Almost Home

Sermon Transcript

Many of us love living in Philadelphia, but one of the things I do often hear people lamenting is the transience. People move here for a few years, you develop a deep friendship with them that you start functionally assuming will last, but then they leave. It’s hard to ever feel quite at home when that happens. While we may feel that more in Philadelphia than in a small, rural town, transience is just a basic feature of life in this changing world. Even Augustine of Hippo, one of the most significant figures of early Christianity, in the late 300s, experienced painful transience. After becoming a Christian in Milan, Italy, Augustine spent the next 3-4 years living in close community with his closest friends, and even his mother and son. But then his mother died, he became a pastor in another place called Hippo in northern Africa, and his friends were scattered elsewhere throughout the Roman Empire. Writing to one friend from whom he was separated by hundreds of miles, Augustine said: “I grieve that I do not see you; but I take comfort in my pain. I have no patience with that spurious ‘strength of character’ that puts up patiently with the absence of good things. Do we not all long for the future Jerusalem?…I cannot refrain from this longing; I be inhuman if I could.”

 

We’re getting toward the end of the book of Daniel today, and if you can remember back to the beginning, the context of Daniel is also one of transience, one of change, one of scattering. Daniel grew up in Jerusalem, at a time when God’s people were together in God’s place—the land he’d promised their forefathers. But the book of Daniel began with Daniel and others being forcibly taken from their land, and by the time we get to the passage on which we are focusing today, decades have gone by in this state of exile, in which God’s people are scattered from one another, from God’s place, and even, in some sense, from their God. And so today, even we who belong to God’s people through faith in Christ are scattered throughout the world, away from our heavenly home, and not yet with our God in the way we hope to be one day. And do we not all, like Augustine, long for the future Jerusalem? Well we’ll see in this passage today that our God will restore his people to his place…but not yet. We’ll look, then, at how God’s people pray for restoration, and then at how our God will restore his people.

 

How God’s people pray for restoration

 

Our passage today takes place in the first year of Darius, which is probably another name for Cyrus or perhaps a general who was appointed king under Cyrus, the first emperor of the Medo-Persian Empire, who conquered the Babylonian empire, the empire that originally conquered Jerusalem and took the Israelites from their land into exile. Babylon didn’t just conquer Jerusalem, though—in the words of verse 3, they left it desolate. Most significantly, they destroyed the temple, the building God commanded Israel to set up, and at which God promised to meet with them. But now Daniel says here that in the first year of Darius’ reign, he perceived in the book of Jeremiah the number of years that must pass before that desolation of Jerusalem is ended—namely, 70 years.

 

Jeremiah was a prophet who spoke God’s word to God’s people before Daniel’s time, and we have his writings also included in the Bible. When we turn there, we find these words in Jeremiah 25:11-12 – “This whole land shall become a ruin and a waste, and these nations shall serve the king of Babylon seventy years. 12 Then after seventy years are completed, I will punish the king of Babylon and that nation, the land of the Chaldeans, for their iniquity, declares the Lord, making the land an everlasting waste.” In Jeremiah 29:10-14 we find these words – “For thus says the Lord: When seventy years are completed for Babylon, I will visit you, and I will fulfill to you my promise and bring you back to this place. 11 For I know the plans I have for you, declares the Lord, plans for welfare and not for evil, to give you a future and a hope. 12 Then you will call upon me and come and pray to me, and I will hear you. 13 You will seek me and find me, when you seek me with all your heart. 14 I will be found by you, declares the Lord, and I will restore your fortunes and gather you from all the nations and all the places where I have driven you, declares the Lord, and I will bring you back to the place from which I sent you into exile.”

 

So Daniel’s reading these things and he’s doing the math: He was taken into exile in 605 B.C. The first year of Darius’ reign was about 539-538 BC. That’s 67 years, and already God brought the judgment he promised on Babylon by bringing the Persians to conquer them. The 70 years prophesied is probably just meant to refer to an average lifespan, not a precise number, and there are other examples in the Bible of judgment being prophesied for a time, but then being cut short as God has mercy on his people in response to their repentance and prayers. Even in Jeremiah 29, we see God saying that his people will call upon him and come and pray to him while in exile, and he says he will hear them, restore their fortunes, and gather them from all the nations back to the place from which he had sent them. So what does Daniel do in response to reading these things in Jeremiah? He prays.

