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 and 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 is not yet

brought about the consummation that will occur when he returns in majesty and glory.

Famous European Theologian Oscar 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 when in a sense the

decisive events that would end World War II actually took place. But the war was not ended and

until the unconditional surrender of the German forces in May 1945 and of the Japanese forces in

August 1945. And those days are often referred to as V-Day, Victory Day or V-E-Day, Victory in

Europe Day or V-J-Day, Victory in Japan Day. But in the year or so between D-Day and V-Day,

there was still conflict, still suffering and still loss of life. The decisive events took place

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