Nicholas Piotrowski on God’s Plan to Unite All Things in Him

This is my third post on Nicholas Piotrowski's wonderful book Return from Exile and the Renewal of God's People. Here are the first and second posts. Today's post struck me as a delightful summary of all of redemptive history in that Piotrowski discusses God's ultimate plan to reunite heaven and earth. This is what we pray for when we ask for God's will to be done on earth as it is in heaven.

​Jesus’s death and resurrection are clearly the climax of all four Gospels. It turns out Jesus’s death and resurrection are the climax of all redemptive history too. From the garden of Eden right through to Israel’s exile, we have seen a constant focus on sin as the cause of both expulsion from God’s presence and death. In the patriarchs, the Passover and exodus, Israel’s liturgy on the Day of Atonement, Israel’s taking of the land, the building of the tabernacle and the temple, and the prophets’ visions of restoration, we have also seen that resurrection and return to the presence of God are the commingled, ultimate goals of redemption. The entire storyline of the Old Testament begs for the climactic sin-atoning sacrifice and the life-giving return to the place of God’s dwelling, a reuniting of heaven and earth. Jesus’s cross and resurrection accomplish all this! The sacrifice of Jesus on the cross is the great end-times Day of Atonement, with Jesus himself serving the role of Isaiah's new, end-of-exile Passover lamb. And in his resurrection and ascension, Jesus has reentered the presence of God, the house of David is raised up and reenthroned, a new temple is built that fills the world, and the new creation has dawned. Indeed, this was God’s “will, according to his purpose, which he set forth in Christ as a plan for the fullness of time, to unite all things in him, things in heaven and things on earth” (Eph. 1:9-10).
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Thus, we understand the trifecta of Jesus’s cross, resurrection, and ascension as the mainshock of return from exile. Now “those who have entered into Christ and have participated in his death and resurrection have entered into the inaugural phase of the ultimate restoration of Israel and creation.” In Jesus’s death, his people are released from exile, and in his resurrection and ascension, the representatively return to God’s holy abode. 

All this amounts to the trampling of Satan under Jesus’s feet as Genesis 3:15 foretold. In Revelation 12, John describes history from his apocalyptic perch: Jesus is the seed of the woman (v. 2) who is constantly under threat from the serpent (v. 3). But Jesus ascends to heaven, from whence he “rule[s] all the nations” (v. 5). Thus, in his resurrection and ascension “that ancient serpent” is “thrown down” (v. 9), and Christ’s people “conquer him by the blood of the Lamb and by the word of their testimony” (v. 11)!

Piotrowski, Nicholas. Return from Exile and the Renewal of God’s People. Wheaton, IL: Crossway, 2024, p. 163-164 of 250 (ebook).