 

The first thing we learn from this, then, about how God’s people pray in the time before we reach our heavenly home, is that we ought to pray in accordance with scripture. The restoration God has promised in scripture, that we need most, isn’t the restoration of our individual fortunes–it’s something better: The restoration of God’s people to God’s place. We speak to God in response to what God has said to us. Jesus said, “If you remain in me, and my words remain in you, ask whatever you wish, and it will be done for you” (John 15:7-8). Without God first speaking to us, we inevitably pray for something less than the restoration he has planned, and we have no reason beyond wishful thinking to hope that our prayers will be heard by him. We’ll see throughout Daniel’s prayer how acutely aware he is that Israel is in exile because of their sins. If they’re getting the judgment they deserve, what would make Daniel think he could just cry out to God and ask him to end the judgment? Why would he think that would work? Because God himself said in scripture that he had appointed an end to the judgment, and that he would end it in response to the prayers of his people.

 

When you’re facing the consequences of your sin, where do you turn? If you are here today and you at not yet a Christian, how would you answer that question? The natural human responses include things like minimizing the sin, brushing it off and trying to do better next time, or a kind of self-flagellating despair. Kids, when your parents or your teachers confront you and you know deep down you really did disobey them, what comes next? Is it an argument in your defense? Is it beating yourself up? Daniel’s not doing any of those things here. With this God there is a better way that both acknowledges the reality of our guilt in a deep and penetrating way, but doesn’t leave us in despair. How this God’s people respond when facing the consequences of their sin is they run right to their God. They draw nearer to him, not farther from him, with confidence that he will actually hear their prayers and have mercy, because this God has promised in his word to hear the prayers of his people when they cry out to him, even when they’ve been guilty of sin.

 

Ok, but then how would you actually pray to God in such a situation? Notice first Daniel’s posture in verse 3: Seeking him by prayer and pleas for mercy with fasting and sackcloth and ashes. He adopts a posture of humility. He’s not coming to God with a list of demands. He’s coming to God in the position of a beggar. One of the times we see God’s people fasting throughout scripture is in connection with repentance. If you are aware of a certain besetting sin in your life, or perhaps a more heinous sin you’ve committed, you might try taking a day, fasting from all food (though it’s still recommended that you drink water), and using the time you’d normally spend eating to cry out to God in prayer. No amount of fasting, sackcloth, or ashes can atone for your sins or make up for them to God—we won’t see Daniel saying in his prayer, “God forgive me, because look at how much I’ve afflicted myself”—but fasting can us adopt the humble posture fitting to a sinner begging for mercy.

 

Then, beyond the posture, we can look at the actual words of Daniel’s prayer to learn how God’s people pray for restoration. The first and perhaps most obvious element of his prayer is confession. Look at verse 5: “We have sinned and done wrong and acted wickedly and rebelled, turning aside from your commandments and rules.” As if just saying “we have sinned” weren’t enough, Daniel adds word upon word: We have sinned and done wrong and acted wickedly and rebelled, turning aside from your commandments and rules. Here are some other ways he says it throughout the prayer: “We have not listened to your servants the prophets” (v. 6), “treachery” (v. 7), “we have sinned against you” (v. 8), “we have rebelled against him” (v. 9), “[we] have not obeyed the voice of the LORD our God by walking in his laws” (v. 10), “all Israel has transgressed your law and turned aside, refusing to obey your voice” (v. 11), “we have sinned against him” (v. 11), “we have not obeyed his voice” (v. 14), “we have sinned, we have done wickedly” (v. 15).

 

Suffice it to say he’s not pulling any punches, only he’s not punching his enemies—he’s punching himself and his own people, with these words. And he is including himself—look at what he says he was doing in verse 20: “confessing my sin and the sin of my people Israel.” There is a counterfeit of this where we talk about the sins of our ancestors, our country, or even our church, but subtly do so in such a way that what we’re really doing is confessing someone else’s sins, and not our own. That’s not what Daniel’s doing here. What Daniel’s doing here is dropping all pretenses and exposing his sins and the sins of his people for what they really are: Not mere mistakes or imperfections, like hey nobody’s perfect after all, but real sins, rebellion, treachery, a refusal to listen to the voice of God, wickedness—that’s what sin really is. That’s what lying, greed, envy, drunkenness, lust, anger, and gossip really are, and they should be confessed as such, along with whatever else falls short of what God commands, without excuse or minimization. This is one of the reasons every Sunday when we gather we pray a prayer of confession together as God’s people.

