In the most recent installment of this Home blog series, I reflected on Jesus the Son of God leaving his heavenly home in the incarnation and choosing a life of relative homelessness in his ministry in order to bring you back home to God. In that post, I made this observation,
“Here is one of the marvelous bits of the gospel. In Jesus, being back home with god starts right now,
Jesus answered him, “If anyone loves me, he will keep my word, and my Father will love him, and we will come to him and make our home with him (John 14:23).
By the Holy Spirit God makes his home, his dwelling place with you right now (Ephesians 2:22). Spiritually in Christ you rest your head in the bosom of the Father. You are home.”
In short, to be united to Jesus, to have Jesus dwelling in you by the Holy Spirit, is to be home. Jesus is your home in this sense. And yet, I also pointed out that you still await the fullness of home with God in the new heavens and new earth. I want to marry this reality with another one I recently pointed out in a past Home Series blog post: you are a sojourner.
You are at once home and sojourning onward towards home still. You are home because Jesus is with you. And you are sojourning because this earth is not your final home. You are on pilgrimage to your God and Father’s eschatological home, the new heavens and new earth.
We just learned to sing Psalm 23 in our “Psalms of Summer” class with our elementary children. I was reminded in singing it and teaching it that it is one of the places to see this dual reality of being home with Jesus now while still journeying to our final home most clearly,
The Lord is my shepherd; I shall not want. He makes me lie down in green pastures. He leads me beside still waters. He restores my soul. He leads me in paths of righteousness for his name’s sake. Even though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil, for you are with me; your rod and your staff, they comfort me. You prepare a table before me in the presence of my enemies; you anoint my head with oil; my cup overflows. 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).
Behold the journey of your life in Psalm 23.[1]
In your sojourn, you will find tranquil havens, like safe, nourishing fields of green where you can enjoy rest for a season. Yes, in your pilgrimage, you will know times of peaceful refreshing like an oasis of still waters. You hunger? You have a blanket of nourishment before you. You thirst? A bracing stream lies close at hand to satisfy you.
At other times in your sojourn, you will walk through valleys of deep darkness. Instead of a nourishing field in which to lie down and rest under the warm sun, you will find yourself in an unfamiliar, lifeless, barren wasteland of shadow where there isn’t so much as a crumb to stave off the pangs. Instead of a calm, crystal stream to cool you, you will know dry and weary paths where every step hazards dangers. In that valley, you will ford fiery rivers of sulfur while the hot breath of death breathes down your neck.
Moreover, there will be times in your sojourn that enemies seem to surround you on all sides. Sleep will elude you because the light from the campfires of the enemy, which flicker against the night air on all sides of the path that lay before you, invade your troubled eyes. The rattle of spears, the clack of blades, the knocking of arrows, the war cries of adversaries greet every step you take.
And yet, in each of these legs of your journey, you will know home. This is because you do not make this journey alone. You are the sheep and your shepherd leads you every step.
It is your shepherd who leads you to the green, nourishing pastures and peaceful refreshing pools and springs. It is your shepherd’s ever-watching, ever-guarding, sleepless eye that ensures your rest and peace in these places. With the nourishment and safety he provides, he restores your soul. He is your home.
And he knows the way to go. He cut the path of righteousness himself because no one else was ever able. So when he leads you, your confidence rests not in your knowledge or sense of direction, but in his. He made this path, and he will lead you in it. He is your home.
It is your shepherd who takes the point in the valley of darkness and death. In him, you find courage and comfort. For he wields his rod and staff to guard and keep you from succumbing to the evils of that valley, which he fends off before you. Again, he has walked through this valley before. He tasted death. And he overcame it. He is your home.
It is your shepherd who, when enemies surround you on every side, provides and serves a sumptuous repast. No scanty, hastily eaten supper with your shepherd. He himself provides refuge enough for a slowly savored banquet. He himself provides and serves a feast that strengthens your weary body. And he himself provides and pours oil upon your head to cleanse and calm your troubled. He himself provides and overflows your cup with rich wine, as if to say, “Sit longer. Enjoy. Your enemies won’t touch you.” He is your home.
