Back to the Unfolding Story

Last time we noted the importance of seeing our lives as situated within an unfolding drama. Tom Wright's 'Shakespeare Play' illustration illustrates this wonderfully.

The Old Testament (OT) writers lived in a frustrating time during which the disruption of relationships was the predominant reality, whereas the actualization of restoration that God was to bring to the world through Israel was often painfully absent. Our OT ancestors-in-the-faith longed for the work of restoration to come to fuller expression. “Where is the promised blessing of Abraham and the expected kingdom of David? Where is the justice and peace and life that is to characterize God’s good world?”

Jesus' Embodiment of the Kingdom: Partial and Ambiguous

What made Jesus’ inauguration of the promised life-giving kingdom so puzzling for his Jewish contemporaries was its partial and ambiguous expression in the day-to-day affairs of first-century Israel. Instead of coming like a flood, it appeared like a mist. Instead of standing large and unmistakable against the horizon like a sturdy oak tree, it came as a small, easily overlooked mustard seed. Instead of breaking conspicuously into history like a victorious Lion, the kingdom came in the misunderstandable form of a suffering Lamb. This is not what they were looking for. It required the eyes of faith to discern the hand of God in the work of Jesus. Read the parables of Jesus collected in Matthew 13 to get a feel for the perplexing ambiguity of the kingdom that came with Jesus’ arrival on the public stage.

At times Jesus taught that the kingdom, the new age, had come. At other time he taught that the coming was still on its way. So, which was it? Had it come or was it coming? The answer is ‘both.’ The kingdom of restoration promised in the OT with the arrival of Christ was both already present, in part, but not yet present in full. It had begun in Jesus’ ministry, but was not yet fully consummated. His contemporaries had to adjust radically their conceptions of the kingdom. Rather than coming all at once and overthrowing the evil in the world, the kingdom crept in and was now co-existing side-by-side with evil. We live in the “already/not yet” age between the beginning of the kingdom of God and the fullness of the kingdom. We live in a time “between the times.”

We Live Between the Times

If you look aghast at the extensive relational disruption that persists in the world, this era can be described as an age of evil. If you focus at the restoration that is bringing life and grace and peace in the world, this is a time of the kingdom. If you perceive the certainty of God’s eventual transformation of the world, this is a season of hope and confident expectation. If you wonder at the continued deferring of the consummation, this is a day that requires patience and endurance. Paul says that we in Christ has been “delivered from the present evil age” (Gal 1:3), though it continues to surround us. He also affirmed that we have been rescued from “the domain of darkness and transferred to the kingdom of the beloved Son” (Col 1:13), though others around us remain captives of the dark domain. Clearly, two kingdoms currently co-exist. John expressed the strange admixture of realities we all experience in this time between the first and the second comings of Christ. “I, John, your brother and companion in the suffering [or tribulation] and kingdom and patient endurance that are ours in Jesus” (Rev 1:9). Contrary to the popular belief among many of today’s American conservative evangelicals, the majority of biblical scholars now, and throughout church history, have understood “the tribulation” to be one descriptor of the whole era between the two advents, or comings, of Christ, when viewed from the perspective of the conflict God’s people experience from the “powers and principalities” (Eph 6:10-12).

We are God’s people of the future who are living in the present in order to demonstrate to the world what “heaven on earth” will look like when the kingdom comes in its fullness. That’s a tall order! What an assignment! Here are three passages that speak directly to our need to keep a picture of the coming consummation in our minds to give us both hope and direction:

Romans 8:16-25. So you have not received a spirit that makes you fearful slaves. Instead, you received God’s Spirit when he adopted you as his own children. Now we call him, "Abba, Father." For his Spirit joins with our spirit to affirm that we are God’s children. And since we are his children, we are his heirs. In fact, together with Christ we are heirs of God’s glory. But if we are to share his glory, we must also share his suffering.

Yet what we suffer now is nothing compared to the glory he will reveal to us later. For all creation is waiting eagerly for that future day when God will reveal who his children really are. Against its will, all creation was subjected to God’s curse. But with eager hope, the creation looks forward to the day when it will join God’s children in glorious freedom from death and decay. For we know that all creation has been groaning as in the pains of childbirth right up to the present time. And we believers also groan, even though we have the Holy Spirit within us as a foretaste of future glory, for we long for our bodies to be released from sin and suffering. We, too, wait with eager hope for the day when God will give us our full rights as his adopted children, including the new bodies he has promised us. We were given this hope when we were saved. (If we already have something, we don’t need to hope for it. But if we look forward to something we don’t yet have, we must wait patiently and confidently.)  And the Holy Spirit helps us in our weakness...

2 Corinthians 4:16-18. That is why we never give up. Though our bodies are dying, our spirits are being renewed every day. For our present troubles are small and won’t last very long. Yet they produce for us a glory that vastly outweighs them and will last forever! So we don’t look at the troubles we can see now; rather, we fix our gaze on things that cannot be seen. For the things we see now will soon be gone, but the things we cannot see will last forever.

