Cosmic Restoration Coming...

Sorry for the long quote, but I love this book (The Resurrection of the Son of God by NT Wright) and as I'm finishing up a paper on Isaiah 60 and Revelation 21, I've been so amazed by the promise of universal, bodily, earthly restoration that God promises to His people. We will not float around as mere spirits in some sort of ethereal paradise, but God will come here to establish His Kingdom on the Earth. This coming (or appearing) of God on the Earth means universal restoration of the pre-fall (the "fall" as in Genesis 3) creation. No more pain and suffering, no more injustice, and no more separation from God in any way for all who trust Him.

NT Wright, who I agree with on this issue (though I think he's wrong on the issue of justification), writes about how the incarnation, life, death and, especially, the resurrection of Jesus opened the door for this type of universal cosmic restoration that is to come:

"The historical question is further sharpened by what happened to the portrait of 'Messiah' in early Christianity. Despite what scholars have often said, it was not abandoned, but nor was it simply adopted wholesale from existing Jewish models. It was transformed, redrawn, around Jesus himself. The early Christians maintained, on the one hand, the basic shape of Jewish messianic belief. They reaffirmed its biblical roots in the Psalms, the prophets and the biblical royal narratives; they developed it in biblical ways (such as the belief that Israel's Messiah was the world's true lord;...). At the same time, on the other hand, they quickly allowed this belief to be transformed in four ways. It lost its ethnic specificity: the Messiah did not belong only to the Jews. The 'messianic battle' changed its character: the Messiah would not fight a military campaign, but would confront evil itself. The rebuilt Temple would not be a bricks-and-mortar construction in Jerusalem, but the community of Jesus' followers. The justice, peace and salvation which the Messiah would bring to the world would not be a Jewish version of the imperial dream of Rome, but would be God's dikaiosune [righteousness], God's eirene [peace], God's soteria [salvation], poured out upon the world through the renewal of the whole creation." NT Wright, The Resurrection of the Son of God, p. 563