“He is leading us home” by David Gibson
“Surely goodness and mercy shall follow me all the days of my life,
and I shall dwell in the house of the LORD forever.” (Psalm 23:6)
“This beautiful psalm is not just the story of a sheep’s daily journey, out of the fold in the morning, doing its thing in the pastures and the valleys, and then returning safely home again with the shepherd at dusk.
It is the story, ultimately, of how ever since our first parents’ fall in Eden, we were exiled from the garden, the dwelling place of the Lord, so that God’s people were in need of an exodus salvation to take us from the land of sin and slavery to the land of promise.
In that land, however, we replayed our rebellion and not only vandalized a perfect garden but, this time, ruined a land flowing with milk and honey; and so the pattern continued. Exiled once more into slavery, God’s people needed a new exodus salvation to restore us to the promised land.
It is true that a return from exile brought deliverance, yes, but it was not complete; it was not total; it did not seem to contain everything that the prophets had promised.
Ever since the dawn of time we have been longing to return home, and that return is made possible only by the coming of the Lord Jesus, the true good shepherd who arrived to lead us home.
This home to which we are returning is Eden restored; but more than this, it is also Eden recalibrated to cosmic proportions.
Eden was the first dwelling place on earth of God with us. It was the first house where God and man lived together in perfect fellowship.
Ever since, every dwelling place of God on earth has been patterned on Eden: the tabernacle and then the temple were built as garden-sanctuaries with walls decorated with Edenic images of trees and flowers and precious stones.
The tabernacle and temple had within them the ultimate dwelling place, “the holy of holies” (or “Most Holy Place,” ESV), but astonishingly, at the end, in the book of Revelation, a “holy of holies” is not to be found. It is absent in Revelation’s glorious vision of God’s end-time dwelling.
The reason for this is simply stunning: the holy of holies—a perfect cube whose floor, walls, and ceiling were made of gold—has now expanded to fill the entire new earth as a city made of “pure gold” (Rev. 21:18) and measured as square in its dimensions.
Eden’s gold, reused in the most holy places of the tabernacle and temple, has now filled the whole earth to tell the gospel story that “God’s special presence, formerly limited to the holy of holies, has now burst forth to encompass the whole earth.”1
This is why the holy city, the new Jerusalem, comes down from heaven to be the place where God will dwell with us: “Behold, the dwelling place of God is with man. He will dwell with them, and they will be his people, and God himself will be with them as their God” (Rev. 21:3).
This is the house of the Lord. We have a longing for this kind of glorious house and this kind of joyful homecoming reunion at a very profound level, I think, because we know what it is to live among the ruins in this world.
Simple homes can be the happiest palaces on earth if filled with love and life, or they can be the most awful dungeons when overrun with strife or sorrow.
Psalm 23 resonates with us so deeply because it speaks to this yearning for all to be well and to arrive, at last, in a place of unreserved welcome and untainted beauty and perfection.
So we live with Christ our shepherd amid the tension of life, the now and the not-yet of His perfect rule. For now, we are not home, but we are heading there because He is leading us.”
–David Gibson, The Lord of Psalm 23: Jesus Our Shepherd, Companion, and Host (Wheaton, IL: Crossway, 2023), 140-142.
1. G. K. Beale, The Temple and the Church’s Mission: A Biblical Theology of the Dwelling Place of God (Nottingham: Inter-Varsity Press, 2004), 370.
