The Bible’s teaching on our union with Christ is rich and inexhaustible. We could spend our whole lives growing in our intellectual understanding and personal experience of it and still not exhaust the glories of it. Over the past several articles in this series we have dug into the doctrine of union with Christ from a variety of perspectives. We saw how union with Christ is rooted in history in His death and resurrection and how that past reality reaches into our present and we experience through restful abiding and walking in the Spirit. As we turn our eyes forward to the future we will see how union with Christ is ultimately an eschatological reality. This is where we will conclude our series on union with Christ.
The Grand Finale
Union with Christ is objective and also experienced personally. And ultimately, eschatological union with Christ is the same. We will objectively be united to Christ in an intimacy unmatched and unanticipated in this life. This will be an experience that will be real. It will not be a theoretical joy. It will be both objective and visceral. In other words, it will be no “trick of the mind” or “emotional high” divorced from reality. Nor will it be objective and secure but lacking any experiential dimension.
The Bible’s final chapters present this eschatological union with our Savior in the picture of a marriage. The marriage analogy is appropriate for the intimacy and joy of the union which we look forward to with Jesus Christ. Jonathan Edwards once declared from the pulpit in 1744 that God’s great design for all His purposes was “to present to his Son a spouse in perfect glory from amongst sinful, miserable mankind…and so to communicate and glorify himself through Jesus Christ, God-man.”¹
John Piper, commenting on Edward’s thesis, writes, “The self-giving of God reaches its exquisite apex in the self-giving of the Son to his bride in bringing her to share his holiness and know a fellowship and union beyond all human comprehension…”² I can say personally that at times when I read Revelation 21 I can almost taste the other-worldly joy that awaits at the marriage supper of the Lamb and yet still remains unimaginable this side of eternity.
The Spirit promises the following to His people, through the writing of Paul to the Thessalonians:
For the Lord himself will descend from heaven with a cry of command, with the voice of an archangel, and with the sound of the trumpet of God. And the dead in Christ will rise first. Then we who are alive, who are left, will be caught up together with them in the clouds to meet the Lord in the air, and so we will always be with the Lord.
1 Thessalonians 4:16-17, ESV
So we will always be with the Lord. This indeed is the blessed hope of the believer. The hope of Christianity is presented in a number of ways throughout Scripture. We are told in Titus 2:13 that our “blessed hope” is the “appearing of the glory of our great God and Savior Jesus Christ”. Paul speaks of the hope of the resurrection in numerous places throughout his epistles. And this makes sense when we realize that upon the appearing of Jesus Christ, His people shall be resurrected (or else “changed”, see 1 Corinthians 15:51). And upon our resurrection we shall enter into full, unimaginably joyful union with Him forever. We shall at last experience the glory of what Paul writes in 1 Corinthians 15:48-49:
As was the man of dust, so also are those who are of the dust, and as is the man of heaven, so also are those who are of heaven. Just as we have borne the image of the man of dust, we shall also bear the image of the man of heaven.
1 Corinthians 15:48-49, ESV
This will bring us full circle. As we have borne the image of Adam, the man of dust, through our union with him, so we shall bear the perfect image of Christ. G.K. Beale writes, “What is true of Christ in his end-time resurrection is true of believers in their union with his resurrection.”³ Beale lists a number of “facets” of Christ’s end-time resurrection that Christians share in through union with Him. These include such things as justification, glorification, sonship, identity as the temple of God, identity as king-priest, and more. While these facets are Christ’s now through His resurrection, and His people share in these realities and blessings in an inaugurated sense through union with the resurrected Christ, there is also a future dimension to these. We await future glorification, we await future and final justification at the Last Judgment, we await the consummation of our temple identity as God dwells once again with His people (Rev. 21:3), we await future and final adoption as sons (see Rom. 8:23), and we await the full and final consummation of the blessings of God’s kingdom and priesthood. These are realities that are, in a sense, already, and at the same time, in another sense, not yet. This is the heart of the glory that we experience now and also in the future.
So That He Might Present Her
We see the consummate union of Christ with His bride, the Church, as the eschatological purpose of God in Ephesians. Paul writes:
Husbands, love your wives, as Christ loved the church and gave himself up for her, that he might sanctify her, having cleansed her by the washing of water with the word, so that he might present the church to himself in splendor, without spot or wrinkle or any such thing, that she might be holy and without blemish.
Ephesians 5:25-27, ESV
The Ephesians passage makes it clear that this was the purpose of Christ’s work. He “gave himself up for her” to this end of cosmic, loving union. This was motivated and rooted in the character of God: love. God “loved the church” and this expressed itself in giving Himself up for her. The purpose of this was her “sanctification” (i.e. that she might be “holy”, set apart for Him). This sanctification was accomplished through the cleansing blood of Christ and the washing of the word, as the Spirit uses the word of God to lead believers closer to Christ and into more perfect identity with Him, which expresses itself in holy living. This was all accomplished for the ultimate end of presenting the cleansed and sanctified church to Christ in splendor and complete perfection.
In theological terms, Richard Gaffin writes, “Further, because in Christ’s resurrection the history of redemption has reached its eschatological consummation, the soteriological experience of the believer accordingly has an eschatological character. For Paul, eschatology is not only the goal of soteriology but also encompasses it, constituting its very substance from the outset.”⁴ In less complex terms, Gaffin is affirming that in Paul’s theology, salvation serves the ultimate end of eschatology. In other words, Christ’s work of salvation and the believer’s experience of that salvation serve the end of our eschatological union with Christ, much as Ephesians 5 teaches. Gaffin’s affirmation also declares that this eschatological nature of our union with Christ pervades our salvation.
This is something we need to hold fast, and in some cases regain, in the church today. We have often divorced eschatology from the rest of the Gospel. We may functionally believe that the Gospel is about salvation from sin and eschatology is the thing the prophecy nuts are obsessed with. But things like the rapture, the second coming of Jesus Christ, the resurrection of the dead, and so on are intimately tied up in the Gospel itself. Salvation (soteriology) includes eschatology and eschatology encompasses salvation.
The great end which God has purposed and has worked all things towards is this glorious consummation. It is personal, joyful, intimate, and unbreakable union with God Himself. This is the guaranteed future of every human being who is united to Christ, objectively by faith. Our current relationship and fellowship with God, the Father, Son, and Spirit, is just a foretaste of that beautiful fellowship which awaits us when the last day comes and the consummation of all things occurs. Our ultimate union with Christ is one of indescribable love. Praise the Lord!
Footnotes
¹Jonathan Edwards, “Approaching the End of God’s Grand Design” quoted in John Piper, The Supremacy of God in Preaching, (Wheaton, IL: Crossway), 2021, p. 116.
²John Piper, The Supremacy of God in Preaching, (Wheaton, IL: Crossway), 2021, p. 120.
³G.K. Beale, Union with the Resurrected Christ, (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Academic), 2023, p. 100.
⁴Richard Gaffin, Resurrection and Redemption: A Study in Paul’s Soteriology, (Phillipsburg, NJ: Presbyterian & Reformed), 1987, p. 59.