughes points out that it’s a “newness that is everlastingly new; because the old is done, the new has come to stay.”

This newness makes ways in the wilderness and rivers in the desert now as well as in the new heavens and earth to come. And makes it just fine that the chocolate malt drip coffee maker—or the next new thing—remains conspicuously absent from my kitchen counter and my life.