Offer Them Life. Dan W. Dunn

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Offer Them Life - Dan W. Dunn

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he is still coming. The kingdom is already here in the presence of the king, but the kingdom has not yet arrived.”59 Bosch shares these sentiments, and he helpfully notes that not only is this tension unresolved in Jesus’s usage (he prefers the designation of reign of God), but should remain that way, for “it is precisely in this creative tension that the reality of God’s reign has significance for our contemporary mission.”60

      In keeping with the spirit of Bosch, I suggest that the tension between the already and not-yet dimensions of kingdom fulfillment bears a strong relationship to the biblical theme of life. Recognizing this tension prompts us to ask: Has the kingdom come fully enough in Jesus that we can experience the life that God intends for us when we submit to Jesus’s reign and rule, or, is it only possible to experience partial life in Christ because the kingdom’s fullness remains to be seen at some future time?

      The tension between the already and not-yet dimensions of kingdom fulfillment helps us understand that while there is a certain measure of life that we will only be able to experience in the future, there is also a vibrant fullness of life that can be experienced now. It’s not that we receive a little bit of life now and then at a later point we will receive eternal life; we receive eternal life now. We receive the very Spirit of God. We are renewed in Christ and the Spirit. We are transformed. We are made alive in a way we neither experienced nor understood before.

      Is this transformation made instantaneously complete? Not at all. What has begun is a process of transformation that will endure a lifetime and beyond, into chronological eternity. However, our incomplete transformation is not because we receive an incomplete (or insufficient) life, but because the two ages (the old age and the age to come) overlap. It is not that we have been given only partial life in Christ, but rather that the full life in Christ that is ours is “crowded out” and “cluttered” by the old age.

      Thus, instead of focusing on the impossibility of experiencing full life in Christ due to the presence and power of the old age, Christians, in both discipleship and evangelism, should focus on the possibility of experiencing full life in Jesus due to the presence and power of the age to come.

      In this recommendation I do not assume that the ministry of evangelism will deliver full God-intended life-in-Jesus, for that is more appropriately the role of the ministry of discipleship. I do, however, suggest that the ministry of evangelism should cast the vision of the full God-intended life-in-Jesus. This is more faithful to the core message of the good news of the gospel, it helps non-Christians more fully understand what they are being invited to embrace (on the front end of their journey), and it more appropriately “sets up” the ministry of discipleship by providing a more complete biblical frame of reference for the full life that discipleship is to help us grow into.

      Life Is Central: It Is God’s Prior Intent

      You might surmise from this discussion that the kingdom provides the foundation for an understanding of life. To a certain extent this is true. The prevalence of kingdom language in the Synoptic Gospels prompts us to consider the kingdom to be a central (for some people, the central) theme for biblical and theological work. However, a strong case can be made from a different perspective: the biblical theme of life could also quite legitimately serve as the central organizing principle of the Bible.

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