life” (John 3:16). And to Martha, before raising Lazarus from the dead, Jesus says: “I am the resurrection and the life. He who believes in me shall live, even though he dies; and whoever lives and believes in me will never die. Do you believe this?” he asks her (John 11:25–26). And yet another word from the Gospel of John: “I tell you the truth,” says Jesus, “whoever hears my word and believes him who sent me has eternal life and will not be condemned; he has crossed over from death to life. I tell you the truth, a time is coming and has now come when the dead will hear the voice of the Son of God, and those who hear will live. For as the Father has life in himself, so he has granted the Son to have life in himself” (John 5:24–26).
“Do you believe this?” Jesus asks Martha. It’s the question we must ask ourselves. It’s the key question. Do we believe that Jesus is the resurrection and the life? In him—in himself, in his being—is life, and as we are in him by grace through faith, and as he is in us, we have life—true life, everlasting life. Herein lies our hope, the hope that the world lacks and cannot give. In him who was raised from the dead, we shall be raised from the dead. This will be the consummate expression of God’s love. “For if the dead are not raised,” writes Paul to some skeptics in Corinth, “then Christ has not been raised either. And if Christ has not been raised, your faith is futile; you are still in your sins . . . If only for this life we have hope in Christ, we are to be pitied more than all men . . . If the dead are not raised, ‘Let us eat and drink, for tomorrow we die’” (1 Cor 15:16–17, 19, 32b). But of course Paul, who had encountered the risen Christ on the road to Damascus, and who, later, in Christ, had been caught up to the third heaven (2 Cor 12:2), was utterly convinced that Christ had been raised, and hence that those who belonged to him would be raised too: “With that same spirit of faith,” he writes to the Corinthians, “we also believe and therefore speak, because we know that the one who raised the Lord Jesus from the dead will also raise us with Jesus and present us with you in his presence” (2 Cor 4:13–14).
II
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
