Already Reigning, Not Yet Fully Come

None of this means the kingdom is finished. Jesus taught His disciples to pray, in one of the most widely prayed sets of words in history, a request that only makes sense if the kingdom's fullness is still, genuinely, ahead:

"So pray this way: Our Father in heaven, may your name be honored, may your kingdom come, may your will be done on earth as it is in heaven."

— Matthew 6:9–10 (NET)

May your kingdom come. If the kingdom had already arrived in its complete and final form, this line in the Lord's Prayer would be strange — a request for something that has already happened, prayed by disciples who had heard Jesus announce that the kingdom was near. The only way both things are true at once — the kingdom is here, and the kingdom is still coming — is if the kingdom operates the way this book will show you, again and again, that nearly everything in New Testament prophecy operates: inaugurated, genuinely present, and not yet finished. Already reigning. Not yet fully come. Both true, held together, not chosen between.

This is not this book inventing a convenient compromise to avoid a hard choice. It is the actual shape of what Jesus taught, visible the moment you stop reading the Gospels through the lens of the waiting-room assumption and start reading them on their own terms. The kingdom that Jesus announced as near in Matthew 4:17, that He located in the midst of His hearers in Luke 17:21, that He described growing from a hidden seed into a great tree — that kingdom is the same kingdom His disciples are taught to keep praying for, because its full and final form has not yet arrived even though its reign, genuinely, unmistakably, already has.

One caution about how far this agreement runs. That Jesus inaugurated the kingdom — that its reign has genuinely begun — is common ground for partial preterists, full preterists and progressive dispensationalists. It is not common ground for every dispensationalist. Classical dispensationalists read Matthew 4:17 as an offer of the kingdom that was then postponed, read the parables of Matthew 13 as describing a hidden form of the kingdom while the King is away (some of them taking the yeast of Matthew 13:33 as a picture of corruption rather than growth), and distinguish God's present rule over everything from the future Davidic kingdom. They point to Luke 19:11–27, where a nobleman goes to a far country to receive a kingdom and then returns, and to Acts 3:19–21, where restoration is tied to Israel's repentance. Part Three comes back to the system as a whole. And the waiting-room picture this part began with is not one of the three positions in this book; it is a popular assumption, and none of the three teaches it.