“If any man be in Christ, He is a new creation; the old has passed away, behold, the new has come.”

Time in abstraction, that is, time thought of in a way that is not thought from God’s triune time for the world in Jesus Christ, can only lead to a life of despair and futility. The 21^st century’s busy-ness that most are preoccupied with often has the tendency to glaze over the futility of life, without Christ, which can often last someone a lifetime; that is until they are finally confronted with the reality of their mortality. Indeed, the reality of mortality is ultimately to face the Firstborn from the Dead, Jesus Christ. And to finally meet the ground of all reality, and the purpose of the created order in general, after a person has “expired,” is a fearful thing indeed. It is as if such a person has finally had to come to terms with the fact that they have trampled the blood of Christ underfoot, counting it a vain thing.

Barth writes:

Again by way of anticipation, the presence of Jesus in His community is full of import for the future. His presence impels and presses to His future, general and definitive revelation, of which there has been a particular and provisional form in the Easter history. Hence even the presence of Jesus in the Spirit, for all its fulness, can only be a pledge or first instalment of what awaits the community as well as the whole universe, His return in glory. But it must never be forgotten that He who comes again in glory, this future Jesus, is identical with the One proclaimed by the history of yesterday and really present to His own to-day. The thorough-going eschatology for which the interim between now and one day necessarily seems to be a time of emptiness, of futility, of lack, of a progressive and barely concealed disillusionment, is not the eschatology of New Testament Christianity. And again it is only an unspiritual community which can tolerate such a view. The fact that the man Jesus will be includes the fact that He is; but the fact that He is does not exclude that He is “not yet.”[1]

For about a decade, starting in the mid-nineties, the Lord, as He began to do a heavy work in my life, allowed me to feel what life would be like without Him as the ground of it all. I can only describe that season of time as a literal hell. Indeed, clinically it might have been “diagnosed” as depression and general anxiety, but it went much deeper than that. Its basis was indeed spiritual. It was tied into a heavy intellectual (although not affective) doubt of God’s existence I was experiencing; even as a Christian. I felt the hell of nihilism whilst in the depths of deep depression and deep anxiety (indeed, these became mutually implicating things). I only made it through that because God is gracious.

Even so, as Barth underscores, we are included in the time of Christ; the new time of God in recreation for us (pro nobis). We have the guarantee of the eschatological time to come even as He in-breaks, by the Holy Spirit, into our broken lives while we continue to inhabit this in-between time. But His parousia (presence) is just as real and weighty now as it will finally be when the consummate reality of the revealing of the sons of God ultimately enfolds us into its full participative esse (ground) as that has been, and always will be, mediated for us in the priestly humanity of our High Priest and Brother, Jesus Christ. Take heart, even though we might experience many and deep tribulations here, Christ has overcome the world!

[1] Karl Barth, Church Dogmatics III/2 §47 [468] The Doctrine of Creation: Study Edition (London: T&T Clark, 2010), 32–3.