“At present, we do not yet see everything in subjection to him. But we see him…
Christian hope does not begin by overlooking the real conditions of the present world. We see suffering, aging, grief, sickness, and death. We know Christ reigns, but we do not yet see everything subjected to Him. There is a tension between the present reign of Christ and what we presently see and experience in the world, but the gospel of hope teaches us to look again and see Jesus.
Jesus entered fully into our mortality, suffered, died, and passed through death into glory and honor. He did not avoid death, but went through it and came out the other side alive. Because He now lives beyond death, His resurrection stands at the center of Christian hope.
The resurrection of Jesus is not merely a promise that a better future may happen someday. The life God has promised for the age to come has already appeared in the present age through the risen Christ. In Him, the future has already begun, and Christian hope learns to see the present in light of that future.
Hope, then, is not wishful thinking about what might happen. It rests upon what has already happened in Jesus. The One who was crucified now lives. He entered the domain of death and rose victorious from it in life and power. His resurrection reveals where God is taking history.
This is why the New Testament speaks of Jesus as the pioneer of our salvation. He has blazed the trail ahead of us, entering territory we could not conquer and opening the way through death into life. Because He has passed through death into glory, His destination reveals the destiny of all who belong to Him.
At the same time, the life of that future age has already begun to work in us. Paul says that when we were baptized into Christ, we were baptized into His death and buried with Him, so that just as Christ was raised from the dead, we too might walk in newness of life (Romans 6:3–5). We still await the redemption of our bodies and the fullness of the world to come, but resurrection life has already dawned within us and is bearing fruit in the way we live now.
Because Jesus has been raised, even though we suffer, suffering does not determine our destiny. Aging does not define our future. Graves do not determine the end of our story. The future God has promised has already appeared in His risen Son, and by the Spirit we have begun to taste the life and power of the age to come.
This is the gospel of hope. We do not yet see everything subjected to Christ, but we see Jesus, crowned with glory and honor. His resurrection teaches us how to see the present, how to endure it, and how to live faithfully within it as people already awakened to the age to come.
-Jacob Brunjes