The Lordship of Christ & the Kingdoms of this World

“Jesus Christ is Lord. That is the first and final assertion Christians make about all of reality, including politics. Believers now assert by faith what one day will be manifest to the sight of all: every earthly sovereignty is subordinate to the sovereignty of Jesus Christ. The Church is the bearer of that claim. Because the Church is pledged to the Kingdom proclaimed by Jesus, it must maintain a critical distance from all the kingdoms of the world, whether actual or proposed. Christians betray their Lord if, in theory or practice, they equate the Kingdom of God with any political, social or economic order of this passing time. At best, such orders permit the proclamation of the gospel of the Kingdom and approximate, in small part, the freedom, peace, and justice for which we hope.”

~ Richard John Neuhaus, quoted by D. A. Carson in Christ & Culture Revisited (Grand Rapids, Mi.: Eerdmans, 2008), 203.

Spanning Two Eternities

“The world-wide preaching of the gospel throughout the historical process is the bridge which spans the two eternities of past promise and future fulfillment.”

~ John Stott, Guard the Truth (Downers Grove, Ill.: InterVarsity Press, 1996), 170.

Resurrection & the Fulfillment of Promised Possibilities

“Because the resurrection vindicates the Crucified, not the crucifixion, the gospel story undercuts any easy moralism or sentimental liberalism. Yet, though the resurrection opens up possibilities that could not even be imagined by ancient man, it also promises the fulfillment of those possibilities. If it provokes unimagined hunger, it also gives hope for unimagined satisfaction.”

~ Peter J. Leithart, Deep Comedy (Moscow, Id.: Cannon Press, 2006), 25.

Moving Towards a Deeply Comic Climax

“For the biblical writers, history is moving toward a deeply comic climax in which all wrongs are righted, all tears dried, and all loses regained with interest. Pain and the cross remain indelibly embedded in the narrative, and there is real waste and loss which is felt absolutely to be waste and loss. Yet, the final telos of the biblical story is absolute joy, peace, justice, and love. For the biblical writers, God’s victory is without question a victory in the ‘exterior world,’ for the Fall took place in this world, Israel was called in this world, Jesus was born, died, and rose again in this world, the Spirit came into this world, the gospel was preached to the nations in this world, and the new creation is a transfiguration of this world.”

~ Peter J. Leithart, Deep Comedy (Moscow, Id.: Canon Press, 2006), 33-34.

Heaven Washed Away

“Heaven is an odd element of the Christian faith. We profess it to be eternally important and then live as though it doesn’t exist. We are runners who fear the finish line. We go through life with little sense of what heaven will be like. We carry on with our lives, fixated on the here and now, oblivious to the there and then. The possibility of thinking about heaven on a daily basis — much less hoping for it to come — is washed away in the torrent of the details of daily life.”

~ Nathan L. K. Bierma, Bringing Heaven Down to Earth (Phillipsburg, NJ: P & R Publishing, 2005), 2.