Imagine you’re going to take a step to a higher place. For example, you’re going to step up onto the bed of a pickup truck. It’s easiest if someone is up there to help you. So, you put one foot up on the tailgate, grab the hand your buddy extends, you push off your foot while your buddy pulls, and you’re up. Another example, you need to get something out of a high kitchen cabinet. You get something like a step ladder, stand on it, brace yourself by putting your hand up on the cabinet, and up you go. Common, ordinary ways we live, but they open for us Christians a view, maybe a new view of space and time.
We’re living in a very here-and-now culture. “What time is it?” you ask, and your friend says, “It’s about 9:26.” About? That’s not about, it’s focused on the present almost to the second. Since you’re in the world, you have to navigate this here-and-now culture, but since you’re a person of faith, you are also not of this world and therefore have a different internal clock. 1 Peter 1:13 is very interesting. The ESV translates, “Set your hope fully on the grace that will be brought to you and the revelation of Jesus Christ.” Most English translations do the same future tense, “the grace that will be brought to you.” But that’s not precisely what the original Greek says: “Set your hope on the grace that is being brought to you by the revelation of Jesus Christ.” Someday Judgment Day will come, we confess that, assuming it’s the sweet by and by, but the verse literally says already now you and I are receiving the gift of our inheritance in heaven that will fully be ours when Jesus comes. Picturing the pickup truck or step ladder, we’ve already got a foot higher in heaven. Think how that changes your outlook for today’s challenges.
The scholarly word for this is “proleptic,” something in the future is presented as already happening. Another example from 1 Peter: You are “guarded through faith for a salvation ready to be revealed in the last time. In this you rejoice, though now for a little while, if necessary, you have been grieved by various trials” (1: 5-6). Believers are already receiving blessings from our future. “Oh, that we were there!” goes a Christmas hymn about heaven (LSB 386:4), but timewise? Already now we’re experiencing the upward pull.
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