The In-Between Moment of the Resurrection — the Time of Faith

Imagine this pair of women, at dawn on Sunday, going along depressed and sad because the Lord has been crucified, He has died; they are not thinking about His resurrection or anything of the sort.

For these women, Jesus’ death is something absolute, irrevocable, final, and they are simply going to honor the Lord’s body with aromatic spices, wrap it in the linens appropriate for the time, and fully prepare His body for its permanent stay in a dark cave where He now lies, having been hastily placed there after His crucifixion; these women have no hope whatsoever, nor even the slightest suspicion that something momentous has happened.

When they arrived at the tomb, they found something extraordinary: they found that the stone of the tomb had been rolled away; it had been removed—a tremendously heavy stone that rolled along a track and sealed the entrance to the tomb. And when they entered the tomb, they did not find the body of the Lord Jesus. Why? Because the Lord was no longer there; He had risen. It says that “while they were perplexed, behold, two men stood beside them in dazzling garments,” and they understood that these were supernatural beings. It says that, because they were afraid, they bowed their faces to the ground in reverence and fear, and these two angelic beings asked them—and this is where I want you to reflect—“Why do you seek the living One among the dead? He is not here, but has risen.”

This passage introduces us to what I call the in-between moment of the resurrection. Jesus’ resurrection was already a fact, but it had not yet made itself felt in all its public manifestations. Something had happened that would change history forever, but no one had yet learned of it. It was simply an ontological reality, but there was no observer to verify it.

That is precisely what I want to talk about: when God does things and we have not yet realized that He has done them, so we continue living as though He had not done them. When God does transformative things—sometimes in our lives, sometimes in history—and He does them sovereignly, and in the spiritual world it is already an undeniable reality, part of the structure of the universe, but in the world of time and space, in the world of circumstances, it has not yet become evident, it has not yet become fully observable and real, what happens in that in-between time, in the time between God giving His word and its transmission into our world, when we become aware of it? What happens during that time? That wilderness time, that time of decision, that time of limbo in a sense—that is the time I want to talk about. That is what I call the time of faith.

Sometimes God does momentous things in the realm of His Spirit, His Kingdom, eternity, and heaven. Sometimes He does transformative things in the world; He acts upon reality, but it takes some time for that act of God to be transmitted into the realm in which we live, the realm of time and space. For example, when Christ rose, the Bible says that there on the cross He defeated principalities and powers and took away the devil’s dominion over the universe. The yoke of slavery under which humanity lived had already been removed, and the freedom of the human being, of man, had been made possible by the resurrection. The Kingdom of God came and dwelt among us. In fact, when Christ came to Earth, the world had already changed radically; there was hope for humanity, and things could happen that could not have happened otherwise.

It says that the Kingdom of God is already within us and among us. Nevertheless, we know that history continues in its madness: children still die prematurely, there are still wars, there is still exploitation in the world, and there is disease. There is a time of disconnection and misalignment between God’s act in the spiritual realm and the full manifestation, in the realm of time and space, of the consequences of that gesture of God, that action of God.

Many times God gives a word, but it takes time for that word to be fulfilled in the realm of reality. That is what I call the territory of faith, and throughout our lives we are always living in that territory in one way or another. The Lord had done something exceedingly powerful: He had raised His Son, and that tomb was illuminated with a powerful light. But there was no one there to see it. The miracle occurred, but some time passed before people became aware of it. In the meantime, they lived through a time of sadness, mourning, disappointment, and feeling that God had not done everything He had promised them. So we see that sometimes God does momentous things in the spiritual realm, and it takes time for us to perceive them in time and space.

Sometimes we pray for something and God says yes, but it takes time for that miracle to come about, because God works supernaturally through the natural. We see this repeatedly; it is a secret that this passage teaches us.

When God says something, we must believe it. If God says, “I am going to do something,” you have to believe, wait, and live within God’s promise. If God has said, “I am going to make your life blossom; I have impregnated you with a promise,” believe it, take it to the bank, and wait for it, because it will surely come. Though the vision tarries, wait for it, because it will be fulfilled, says Habakkuk chapter 2. We have to believe the Lord; we have to believe that He is faithful. And while we await the moment of resurrection and the Sunday when we see the open tomb, we must ask and confess: God said it; He will fulfill it.

For further study: The Fig Tree Did Not Wither in an Instant—Living in the In-Between Time of Faith (Sermon by Dr. Roberto Miranda)