The Present-Future

Remembering Our Confession of Faith

One of my favorite chapters to preach from is Acts 2 and the Pentecost message. The chapter is one of the most theologically explosive texts in scripture. I mean, the claim this text makes about history is that the end of history is already fixed. God has poured out his Spirit upon all flesh to demonstrate that the last age has begun. The promised future of God’s salvation is now breaking into the present in the crucified Jesus, whom God has raised from death and exalted as Lord and Messiah.

As believers, the claim of Acts 2 discloses the new reality. As Lee Camps put it, “that the kingdom of God has been inaugurated—redefines reality. It redefines what is most real.”¹

But we might not know this from the way Christians sometimes speak. As church memberships decline and as America becomes more and more of a post-Christian society, it’s not uncommon to hear Christians speak with nostalgia for the past and with anxiety for the future, as if society is going to hell in a hen basket.

I’m neither naíve to the past nor present. Yes, beliefs and practices are always changing, but evil has been a part of the world ever since the original sin. But rather than letting a dystopian vision become the lens through which we view society, we need to remember the claim of Acts 2 and live out of the Christ-centered and Kingdom-oriented mission God has made us a part of in Christ.²

This is the vision from which the earliest followers lived. Even in the face of hardships, the early church believed the claim of Acts 2. The late evangelical theologian Carl F.H. Henry once said, “The early church didn’t say, ‘Look what the world is coming to!’ They said, ‘Look what has come into the world’!”

Remember the claim of Acts 2 and remember the faith we confess as people baptized in the name of Jesus, the Messiah, as people who have received the gift of the Holy Spirit. I am not suggesting that life for Christians will be without challenges in the post-Christian society that America becoming. But facing those challenges is not only possible but also new opportunities for bearing witness to the good news of Jesus Christ and the kingdom of God if we’ll remember our confession of faith.

1. Lee C. Camp, Scandalous Witness: A Little Political Manifesto for Christians, Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2020, 25.

2. K. Rex Butts, Gospel Portraits: Reading Scripture as Participants in the Mission of God, Eugene: Wipf and Stock Publishers, 2022, 55-56, “The fancier way of expressing this mission and our life of discipleship is to say that we are called to embody a life that is shaped simultaneously by both a Christological and Eschatological dimension. Christology is the aspect of Christian theology concerned with our understanding of who Jesus is and the life he lives, whereas eschatology, while technically referring to the understanding of the last things such as death and eternity, is our understanding of how the future of history is coming into existence.”