Heb.13:8, Jesus Christ is the same yesterday, today, and forever.
How crucial is the grace of faith that looks into the past and sees who God has declared Himself to be in the Passion of His Son, and that turns toward the impenetrable veil of the future and believes He will always be as He has always been.
And yet, there is a sense in which the veil of the future has been torn asunder through the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ. Jesus rises as the first fruits of the New Creation, as the first rays of the dawning sun, as the Head of the True Humanity; His resurrection is an event in the past—we must never relinquish that fact—but, at the same time, it is not only an event in the past, it is simultaneously the future, indeed, it is the end breaking into the times before the end. The Anastasiform Christ is the New Creation, is Mature Humanity, is the Omega, the End, the Telos of all things (Col.1:15-17). Thus to see Him—and He can now only be seen by faith that receives and obeys, and thus only by those who belong to Him (John 14:22-23)—to see Him is to see the End, is to see the Future, is to, as it were, read the final page of the book.
And so, even as the torn flesh of the risen Christ tears the veil between God and Man, and Heaven and Earth, so too it tears the veil between the End and the beginning, the Future and the Present….And once this has happened in our perception, the Church realizes that she is surrounded on all times by the slain and risen Jesus, who is Himself the ‘Voice’ of YHWH, spoken into every moment of her experience….
He is the blood-sealed declaration of the unchanging character of YHWH that stands as a witness in her past (John 1:18, 17:24); He is the radiant and living hope revealed as her future, whose glorified wounds are the first fruit of cypress and myrtle harvested from the thorn fields of the fallen world (Is.55:13); and He is the steadfast and faithful one who fills every moment of her present with the gift of Himself (Matt.28:20), flowing as a cataract of grace from the fountain of God’s own heart, opened through the eternal passion of the anastasiform Son