1 Peter 1:3-9,13-16. All praise to God, the Father of our Lord Jesus Christ. It is by his great mercy that we have been born again, because God raised Jesus Christ from the dead. Now we live with great expectation, and we have a priceless inheritance—an inheritance that is kept in heaven for you, pure and undefiled, beyond the reach of change and decay. And through your faith, God is protecting you by his power until you receive this salvation, which is ready to be revealed on the last day for all to see. So be truly glad. There is wonderful joy ahead, even though you have to endure many trials for a little while. These trials will show that your faith is genuine. It is being tested as fire tests and purifies gold—though your faith is far more precious than mere gold. So when your faith remains strong through many trials, it will bring you much praise and glory and honor on the day when Jesus Christ is revealed to the whole world.

 You love him even though you have never seen him. Though you do not see him now, you trust him; and you rejoice with a glorious, inexpressible joy. The reward for trusting him will be the salvation of your souls... So think clearly and exercise self-control. Look forward to the gracious salvation that will come to you when Jesus Christ is revealed to the world.  So you must live as God’s obedient children. Don’t slip back into your old ways of living to satisfy your own desires. You didn’t know any better then. But now you must be holy in everything you do, just as God who chose you is holy. For the Scriptures say, “You must be holy because I am holy."

Inaugurated Eschatology

The Greek word that is translated “last” is eschatos. The study of the “last things” is called eschatology. In some circles eschatology is restricted to the topics of resurrection, judgment, heaven, and hell. It’s better I think to understand the term from within the biblical story where it assumes a much broader meaning. Standing in the shoes of the OT prophets the eschaton was the time of full restoration, the defeat of evil, and the flooding of the world with God’s justice and peace. With the arrival of Jesus, Israel’s King, this all-at-once scheme had to be modified into something of a two-stage fulfillment. With Jesus’ first advent the time of restoration, the eschaton, was inaugurated. Only when he comes again will the eschaton come in its fullness. With the first arrival of Jesus onto the stage of world history the anticipated “age to come” got off the ground. We now live in the first stage of the “age to come.”

Experiencing in the Present the Life of the Age-to-Come

This is what Jesus was talking about by using the term “eternal life.” We often think of “eternal life” as “life-that-goes-on-forever,” but in first-century Jewish ears it meant rather “life of the age to come,” or, “life of the eschaton,” or “eschatological life.” To put it in terms of our Gospel Story, eternal life is what we begin to experience when we get reconnected rightly with God and others. This manifold restoration of harmonious relationships is a foretaste of the kind of existence we will have when his “kingdom [finally] comes to earth as it is in heaven” (Matt 6:10). When the rich young ruler we looked at lask week approached Jesus, he asked, “What must I do to inherit eternal life?” (Mark 10:17) or, in other words, “what path must I follow to land a place among God’s people who will participate in life, full life, in the coming last days?” By bringing this life-of-the-coming-age to his followers, Jesus was bringing a taste of the future into the present. “We are living in the flow of how we are going to live forever,” writes Rob Bell (quoted by Scot on p. 60). Life of the restoration is already present, through not yet in its fullness. This is inaugurated eschatology.

Paul, prior to his call and conversion, along with his Jewish contemporaries, was anticipating the new age, the new exodus, the new covenant, and the resurrection to new life of all the faithful to inhabit the new heavenly earth. These new events would come all at once and completely displace and transform the old. But things didn't turn out like he thought they would. When on the road to Damacus (see Acts 9) the church-hating Paul encountered the resurrected Christ. That must have been quite the challenge to his conceptions of how the eschaton would "supposed to" arrive. Instead of all the faithful being resurrected en masse at the turn of the ages, Paul had encountered one man, Israel's King, resurrected in isolation in what was only the beginning of the last days. This event led not only to Paul's conversion, but to the overhaul and restructuring of his eschatology. For more on Paul and his perspectives, see Tom Wright's essay here from the New Dictionary of Theology, eds. David F. Wright, Sinclair B. Ferguson, J. I. Packer (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 1988), 496-499.

Our discussion of Scot's 5th chapter will close with reference to his helpful wheel analogy (p. 57) and the earthy realities of the heavenly commune, when heaven comes to earth (pp. 58-59). How much richer is this conception of our future than that popular notion of floating on one's own cloud playing a harp. For more on what we in Christ look forward to, see some of our earlier discussion on Christian Hope.

Seeing to our Part of our Transformation

Because we experience life-of-the-age-to-come now in the midst of tohu va-bohu, a chaotic world fraught with temptation and tribulation, we have to grapple with competing, almost dualistic, forces: God and his opposition, light and darkness, good and evil, life and destruction, obedience and sin. Fortunately, “he who is in us is greater than he who governs the evil age” (from 1 John 4:4). Though the battle may be fierce, the ultimate victory is certain. In the face of opposition, we in Christ are to pro-actively pursue the things that foster our transformation, personally and corporately, so that we can shine as lights in the dark world: “Don’t let the world-without-God squeeze you into its mold,” Paul warned, “but be continually transformed by renewing your mind” (Rom 12:1-2). How? By renewing your behavior in the context of community relations, as verses 3-21 make clear. This will take a lifetime! “Put away the bad stuff and put on the new” is another way Paul expresses this call to transformation (Ephesians 5:20-24). This exhortation, like in Romans, is followed by a hands-on list of the practical means of seeing to our part of our transformation. There’s a similar passage in Col 3:1-17. Here’s where the prayer for “grace and peace” is needed. We need his grace to experience the life of the age to come, a foretaste of the Shalom, or peace, that will one day engulf the earth at his return. “O, Come Lord Jesus!”