Welcome to Wednesday's edition of Things Unseen.

This week we've been talking about gospel grammar.

Yesterday the topic was moods, the indicative and imperative moods of the verbs in which

the gospel is expressed.

That's what gives the gospel shape and expresses its tone of grace.

But there's more to verbs than moods.

Verbs also come in different tenses.

And there are basically three tenses, although they come in different forms,

past, present, and future. And the gospel comes in all these three tenses. The New Testament

teaches us to live the Christian life in relationship to them. And the simplest way to summarize its teaching is perhaps this.

The gospel teaches us to live today, conscious that we are living now between the already

and the not yet.

We live now in the light of what God did in the past in Christ, but also

looking to the future when Christ will come again. We live, as I say, between the already

what Christ has done, looking forward to the not yet what he is still to do.

And that helps us realize that while our experience of God's grace in Christ is real,

it is as yet incomplete.

Already Christ has become incarnate in the past, lived and died and risen again and ascended and is now reigning

still the same incarnate Savior. But he has not yet brought about the consummation that

will occur when he returns in majesty and glory. Famous European theologian

Oskar Coulman famously used events in World War II to illustrate this.

We celebrate the Normandy landings on June 6, 1944, as D-Day, the day, the day when in a sense,

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