Part 2
What Does It Mean to Reign with Christ?
Some interpreters believe that reigning with Christ is a special reward rather than the future experience of every believer. They point to 2 Timothy 2:12, where reigning is connected with endurance, and to Revelation 2 and 3, where authority is promised to those who overcome.
On this reading, belonging to Christ and receiving the privilege of reigning with him are related but not identical. Other interpreters understand the same passages as promises to all genuine believers rather than to a special group within the redeemed. The New Testament does not settle this disagreement in one explicit statement.
Whichever reading is correct, the question of who reigns cannot be separated from the question of over whom. The section above on who remains on the earth sets out what Revelation supplies on that point and what it withholds. Reigning means something concrete once there are subjects, and the promise of authority over the nations in Revelation 2:26-27 reads differently when the nations are in view.
Either way, the election passages can look different within a Kingdom framework.
Election need not concern only the inclusion of some people in salvation and the exclusion of everyone else. Scripture repeatedly connects God’s choosing with transformation, service, witness, and participation in his purposes. If reigning is a special reward rather than the inheritance of every believer, however, election should not simply be equated with selection for rulership.
Scripture’s language of calling, predestination, holiness, and conformity to Christ can therefore be understood in both saving and vocational terms. God saves and transforms a community so that it can serve, exercise stewardship, and participate in the coming age.
What, then, can we say about the non-elect, or about those whose names are not written in the book of life (Revelation 17:8)? Honesty requires us to admit that Scripture does not give one complete explanation of their final condition.
Scripture says that judgment begins with the household of God (1 Peter 4:17). Those who belong to God are accountable in the present. God disciplines and shapes them rather than merely protecting them from every hardship. Paul makes a related point in 1 Corinthians 11. While correcting the Corinthians’ abuse of the Lord’s Supper, he says that when the Lord judges his people, he disciplines them so that they will not be condemned with the world.
This does not mean that believers necessarily suffer more than other people. Nor does it allow us to measure a person’s future reward by the amount of suffering in that person’s life. It means that belonging to God includes being formed now, learning to live like Christ and being prepared for service in the age to come.
The lake of fire and the second death are real biblical images and must not be dismissed. But Scripture does not fully explain what the second death accomplishes or whether anything lies beyond it. Christian tradition has generally understood it as everlasting exclusion from relationship with God. This book argues that the relevant passages leave more interpretive questions open than tradition has often acknowledged.
When Paul says that God will be “all in all,”
panta en pasin, his words do not fit easily into a picture of creation forever divided between God and a large group that remains eternally opposed to him. The phrase pressures the idea of permanent, unresolved division. Yet it does not, by itself, tell us exactly how that division ends or what happens to every individual.
The election passages are real. The Kingdom framework allows us to see election as God’s choice of a people for transformation, service, and participation in Christ’s reign. This reading does not require us to conclude that, before creation, God deliberately arranged the everlasting condemnation of billions of people. Strict forms of double predestination must carry that moral and theological tension, and the tension deserves honest examination.
What about people who never heard the Gospel? Understanding election as including a role in the Kingdom does not answer every question about their final destiny. It does, however, move the question. It allows for the possibility that God’s preparation of a particular people for a particular purpose is part of a story larger than those people alone.
We still do not know everything that the second death accomplishes or whether anything lies beyond it. Traditionalists read Revelation 20 together with other judgment passages and conclude that the lost suffer forever. Annihilationists conclude that the lost finally cease to exist. Universalists conclude that judgment ultimately leads to restoration. Each view draws on a larger interpretation of Scripture. Revelation 20 by itself does not state any of these systems in full.
We know in part, and we prophesy in part. The part we know is that the God who chooses is the same God who moves toward his creation, the same God whose mercy endures, the same God who in the end will be all in all. This does not weaken the seriousness of judgment. It simply refuses to claim more certainty than the biblical text provides.
Sorry guys.... we are no longer in the milk of the word! I'm grilling a ribeye, the question is... did I overcook it?
[1]NET Bible, Full Notes Edition, translators’ note on Ephesians 1:11.