LITMIR.BIZ

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      Resurrection life is what characterizes the kingdom of God. Where Jesus reigns, there is the kingdom of God. This kingdom is both present and future, hidden now in the hearts of those who believe and in the Spirit-filled lives they seek to lead (see Matthew 4:17, 23, 13:24; Luke 12:31–32, 17:20–21), and to be manifested fully in the future, when Christ returns to raise and judge the dead and renew the creation (see Mark 9:1; Luke 13:29, 22:30; John 6:40, 44; 1 Cor 6:9–10, 15:50). Eternal life and the kingdom of God are the same reality, as Jesus makes plain in his exchange with the rich young man (Mark 10:17–31). To enter it, we must die to the autonomous self—the rebel self that lives apart from the true God, according to its own dictates—and we must follow Jesus. We must humble ourselves and repent. We must decide to put to death our own self-as-king and receive in exchange, by faith, Jesus as King. This involves identifying with Jesus on the cross. The old man, the self-focused ego, dies with Jesus, and the new man rises with him. Neither for Jesus nor for us is resurrection possible without death. “For you died,” writes Paul to the Colossian Christians, “and your life is now hidden with Christ in God.” And he exhorts them: “Since, then, you have been raised with Christ, set your hearts on things above” (Col 3:1). Paul uses the present tense. Because, by faith, we are in Christ and are indwelt by the Spirit of God, we have new life—eternal life—even now.

      The Son of God, who is life, has overcome death: first by becoming one of us, then by living a sinless life of obedience to the Father, and then, at terrible cost, by laying down his life for us. He has defeated the devil, who holds the power of death (Heb 2:14–15). The evidence of this victory is Christ’s resurrection and the establishment of his kingdom in the hearts of men and women down through the ages who, living in the shadow of death and conscious of the shadows in their own lives, have hungered for life and love and found hope and salvation in Jesus. The church is not the kingdom of God, but it is the vehicle for the kingdom to penetrate this fallen world. We who make up the church are sinners and have often failed to live the life Christ calls us to, but that does not alter the truth of the good news at the heart of the gospel we seek to proclaim. At his return, Christ the King will complete the victory won at Calvary by destroying Satan forever and renewing the creation (Rev 20:7–10).

      Christ’s return is a certainty of which Jesus himself and the apostles have a great deal to say. In no way should this biblical truth be considered myth, any more than our Lord’s resurrection. Not only did Jesus promise it categorically (e.g., Mark 13:26–35; Matt 24:30–51; Luke 17:19–27; John 14:3–4; and see Acts 1:11; Phil 3:20–21; 1 Thess 4:13–18), his return in glory is, when you think logically about it, absolutely necessary to complete the work of salvation and new creation. The church knows that the divine invasion of earth has taken place and that Satan and death have been defeated by Christ at the cross (Luke 10:17–20, John 12:31, Col 2:15, Heb 2:14–16), but it is clear, as St. John puts it in his First Epistle, that the world still lies in the lap of the evil one (1 John 5:19). If Christ does not return to complete his victory at the cross, that victory would be stillborn. It would not be generally and conclusively effectual. Evil would still be effectively on the throne, and Satan triumphant. There would be no final judgment, justice would not prevail. God would not be God—he would not be the righteous and all-powerful Creator and Re-Creator.

      The establishment of the kingdom of God within history happens in stages. There is first the period of Israel, when the true God reveals himself and calls out a people to make known his Name; this leads to the coming of the Jewish Messiah, the Son of God, who, by his incarnation and passion, accomplishes the work of salvation, making communion with the true God available not only to the people of Israel but to gentiles (pagans) as well; then there is the period of mission, when the good news of the kingdom is proclaimed far and wide by the church, so that those of the human race who desire truth may be able to turn to God and receive eternal life; and finally there is the time of fulfillment, when Christ the King will return in manifest power to complete his work of redemption, take back his creation, and definitively destroy the devil, the rebellious angelic forces, and death. Then God will be all in all, and his kingdom will be established forever (1 Cor 15:20–28).

      The early church longed for the Lord’s return, and so must we. And we must earnestly look out for the signs that point to his return (e.g., Matt 24; Luke 21; 1 Thess 5). In our day, they are everywhere, and it may well be the case that Christ’s return is imminent. The modern spirit, with its materialism, its suspicion of transcendence, and its rejection of any objective divine reality beyond and behind the cosmos, has infected much of the Western church with skepticism as far as the Lord’s return is concerned. The myth of progress has absorbed and virtually replaced the biblical understanding of the kingdom of God. In the last 100 years, this myth of progress has been basically shattered by world events, but it still hangs on, both in the popular mind and among elites, and is finding, to some extent, new strength in the prodigious advances of technology. But the hope and sense of purpose and direction that accompanied this myth in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries—these are hardly to be found any more. Messianic political ideologies have been discredited. A sense of pointlessness, even despair, is now common currency, and corruption, fear, and violence of all kinds are overtaking every part of the world. Even the reigning god of technology and the economic structure of capitalism that expands technology’s reach and power—and which is itself an expression of technology—is no longer looked upon, at least by reasonable people, as the source of salvation and the provider of ultimate meaning to human life.

      And yet for all that, materialism and consumerism, sustained by technology, maintain their ideological grip on human society, even where nationalist or religious identity retains or asserts, often violently, a supposedly countervailing influence. While this state of affairs puts tremendous pressure on Christians who, along with Jews, are being scapegoated and attacked wherever they find themselves because, in principle, they follow a different—transcendent—star, it also provides a tremendous opportunity for the church to proclaim with boldness the good news of hope and eternal life in Jesus Christ. There is desperation and a great hunger for truth out there, underneath the apparent indifference to transcendent reality, and we Christians alone have truly good news to proclaim. The message of the return of the Messiah to set things right, of the final judgment of evil and the establishment of justice, and of the renewal of creation, even as we see the original creation being desecrated—this message, while it certainly stretches the mind and imagination and is in fact, for our finite minds, quite unimaginable in its realization (as were the incarnation and the resurrection before they actually happened in history), is an absolutely essential part of the good news we are called to proclaim, and it should be consciously at the heart of our personal and liturgical prayers, as it was in the early church.

      Once again, it is Christ’s resurrection that is the core of this proclamation. This, as I’ve been saying and as we know, is true dogmatically, with respect to sin, death, and salvation. But it is also true philosophically, in the following sense—and I think this is an important point. Christ’s resurrection is the great reality within history that is manifestly supernatural (his incarnation was likewise supernatural, of course, but not manifestly so, not publicly—only to Mary and Joseph). His miracles are supernatural too, of course, and point to the reality of who he is, but they don’t have the utter and absolute strangeness as has his own resurrection from the dead. His resurrection does not arise in any way from within historical conditions as such, or from natural law or causality. It is absolutely sui generis, a demonstration of power that is not human and so can only be divine. Those who deny it or who call it a myth cannot contest this, they can only claim—with no historical evidence whatsoever to support their claim—that it did not happen.

      Here is not the place to develop this point, but it should be for believers a source of tremendous reassurance and hope: in Christ, God has manifestly penetrated our human sphere and has acted as nowhere else in the course of history, and the nature of that action being what it was, we have every reason to believe that what those who experienced it declared to be its significance—that is, redemption and the offer of eternal life to those who hunger for it—was and is true. Similarly, if such supernatural power has turned nature inside out once, we have every reason to believe—even if we cannot imagine how he will do it—that the Lord, at his return, will have the power to upturn and renew his entire fallen creation. Heaven will

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