Nourishment. Refreshment. Restoration. Direction. Protection. Comfort. Feasting. These are the mile markers you see when you look back on your journey. Indeed, what you see is that because of your Shepherd, goodness and mercy followed you and will follow you (Psalm 23:6). “Follow” here doesn’t quite do the Hebrew word justice. The Hebrew word the ESV renders “follow” conveys the idea of pursuing. Indeed, most often in the Old Testament, it describes an enemy “pursuing” an enemy, and the ESV indeed renders the majority uses of the Hebrew word as “pursue” or “chase.” So David wants you to see something here with his word choice. He wants you to see that in your journey, you don’t just passively happen upon goodness and mercy by accident. Rather, goodness and mercy were chasing you down, hot on your heels every step.[2]
So, when you look back on your journey, you don’t just see random places of rest you were lucky enough to find. You don’t just see valleys of darkness that came upon you suddenly or that you happened to stumble into—valleys in which you were fortunate enough to find a measure of comfort and an exit. You don’t just see enemy camps that cut you off or that you mistakenly wondered into by a wrong turn. You don’t just see fluky feasts that you managed to sneak in when the enemy wasn’t looking. What you see is that goodness and mercy actively pursued you, caught you, and blessed you with the kindness of God in every leg of your journey. And you know without a doubt that they will continue to follow you all your days, because your Shepherd is with you, and he is your home.
And, important to note here, your journey is not aimless. Your Shepherd does not lead you on this winding pilgrimage full of ups and downs, chased by goodness and mercy, just for the exercise. He leads you somewhere. He has a destination in mind,
[You] shall dwell in the house of the Lord forever (Psalm 23:6).
Your Shepherd who is your mobile home as it were, leads you to your permanent home—the house of the Lord. Ultimately, this home will be the new heavens and new earth, eternity with God.
Author and theologian David Gibson points to the words of Scottish author and minister George MacDonald to illustrate this stunning promise that this world is not our final home. Our final home with God lies on the horizon of this long, often hard journey.
“We are in a house with windows on all sides. On one side the sweet garden is trampled and torn, the beeches blown down, the fountain broken; you sit and look out, and it is all very miserable. Shut the window. I do not mean forget the garden as it was, but do not brood on it as it is. Open the window on the other side, where the great mountains shoot heavenward, and the stars rising and setting, crown their peaks. Down those stairs look for the descending feet of the Son of Man coming to comfort you. This world, if it were alone, would not be worth much—1 should be miserable already; but it is the porch to the Father’s home, and he does not expect us to be quite happy, and knows we must sometimes be very unhappy till we get there: we are getting nearer.”[3]
Your Shepherd who is your home now, who makes it so that goodness and mercy do pursue you even in the dark valleys and enemy fields, leads you to your eternal home with God. With every step now, you get closer and closer.
Glory be to the Father,
and to the Son, and to the Holy Ghost;
as it was in the beginning,
is now, and ever shall be,
world without end. Amen, amen.[4]
[1] I have not read David Gibson’s The Lord of Psalm 23 though I employ here in this article a quote from Gibson’s book, which (within a larger excerpt) was brought to my attention and proved fitting. Many of the themes and observations of this article may overlap or share similarities with Gibson’s book. This is purely coincidental. See David Gibson, The Lord of Psalm 23: Jesus Our Shepherd, Companion, and Host, (Wheaton: Crossway, 2023).
[2] Gibson provides a discussion on understanding “follow” as the more active “pursue” as well. See, Gibson, “What He Sends” in The Lord of Psalm 23, 121–134. I have not read this chapter or the book.
[3] Cited in Gibson, The Lord of Psalm 23, 143. Originally cited in Glenn Edward Sadler, “Defining Death as ‘More Life’: Unpublished Letters by George MacDonald,” North Wind: A Journal of George MacDonald Studies 3 (1984): 13–14.
[4] “Gloia Patri” by Anonymous (1179). My use of “Gloria Patri” here was inspired by the larger excerpt from Gibson’s book mentioned in Footnote 1. That excerpt included a prayer from Daily Prayer, ed. Eric Milner-White and G. W. Briggs (Harmondsworth, UK: Penguin, 1959), http://assets.newscriptorium.com/collects-and-prayers/daily_prayer.htm. Which Gibson notes “[build] on the words of John Donne, sermon 146, on Acts 7:60, preached at Whitehall, February 29, 1967. This prayer ends with “in the habitations of thy glory and dominion, world without end.” See Gibson, The Lord of Psalm 23, 143–44.