 

Now some worry about this kind of confession. They’ll say, “Don’t be so hard on yourself,” or “Don’t beat yourself up over it; that’s not what God wants.” And there is a real danger of a worldly sorrow that is all about me punishing myself for sins I committed essentially against myself by not living up to my own standards. Though Daniel is brutally honest about the reality and severity of his sin here, that’s not what he’s doing either, because notice who he’s talking to about his sin: God. Worldly sorrow sounds like, “I’m such a failure; I can never get it right.” When you have worldly sorrow, you talk to yourself a lot, rather than talking to God. But godly sorrow draws closer to God, and says to him: We have sinned against you. Do you see how simple, and yet how frequently avoided, it is? “God, this is what I did. I was wrong. I rebelled against you.” “God, this is what we did. We did not obey your voice. We were treacherous.”

 

So confession is basic to this prayer. But Daniel didn’t just confess his sins; he also confessed God’s righteousness. We could say he charged himself as guilty, but declared God righteous. So Daniel says in verse 11 that all Israel has transgressed your law and turned aside, refusing to obey your voice. “And the curse and the oath that are written in the Law of Moses the servant of God have been poured out upon us, because we have sinned against him.” In other words, even though God has subjected his people to terrible suffering, and his land to desolation, God is in the right! He’s just doing what he said we would; in fact, he’s keeping his promise to punish evil! So he says in verse 14 that the LORD has kept ready the calamity and has brought it upon us, precisely because he is righteous.

 

Part of repentance, then, is being able to say to God, “God, you have every right to condemn me for this sin, and whatever consequences you’ve already given me for this sin have been totally justified.” Brothers and sisters, do you ever find yourself thinking that God owes you something? Isn’t that what we’re really saying in our hearts when we grumble against the LORD? My heart is so quick to grumble when it appears to me that someone else is enjoying more visible success than I am. What am I really saying there when I grumble about that? “Oh come on Lord, why do they get that and I don’t? I deserve better.” Let’s never forget that all we deserve from the Lord is hell, and it’s sheer grace that all of us in this room today aren’t there. And as if that weren’t enough, on top of that, all of us in this room are offered forgiveness and restoration to God, and some of us in this room have even already been restored to God! Especially if you are acutely aware of suffering in your life, and I know some of you have been through significant suffering, and are going through it even now, just be on the lookout for this, because one way Satan would love to use your suffering is to get you bitter toward our God, to get you thinking that in addition to saving you from hell, God now somehow owes you an easy life on earth as well. Perish the thought. As the great pastor John Newton said, “I have felt impatience in my spirit, utterly unsuitable to my state as a sinner and a beggar.” What’s Daniel in this passage? A sinner and a beggar. What are we, brothers and sisters? Sinners and beggars. And we’re going to get impatient with the one we’ve sinned against?! How dare we?

 

Daniel accuses himself, Daniel justifies God, and finally, Daniel cries out to God for mercy. This is how we know he isn’t just beating himself up. Not only is he talking to God rather than just talking to himself, but he asks God for mercy, not judgment! One aspect of God’s righteousness is his justice, but another aspect is his mercy. So Daniel can say in verse 9 that “to the Lord our God belong mercy and forgiveness.” And in the law of Moses Daniel didn’t just read of the promised curse; he also read of how God brought his people out of the land of Egypt with a mighty hand, which he references in verse 15, and then in the following verse he prays that according to such righteous acts, God would perform a new exodus, turn his anger away from his people, and restore his people in his land. We have hope to pray and ask for forgiveness rather than despairing because our God is merciful.

 

And we have hope for God to be merciful because we know that God is ultimately committed to God. Did you catch that at the end of Daniel’s prayer in verse 19? He says, “Delay not, for your own sake, O my God, because your city and your people are called by your name.” So there’s the two things he’s praying for: The restoration of the city, God’s place, and God’s people. That’s God’s people and God’s place—they bear his very name, and for them to remain desolate indefinitely suggests that our God is desolate, or perhaps that he is even too weak to save and restore his people to his place. But that’s not true, and for God to act like it is would be for him to participate in a lie. Like a good company doesn’t want defective products out there with their name slapped all over them, so we rightly appeal to a good God to restore his people to his place because his name is slapped all over us.

