The Already—Not Yet Latter-Day Resurrection and New-Creational Kingdom in the Gospels
The Gospel of John particularly links the end of the age with resurrection:
John 6:39 “This is the will of Him who sent Me, that of all that He has given Me I lose nothing, but raise it up on the last day.”
John 6:40 “For this is the will of My Father, that everyone who beholds the Son and believes in Him will have eternal life, and I Myself will raise him up on the last day.”
John 6:44 “No one can come to Me unless the Father who sent Me draws him; and I will raise him up on the last day.”
John 6:54 “He who eats My flesh and drinks My blood has eternal life, and I will raise him up on the last day.”
John 11:24 Martha said to Him, “I know that he will rise again in the resurrection on the last day.”
John 12:48 “He who rejects Me and does not receive My sayings, has one who judges him; the word I spoke is what will judge him at the last day.”
We observed earlier in John 5:24–29 that Jesus refers to the last “hour” of Dan. 12:1–2, one of the well-known resurrection passages of the OT, and that he sees it to have begun fulfillment in a spiritual manner in his ministry and a culminating fulfillment at the very end of time in the physical resurrection of all people. In response to Lazurus’s death, Jesus tells Martha, “Your brother will rise again.” Martha responds, “I know that he will rise again in the resurrection on the last day,” to which Jesus replies, “I am the resurrection and the life; he who believes Me will live even if he dies” (John 11:23–25). Consequently, the fact that Jesus identifies himself presently with resurrection life likewise includes an affirmation that this is to be identified with “the resurrection of the last day,” which thus had begun with him. Jesus’s raising of Lazarus later in the narrative (John 11:38–44) is another indication that “the resurrection of the last day” had been inaugurated in some way, even though the role of Lazurus’s resurrection within the overall storyline of John is to be an anticipation of Jesus’s own resurrection, which occurs on a grander scale (since Lazurus presumably died at some later point).
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That resurrection is a “new creation” concept is clear from the simple fact that a resurrected body is a newly created body, and the body that saints will have in order to be part of the consummated, eternal new creation of the whole cosmos is a resurrected body. In this respect, Christ’s resurrected body was the first newly created body to pass to the other side of the new creation. The coming new creation penetrated back into the old world through the resurrected, new-creational body of Jesus.33 Although his postresurrection existence was on this old earth for a time, he ascended to the unseen heavenly dimension of the beginning new creation, which will finally descend visibly at the end of time, when the old cosmos disintegrates (Rev. 21:1–22:5).
Beale, G. K. (2011). A New Testament Biblical Theology: The Unfolding of the Old Testament in the New (pp. 234–238). Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Academic.
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