Although the new era has come, this is only a partial fulfillment of the covenants. We await a final, complete fulfillment. God still wants to provide a perfect place to live among his people in an even more permanent and personal way. One day God will destroy evil and wickedness and provide this perfect place – a new heaven and new earth. The book of Revelation describes this perfect garden-city, the new Jerusalem, where God will live among his people in unhindered intimacy.

The long restoration project is finally complete. People from every tribe and language and people and nation who follow Jesus the Messiah are welcomed into this perfectly restored creation. What sin and the serpent once destroyed, God has restored. God has kept his promises.

God has brilliantly and masterfully and compassionately provided a way to right the wrongs and restore his creation. In the new heaven and new earth, all our relationships will be made whole and new – with the Lord God, with other people, and with creation itself. Until then, as the author of Hebrews puts it: “let us run with perseverance the race marked out for us, fixing our eyes on Jesus, the pioneer and perfecter of faith.^[1]”

^[1] The Holy Bible: New International Version (Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan, 2011), Heb 12:1–2.