 

How, then, do God’s people pray for restoration? We pray in response to God’s word because God promises in it to hear the prayers of his people for the restoration he’s promised. We pray with humility. We confess our sins clearly, without minimizing or excusing them. We declare God righteous in all that he’s done, and acknowledge that all he owes us is judgment. And yet also because God is righteous, we ask him for mercy, for his name’s sake, to restore us to his place.

 

But what do we expect that restoration to look like? Daniel clearly expected it to look like a return to the land of Jerusalem, and a restoration of honor to both the people and to the sanctuary, the temple, which laid desolate at the time. That’s the sort of thing a reading of Jeremiah would teach Daniel to expect, and after all, they were just about at 70 years when Daniel prayed this prayer. But in God’s answer to Daniel’s prayer, God reveals to him that it’s not quite that simple. Our God will restore his people in his place; he’s faithful to his promise and always will be. But the ultimate restoration is not yet. So let’s look next at how our God will restore his people.

 

How our God will restore his people

 

While Daniel was praying, verse 21 tells us that Gabriel, an angel we met in Daniel 8, appears to him, seemingly in person this time, and Gabriel says he has come to tell it to Daniel, because Daniel is greatly loved. Then the vision begins in verse 24 by saying that seventy weeks are decreed about Daniel’s people and his holy city, the two things he was praying for, and what is decreed for them sounds amazing: Finishing the transgression, atoning for iniquity, bringing in everlasting righteousness, sealing both vision and prophet, and anointing a most holy place. The LORD is saying here that he is going to answer Daniel’s prayer! He is going to restore his people to his place, where sin will be no more, where there will be no more judgments to pour out on them because their iniquities have been atoned for, they will receive a righteousness that will last forever, there will be no more visions and prophets needed, for all will be accomplished, and the most holy place, the temple, will be restored. Our God will restore his people to his place…but not yet.

 

Because he tells Daniel that this will only be after seventy weeks, and look when verse 25 says that count begins: From the going out of the word to restore and build Jerusalem. So if you’re trying to get the timeline straight, Daniel and other Babylonians were taken into exile in 605 BC; that happened in the first chapter of the book of Daniel. About 70 years later, in 539 or 538 BC, Daniel prays the prayer recorded in this chapter. That same year, ostensibly in response to the prayer, Cyrus, called Darius in this passage, sends out a word to send the Jews back to Jerusalem, and then these 70 weeks begin, verse 25 says. In other words, Gabriel is saying to Daniel: Yes Daniel, God will restore his people to his place…but not for another 70 weeks. The 70 weeks are then divided into three periods: The first 7 weeks, then 62 weeks, then a final week, with that final week also divided in two.

 

Now, let me just flag for you that this is known to be one of the hardest passages in the whole Bible to understand, so bear with me while I say a few things by way of preface before attempting an explanation. There are three basic ways to understand this passage and others like it in the Bible that predict what will happen at the end: Historicist, idealist, and futurist. Historicists see passages like this one as having been fulfilled in events that already took place in history, like Antiochus’ desecration of the temple around 170 BC, or the Roman destruction of the second temple in AD 70. Idealists see these passages as revealing types that have multiple fulfillments throughout past history, in the present, and in the future: So yes, Antiochus is one fulfillment, the Roman destruction of the temple another, there are ways the passage is “live” in our own day, and ways it will still be fulfilled further in the future. Futurists see the passages as mainly fulfilled in the future, and are typically what we call in theology “Dispensationalists”—this is the perspective popularized in the Left Behind books and movies in which there is a removal of the church from the earth (commonly called the rapture), a great tribulation, a single antichrist who is typically seen as a world ruler, and a more general fixation on identifying the antichrist, predicting when the end will come, and identifying specific world events of our day as the fulfillment of passages like this one, while saying comparatively little to the people of God today about what these texts mean for us today. In its worst form, they almost explicitly teach that passages like this don’t apply to Christians at all; they’re just for ethnic or national Israel.

