Fearlessly Courageous
Desk of Dennis Piller
12/23/2021
The End of the Ages Came at Christmas.
Christmas is Saturday. It’s a great time to take a fresh look at Christmas, particularly in what Christ’s birth represents in the big picture. I was reading a piece from John Piper this morning that I thought you would enjoy.
“As the apostle Paul says of us, Christians are those “on whom the end of the ages has come” (1 Corinthians 10:11). The end of the ages has come upon us, and the end of the ages has come upon us by the incarnation of Jesus Christ.
This is a big concept — a hard one. But it’s worth our time. Theologian Richard Gaffin has developed this point well in a really good book, his magnum opus coming out next year, which is titled In the Fullness of Time: An Introduction to the Biblical Theology of Acts and Paul (Crossway, May 2022).
There he describes why the apostle Paul was so amazed that he — and us — is one upon which “the end of the ages has come.” Paul, he writes, is
deeply conscious of living in “the fullness of time,” when, at last, God has sent his Son and when the new creation has already dawned. His vantage point in history is characterized by the fact that he is privileged to be able now to look back on the climactic events of the history of redemption, the [birth and] death and resurrection of Christ, as having occurred. Using a sometimes-cited analogy from the Second World War, Paul knows himself to be among those for whom the great D-Day kingdom battle is over, for whom the era of conflict between the kingdom of God and the dominion of Satan is in the past and has been decisively resolved; the redemption of God’s people is an accomplished and secure reality.
D-Day is done. V-Day is yet future, in the second coming. Nevertheless, D-Day, the decisive battle, is over. It has been won. The kingdom has dawned. In other words, Gaffin writes, “God’s revelation in his Son, in his incarnate person and work . . . has a finality that cannot be superseded or surpassed.”
That’s the significance of the incarnation. The new creation has arrived. The kingdom of God has dawned. The future full arrival of the kingdom and the new creation, or V-Day, is now inevitable and unstoppable because there is a finality to redemptive history at Christmas. Paul never lost his amazement that something climactic, something decisive, something marking the end of time happened in a dusty manger in Bethlehem.
To use the apostle Paul’s very words: “When the fullness of time had come, God sent forth his Son, born of woman, born under the law, to redeem those who were under the law, so that we might receive adoption as sons” (Galatians 4:4–5). That first Christmas marked the fullness of time. Or to say it another way, history ended on Christmas.”
But don’t align Christmas on the same continuum with the other great events of God. We trivialize the incarnation if we make it just another stage along the way to the end. It IS the end of redemptive history. His 2nd coming is unstoppable and inevitable…
For those who get it…this is the great celebration. Make it special!
Merry Christmas
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y7hPy8EJnRU
Mariah Carey; Hark the Angels/Glory
