Has the End Already Begun?

What happens at the end of time? Christian theology teaches that at the end Christ will return to rescue his people, there will be a great day of judgment where unbelievers are judged for their sins and believers are vindicated in Christ, where believers will receive their resurrection bodies, where creation will be remade anew, and where believers will live with God for all eternity. But what if the end has already started?

Hebrews 1:1–2 says, Long ago, at many times and in many ways, God spoke to our fathers by the prophets, but in these last days he has spoken to us by his Son, whom he appointed the heir of all things, through whom also he created the world.

1 John 2:18 says as well, “Children, it is the last hour, and as you have heard that antichrist is coming, so now many antichrists have come. Therefore we know that it is the last hour.”

The final days have come upon us with the arrival, death, resurrection, ascension of Christ, and the outpouring of the Spirit. So what difference does that make for Christians? Plenty! In his new book on 2 Corinthians, Ministry in the New Realm, Dane Ortlund looks at eight major markers God’s people in the Old Testament were looking for when God’s kingdom would come.

Ortlund asks, “When Mark tells us that Joseph of Arimathea “was also himself looking for the kingdom of God” (Mark 15:43), what exactly was the content of that eager expectation?” (17). From the perspective of the Old Testament, there was a constellation of eight “world-shaking events [that] would signal and usher in the latter days and the new creational kingdom” (or what Ortlund calls “the new realm”) that the OT saints were waiting for:

1. The Messiah would come;
2. God’s enemies would be defeated;
3. The fall in Eden would be undone;
4. Sin would be judged;
5. The nations would stream to Jerusalem;
6. God’s people would be vindicated over their enemies;
7. God’s latter-day kingdom would be ushered in;
8. The dead would be raised (17).

Yet when we read the New Testament, every one of these expectations has begun to be fulfilled. This is called the already/not-yet. Promises have already now begun to be fulfilled, yet they have not yet been completely fulfilled.

1. Messiah has come (Rom 1:3–4);
2. God’s enemies were decisively triumphed over—not on a battlefield but on a cross (Col 2:13–15);
3. Jesus, the second Adam, has succeeded where the first Adam failed. Jesus resisted Satan’s temptations (Luke 3:38–4:13). Jesus’ exorcisms (driving demons out of people) were a picture of what Adam failed to do (driving Satan out of Eden);
4. Sin was judged once and for all at the cross, where the end-time judgment on sin was brought down onto one man (Rom 5:9; 1 Thess 5:9);
5. Gentiles are flooding into the kingdom like they never have before (Rom 15:8–27);
6. God’s people have been vindicated now in their justification (Rom 5:1). While there remains a final judgment where God’s people will be vindicated before all, God declares his in-Christ people as being now innocent of all charges;
7. Jesus announced that the kingdom is here (Mark 1:15; cf. Acts 20:25; 28:31; Rom 14:17). He frees 1:2 tells us that we are in the last days;
8. In Christ, the dead have been raised (Eph 2:6; Col 3:1; cf. Rom 6:4).

The New Testament’s message is that all the promises of God are yes in Christ, and those promises are ours even today. But these promises have been fulfilled in an already / not yet way. Ortlund notes, “A future consummation is still needed at every point. We call it inaugurated eschatology, not fulfilled eschatology. But the decisive moment has nevertheless already quietly taken place in the person and work of Jesus” (18).

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