 

While there are Bible-believing brothers and sisters in Christ represented in each of those three approaches, and while there is variety within them, I think on balance, the idealist approach is the truest to the Bible. The historicist approach seems to miss how much of these prophesies are, in fact, not yet fulfilled. Has the transgression really been finished, has sin really come to an end, as verse 24 says will happen when this vision is fulfilled? It also seems to miss the way New Testament passages refer to prophecies like this one as though they are still to come, and as though they will come in association with the second coming of Christ, a point to which I will return later. But futurists miss how many of these passages were fulfilled in historical events like Antiochus and the Roman destruction of the temple, and the ways New Testament passages refer to prophecies like this one as though some aspects of them will be fulfilled in the generation of the New Testament. Even more significantly, they tend to miss the ways these passages are fulfilled in Christ himself. Do they really want to say iniquity has not been atoned for, as verse 24 says it will be when this prophecy is fulfilled, in the death of Christ, for example? So in accordance with the idealist approach, I see some aspects of this being already fulfilled in history and in Christ, while others remain not yet fulfilled.

 

A couple other disclaimers before I get into the details of the vision: Remember that we are in apocalyptic literature, in which numbers are often symbolic. We can’t appeal to symbolism whenever we feel like it; like we can’t read the Gospels and claim that Jesus’ resurrection is symbolic, because the Gospel writers told us they were writing history. That’s not the genre of Daniel 7-12, though, and in apocalyptic literature, we know numbers are often symbolic. Third, even though I don’t think even my interpretation of this passage answers every question, the main point of the passage is still clear. So let’s get into it.

 

The word translated weeks in verse 24 is the same Hebrew form as a word meaning seven, such that you can rightly read verse 24 as saying “Seventy sevens” are decreed, and the number seven is significant in this context. Seven years represented a sabbatical cycle, because in the law God gave Israel, he said every seventh year should be a sabbath year for the land; i.e., Israel was not to actively farm it. Then in Leviticus 26, God said that when he would remove his people from the land, it was so the land could enjoy its sabbaths. So 70 years was like a ten-fold sabbath for the land. But the 7 year sabbatical cycle wasn’t the only significant multiple of seven on the Jewish calendar God gave. There was another, even greater year, called the jubilee year, that would come every 49 years: That’s seven times seven, and in the jubilee year, all the captives in Israel would be set free, and everyone would return to the land God had promised their ancestors. So as the exile was a ten-fold sabbath for the land, what are we seeing here prophesied in the restoration? A ten-fold jubilee, and what happens in the jubilee? The captives are set free and return to their ancestral land. God’s people are restored to God’s place.

 

So the numbers here are of more symbolic than literal significance, communicating that what is coming is the ultimate jubilee. With that in mind, we can still break down the periods of those seventy weeks: First 7 weeks, then 62, then 1 that is divided into two. We know after the decree goes out to rebuild Jerusalem, that the rebuilding effort is completed within a century or so, a shorter period of time that could correspond to the 7 weeks, and then the 62 weeks would be the time until the coming of an anointed one who will be cut off, as verse 26 says, just as we saw earlier that Darius the Mede, another “anointed one,” himself came to the throne when he was 62 years old (Dan 5:31).

 

Interestingly, even if we take a more literal approach to the weeks of years, 490 years (70 weeks of years) from the time the word goes out to rebuild Jerusalem puts us right around the time of Jesus Christ’s life and death. So in verse 26 we read that an anointed one shall be cut off and who does that sound like? In his first sermon recorded for us in Luke 4:18-19, Jesus said this, “The Spirit of the Lord is upon me, because he has anointed me to proclaim good news to the poor. He has sent me to proclaim liberty to the captives and recovering of sight to the blind, to set at liberty those who are oppressed, 19 to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favor.” Here Jesus says he has been anointed, and anointed to announce what? The year of jubilee, the year of the Lord’s favor, liberty to the captives. Now sin would be ended, iniquity atoned for, everlasting righteousness brought in…but not yet. Because what verse 26 of our passages tells us is that that anointed one would first be cut off and have nothing, and on the cross this anointed one who came to preach the year of the Lord’s favor suffered the Lord’s judgment for the sins of his people. On the cross he was cut off, and he had nothing. Even his last garment was taken from him, and then his last breath. He had to be cut off so that God’s people who had sinned against him could be restored. That’s how the iniquities of God’s people were atoned for.

