Matthew Wright’s Reviews > Surprised by Hope: Rethinking Heaven, the Resurrection, and the Mission of the Church > Status Update

In first Corinthians 15:58: the resurrection means that what you do in the present, and working hard for the gospel, is not wasted. It is not in Vain. It will be completed, will have it, fulfillment, and God’s future.

We sometimes speak of someone who's been very ill as being a shadow of their former self. If Paul is right, a Christian in the present life is a mere shadow of his or her future self, the self that person will be when the body that God has waiting in his heavenly storeroom is brought out, already made to measure, and put on over the present one-or over the self that will still exist after bodily death.

With Jesus, the future hope has come forward into the present. For those who die in faith, before that final reawaken-ing, the central promise is of being "with Jesus" at once. "My desire is to depart," wrote Paul, "and be with Christ, which is far better?"

Resurrection = life after life, after death

What does Jesus mean when he declares that there are "many dwelling places" in his father's house?

the word for “dwelling places" here, monai, is regularly used in ancient Greek not for a final resting place but for a temporary halt on a journey that will take you somewhere else in the long run.

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.