Already and Not Yet

The portrait of the body of Christ that Paul painted was of one “upon whom the ends of the ages have come” (1 Cor. 10:11)—that is, God’s people are at one and the same time in both the already and the not yet of God’s kingdom. 

There are some who speak of this not as something partially fulfilled today with the rest to be finished later, but rather as Paul’s strident call to Christ’s body to regard itself in the here and now as one for whom eternity has already begun in its completeness. As it will be, so we are to live it now.

For Paul, through the resurrection of Christ and the subsequent gift of the Spirit, God himself had set the future inexorably in montion, so that everything in the 'present' is determined by the appearance of the future." [1]

Stated simply, to paraphrase Paul, “This is who you are. Walk in it.” Embracing this, says Fee, is not triumphalism, but rather in Paul’s mind to be the experienced reality of the power of Christ’s resurrection in His Body, the Church: the one that is both “stamped with eternity” and yet presently participates in His sufferings. [2]

That we don’t always see this when looking at Christ’s body with its mistakes and stumbles takes nothing away from the timeless reality Paul sought to convey, for like God’s people of Paul’s time, we in this present day are also in need of reminding of who we are by virtue of what God has done, and having been reminded, to grow and so walk in our love for the Father and one another.

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[1] Gordon Fee, God’s Empowering Presence: The Holy Spirit in the Letters of Paul, (Hendrickson Publishers, Inc., 2006), 801.

[2] Ibid. 804.