 

And then verse 26 tells us that the people of the prince who is to come shall destroy the city and the sanctuary. After the anointed one, another prince came, who destroyed the city and the sanctuary, this prince being most directly a reference to Titus, a Roman general who later became emperor, and who led the Roman forces to destroy the temple and the city of Jerusalem in the year AD 70, a short time after Jesus was cut off in AD 33. Then the end of verse 26 pushes us beyond this, and says that its end shall come with a flood, and to the end there shall be war. Desolations are decreed. Though the Roman destruction of the temple fulfilled this prophecy, it did not exhaust it. Within the New Testament we read of a final man of lawlessness (2 Thess 2), a final desolator, and until his time the spirit of the antichrist is at work through people like Antiochus, who we looked at last week, and people like Titus, who we’ve just mentioned, and through emperors after him like Marcus Aurelius who were known for their violent persecution of Christians, to the terrorist groups in Nigeria today killing Christians by the thousands.

 

When will the final antichrist come? We don’t know the answer to that question any more than we know when the Christ will come again, and don’t listen to anyone who tells you they do. The point of these texts is not so that we will chart out the dates and correctly guess the date or even correctly identify the final antichrist. The point is to help us recognize the spirit of the antichrist in every age, to expect desolation to come on our way to restoration, and to persevere by faith in our anointed prince until the end of verse 27 comes, and the decreed end is poured out on the desolator. Much like last week, we see again that what this antichrist-figure will do is attack the worship of God, which verse 27 describes as putting an end to sacrifice and offering, though here we get this added nuance of his making a strong covenant with many for one week, meaning he will not be acting alone. Many will follow him. But when the decreed end is poured out on the desolator, the blessings of verse 24 will come in.

 

And from our side of Jesus Christ’s crucifixion, the cutting off of the anointed one, we can see ways they have already come in. Jesus has atoned for our iniquities by his death on the cross. All who believe in him receive his righteousness as a gift, thus securing their justification, and he goes to work making them inwardly righteous. But, there is still a not yet. We remain painfully aware that transgression is not yet finished, sin is not yet ended, there is still more of this vision and prophecy to be fulfilled, and God’s most holy place has not yet come down to earth. If you are repenting of your sins today and trusting in Jesus alone for salvation, you have been restored to God, and invisibly united to people from every tribe, and language, and people, and nation. But we aren’t home yet. We aren’t yet visibly together, and we aren’t yet with our God. The final antichrist has not yet come, and Jesus has not yet killed him with the breath of his mouth, as 2 Thessalonians 2:8 tells us he will do. That time will come…but not yet.

 

So what do you expect the path from here to there to look like? A life of ease? Not yet. Do you find yourself getting bitter or stressed when you can’t seem to make life work exactly as you wanted to? What did you expect? Do you find yourself getting anxious about trying to control a future in which everything works? What do you expect? To the end there shall be war. Desolations are decreed, and it is through many tribulations that we must enter the kingdom of God (Acts 14:22). If you are here today and you are not a Christian yet, I don’t want to deceive you: The call to trust Christ is not a calling into a life of ease. The choice neither of us get to make is whether desolations will come. They are decreed. The choice we get is whether we will go through them in covenant with the evil one, or in covenant with the anointed one. To those who persevere through the desolations by faith in Christ, God promises a final restoration of his people to his place, a final removal of all sin, and a new heaven and new earth, in which righteousness dwells.

 

So don’t panic when wars or desolations come, as though something strange were happening (1 Peter 4:12). Don’t be surprised when the nations rage against the Lord and against his anointed (Psalm 2:1-2). These things are all part of the plan. Hold on to Christ, and keep going. Keep confessing your sins, and asking God for mercy. Keep praying for God’s kingdom to come, and his will to be done, on earth as it is in heaven, even when it looks like the desolator’s kingdom is the one coming, and it looks like his will is being done. Pray for the spread of the gospel and the building up of the church throughout the world, even when it is under attack and appears desolate in the eyes of the world. Keep gathering for worship, week in and week out, even when the evil one is trying to put an end to it. Keep loving your enemies and praying for those who persecute you, even when they’re the ones perpetrating the desolations. And one day, a day only God knows, when these 70 weeks are up, however long they are, the transgression will be finished, sin will be ended, iniquity will be atoned for, an everlasting righteousness will come, all visions and prophecies will be fulfilled, and the most holy place will be here on earth, where God will dwell with man forever. Our God will restore his people to his place…but not yet.