Already and Not Yet: the feasts and the new creation

The threads of the Day have been dark. Darkening and shaking, un-creation and theophany; the trumpet, the harvest, the sacrifice, and the cup; the wrath, the fire, the refining. Whoever counts only those threads would take the Day for a downfall. But they do not end in downfall. They end in a city without night. This last chapter of the threads is therefore the chapter where everything converges — where the loose lines that ran through the whole book are gathered up one by one and knotted together, and where it becomes plain that the dark threads and the bright ones together form a single fabric. The Day is, as will appear, no dead end but a hinge: the point at which the old creation dies and the new is born. To see that, three things must be laid side by side: the key by which the whole New Testament reads the Day, the calendar in which she finds her form, and the destination toward which she runs.

Begin with the key, for without her everything jams: already, and not yet. At Pentecost, as chapter 15 showed, Peter declared the end time begun. "This is that," he said of the outpoured Spirit, "which was spoken by the prophet Joel" — touto estin — and he called the time from then on "the last days." But in the same breath he read Joel on to the cosmic signs that had not yet happened, and let the hinge-word stand: those signs come "before the great and glorious day of the LORD comes" — prin ē. In one citation he thus held two times together: the already (the Spirit, now poured out) and the not-yet (the signs, the Day itself, still future). And that doubleness belongs not to Acts 2 alone; it is the ground pattern of the whole New Testament. The kingdom has "come near" (Mark 1:15) and is still to be awaited (Matt 6:10). The believer has been "transferred into the kingdom" (Col 1:13) and "awaits" the new world (2 Pet 3:13). We have "the firstfruits of the Spirit" (Rom 8:23) — the first, real part of the harvest — and wait for the rest; we have "the pledge," the arrabōn, the down payment of the inheritance (2 Cor 1:22; Eph 1:14), and wait for the full sum. We live, in short, in the fold: the anchor lies in the past (cross, resurrection, Pentecost), the fulfillment in the future (the Day), and we stand in the taut interval, with the Spirit as the surety that the rest is coming. That tension is no defect in the scheme; it is the scheme, and it guards against two opposite abysses. The one is the over-fulfilled reading: everything has already happened spiritually, no bodily Day is still to come — the error of Hymenaeus and Philetus, "who say that the resurrection is already past" (2 Tim 2:18), and who thereby overthrow the hope. The other is the under-fulfilled reading: everything is still purely future, the end time has yet to begin — which fails to see that the Spirit has already been poured out and the last days are already running. Scripture holds both, and precisely for that reason it can at once warn gravely ("the Day is still coming") and comfort deeply ("it has already begun, and the Spirit is the proof").

That tension even has a calendar — and that is the second thread that converges here. The seven feasts of Leviticus 23 (chapter 12) trace exactly this already/not-yet, and they do it with a precision that can be no accident. The three spring feasts are fulfilled — and each time on the calendar day itself. Passover: the Lamb slain, on the fourteenth of Nisan. Firstfruits: Christ raised "as the firstfruits of those who have fallen asleep" (1 Cor 15:20), on the day of the firstfruits sheaf. The Feast of Weeks: the Spirit poured out, on the fiftieth day, Pentecost. Three feasts, three fulfillments, each on its day. And then falls a summer of silence — nearly four months in which the calendar is mute, the time in which we live. Thereafter the three autumn feasts wait, in the seventh month, and they trace what the Day has still to bring. The Feast of Trumpets: the onset, the alarm, the gathering, the resurrection (chapter 20). The Great Day of Atonement: the national mourning and cleansing of Israel, when it recognizes and laments its pierced Messiah (Zech 12:10). And the Feast of Tabernacles: the ingathering of the harvest and the dwelling of God with men. Note how the threads of this whole part already lie waiting in those autumn feasts: the trumpet of chapter 20 opens the sequence, the refining of chapter 21 cleanses on the Day of Atonement, and the dwelling-of-God of the Feast of Tabernacles is the new creation toward which chapter 19's un-creation pointed. The Day thus has a liturgical form; she is no chaos but a festal cycle, and we stand precisely between Pentecost and the Trumpet — in the stillness of summer, awaiting the first blast of the shofar.

