Nicholas Piotrowski on the Day of Atonement as Return from Exile

One book I’m looking forward to reading in 2026 is Nicholas Piotrowski's Return from Exile and the Renewal of God’s People. When preparing to teach on atonement recently in Sunday school, I was thinking about how the Day of Atonement is a typological return to Eden as it removes the barrier (sin) between God and his people. Piotrowski strikes a similar note in chapter 2:

[I]t is Israel’s high priest who bears the biggest burden, whose ministry carries the fate of us all. Once per year, Israel’s high priest representatively carries all humanity into the Most Holy Place, the tabernacle’s inner sanctum where God himself dwells. In so doing, he symbolically effects humanity’s return from exile back into a typological garden of Eden.

I’m not sure how Piotrowski will weave these details into the rest of his book, but perhaps something like this: Hebrews 8:6–7 says, “But as it is, Christ has obtained a ministry [as High Priest] that is as much more excellent than the old as the covenant he mediates is better, since it is enacted on better promises. For if that first covenant had been faultless, there would have been no occasion to look for a second.” Hebrews also says that Christ has entered into the True Temple in heaven, of which the earthly temple was a “copy.” He entered with his own blood, not animal blood, to make atonement once-and-for-all. In doing this he put an end to the OT sacrificial system which (when Hebrews was written c. 60 AD) was “ready to vanish away” and did vanish when the temple was destroyed in 70 AD (Heb 8:13).

This means that, to some extent, we live in Eden again. Essentially, our return from exile has been completed in Christ. "It is finished," said Christ. This is not to say that we are free of sin, but that in Christ, our sin problem has been dealt with and the record of our sin no longer stands against us. We are no longer in exile in relation to God. On the contrary, we are able to boldly approach his throne. We might consider ourselves to be in a kind of “exile” as we continue to dwell in a world that is hostile to God (to varying degrees based on time and place throughout history), but this is a different kind of exile altogether. To be exiled by God is curse, but to be exiled by the world is our salvation. Praise be to Jesus our High Priest who has reconciled us and brought us back from exile! 

Piotrowski, Nicholas. Return from Exile and the Renewal of God’s People. Wheaton, IL: Crossway, 2024, p. 67 of 297 (ebook).