It’s so easy to take up the promises of Scripture and read them through the lenses of our own hopes and dreams.  This was the very trouble with the Jewish generation that encountered Jesus, and it remains the same for us.  In his new book, Wright captures this so well:

This is the point at which we can understand only too well how it was that the Israelite people of old, and the Jewish people of Jesus’ day, could very easily forget that their national dream and God’s purposes for them might actually be two quite different things. The prophets existed to remind them of the fact; but prophets were easy to ignore or forget. Or kill.

N. T. Wright, Simply Jesus, p. 43.