And then, where all the threads arrive, the new creation. What began on the first page and is rolled back on the Day — the lights extinguished, the earth reduced to tohu, the heaven rolled up (chapter 19) — is not left in nothingness. The un-creation was never the final goal; it was the demolition before the rebuilding, the return to the dark so that "let there be light" could sound again. "Behold, I create a new heaven and a new earth; the former things shall no more be remembered," says Isaiah (65:17; 66:22).1 And the dead share in it: "your dead shall live, my dead body shall arise; awake and sing for joy, you who dwell in the dust" (26:19) — the un-creation that struck the living is reversed into a resurrection that gives back even to the dust what it took. Peter takes up the line: beyond the fire "we await, according to His promise, new heavens and a new earth, in which righteousness dwells" (2 Pet 3:13, chapter 17) — the fire was a crucible, not an incineration (chapter 21). And John sees it complete, and in his vision all the threads come together in a few verses. "I saw a new heaven and a new earth [...] and the sea was no more" (Rev 21:1) — the chaos-sea that threatened creation is gone. "Behold, the tabernacle of God is with men, and He will dwell with them" (21:3) — there the Feast of Tabernacles is fulfilled, God dwelling in the midst of His people, and there Ezekiel's YHWH-shammah, "the LORD is there" (chapter 9), has become reality. "He will wipe away every tear from their eyes, and death shall be no more" (21:4) — there Isaiah's promise is fulfilled that "death is swallowed up forever" (25:8). And from the throne sounds the word toward which all Scripture reaches: behold, I make all things new — kaina panta.2 Finally the last barrier falls away: "there shall be no night there, and they need no lamp or sunlight, for the Lord God gives them light" (22:5). The Day that began with the darkening of the sun ends in a light that makes the sun superfluous.

There too the name-shift of chapter 3 closes, and it is worth following her here to her endpoint, for she is the scarlet thread beneath all the others. The day of the LORD — yom YHWH, the terror, the thief, the darkness — has at the climax become the face of the day of Christ — the comfort, the harvest, the redemption. And this has passed into the day of God — the consummation, the fire, the renewal (2 Pet 3:12). And at last the name "day of [...]" falls away altogether, for there is no more alternation of day and night to name: there is only the abiding day, the light that no longer fades. So the name of the Day travels from the terror of Amos ("darkness, and not light," chapter 1) all the way to the city where it is never night again — and whoever keeps that journey in view holds the whole arc of the book in a single image.

So, at the end of the threads, all the lines come together, and it is astonishing how precisely they fit one another. The darkening (chapter 19) gave way to an imperishable light. The shaking shook away everything that wavered, so that the unshakable kingdom should remain. The un-creation to tohu became the run-up to a new heaven and earth. The trumpet (chapter 20) summoned not only to judgment but to resurrection, and carried the sound of the jubilee. The harvest garnered the grain. The sacrificial meal became, at the good table, the wedding of the Lamb. The cup that Christ drained became the wine of the wedding feast. The wrath (chapter 21) was bounded and refined a remnant. That remnant (chapter 22) became the seed of a restored people. And the birth pangs ran out, as birth pangs are meant to do, upon a birth: a new heaven and a new earth, in which righteousness dwells. The day of the LORD, so it proves at the end of all her threads, is no grave but a birth canal — the narrow, dark, painful passage through which the old creation must pass to be born as new. That is why the same Day bears terror and comfort, darkness and light, judgment and rescue: she is the end of the old and the beginning of the new, in one event. And which of the two you see — the end or the beginning — depends, as always, on where you stand.

With that the map of the threads is complete, and the pattern of the whole book lies open. What the first chapters named and the second and third parts worked out book by book is now knotted, part by part, into one fabric. And the keynote of that fabric is, against all the dark threads, no despair. The threads run out upon kaina panta. The last word of the Day of the LORD is not "darkness," and not "wrath," and not "end." The last word is: "new." From here the book can move on to the questions it has thus far deferred — where the Church stands in all this (Part V), how the points of dispute are weighed fairly (Part VI), and how the whole fits within the prophetic framework (Part VII) — but it does so now with the keynote settled: the Day is a passage, and on the far side is the light.