Matthew Wright > Recent Status Updates

justification by faith is what happens in the present time, anticipating the verdict of the future day when God judges the world.

Justification by faith cannot be collapsed, as so many in the last two centuries tried to do, either into a generalized liberal view of a laissez-faire morality or into the romantic view that what we do outwardly doesn't matter at all since the only thing that matters is what we're like inwardly.

this picture of future judgment according to works is actually the basis of Paul's theology of justification by faith. The point of justification by faith isn't that God suddenly ceases to care about good behavior or morality.

Faced with a world in rebellion, a world full of exploitation and wickedness, a good God must be a God of judgment.

The word judgment carries negative overtones for a good many people in our liberal and postliberal world. We need to remind ourselves that throughout the Bible, not least in the Psalms, God's coming judgment is a good thing, something to be celebrated, longed for, yearned over.

The picture of Jesus as the coming judge is the central feature of another absolutely vital and nonnegotiable Christian belief: that there will indeed be a judgment in which the creator God will set the world right once and for all.

The promise is not that Jesus will simply reappear within the present world order, but that when heaven and earth are joined together in the new way God has promised, then he will appear to us-and we will appear to him, and to one another, in our own true
identity.

Colossians 3. Here we have in a nutshell Paul's theology of resurrection and ascension as applied to present Christian living and future Christian hope:

perhaps that is partly why such theology, with its dreams of Armageddon, has quietly supported the political status quo in a way that Paul would never have done.

Christian theology of resurrection, ascension, second com-ing, and hope. This theology was born out of confrontation with the political authorities, out of the conviction that Jesus was already the true Lord of the world who would one day be manifested as such. The rapture theology avoids this confrontation because it suggests that Christians will miraculously be removed from this wicked world.

The reality to which it refers is this: Jesus will be personally present, the dead will be raised, and the living Christians will be transformed.

Being citizens of heaven, as the Philippians would know, doesn't mean that one is expecting to go back to the mother city but rather means that one is expecting the emperor to come from the mother city to give the colony its full dignity, to rescue it if need be, to subdue local enemies and put everything to rights.

The point is that, having gone out to meet their returning Lord, they will escort him royally into his domain, that is, back to the place they have come from. Even when we realize that this is highly charged metaphor, not literal description, the meaning is the same as in the parallel in Philippians 3:20.

When they met him, they wouldn't then stay out in the open country; they would escort him royally into the city itself. When Paul speaks of "meeting" the Lord "in the air," the point is precisely not-as in the popular rapture theology-that the saved believers would then stay up in the air somewhere, away from earth.

3. When the emperor visited a colony or prov-ince, the citizens of the country would go to meet him at some distance from the city. It would be disrespectful to have him actually arrive at the gates as though his subjects couldn't be bothered to greet him properly.

2. Then there is the story of Daniel 7, in which the persecuted people of God are vindicated over their pagan enemy by being raised up on the clouds to sit with God in glory. This iraising up on the clouds," which Jesus applies to himself in the gospels, is now applied by Paul to the Christians who are presently suffering persecution.

Still on 1 Thess.

1. The three stories Paul is here bringing together start with the story of Moses coming down the mountain. The trumpet sounds, a loud voice is heard, and after a long wait Moses appears and descends from the mountain to see what's been going on in his absence.

So why does Paul speak in this peculiar way in I Thessalonians about the Lord descending and the living saints being snatched up in the air? I suggest that he is finding richly metaphorical ways of alluding to three other stories that he is deliberately bringing to-gether.

So too in Philippians 3:21, where the context is quite explicitly ranging Jesus over against Caesar, Paul speaks of the transformation of the present lowly body to be like Jesus's glorious body, as a result of his all-conquering power.

They will be changed, transformed. This is dearly the same event as he is speaking of in I Thessalonians 4; we have the trumpet in both, and the resurrection of the dead in both; but whereas in I Thessalonians he speaks of those presently alive being "natched up in the air," in I Corinthians he speaks of them be-ung "transformed."

In 1 Corinthians 15:23-27 Paul speaks of the parou-sia of the Messiah as the time of the resurrection of the dead, the time when his present though secret rule will become manifest in the conquest of the last enemies, especially death. Then in verses S1-54 he speaks of what will happen to those who, at Jesus's com-ing, are not yet dead.

1 Thessalonians 4:16-17:
The point to notice above all about these tricky verses is that they are not to be taken as a literal description of what Paul thinks will happen. They are simply a different way of saying what he is saying in I Corinthians 15:23-27 and $1-54, and in Philippians 3:20-21.

"son of man' texts aren't "second com-ing' texts at all, despite their frequent misreading that way. They are about Jesus's vindication. And Jesus's vindication-in his resurrec-tion, ascension, and judgment on Jerusalem-requires a still further event for everything to be complete.

Nowhere in the New Testament does any writer say that at Jesus's final coming some of his servants, some actual believing Christians, will be judged in the way that the wicked servant was judged for hiding his master's money in a napkin.

the phrase the “second coming,” very rare in the New Testament

for full communication between human beings you need not only a tone of voice but also body language, facial language, and the thousand small ways in which, without realizing it, we relate to one another. At the moment, by the Spirit, the word, the sacraments and prayer, and in those in need whom we are called to serve for his sake, the absent Jesus is present to us; but 1 day he will be there with us, face-to-face.