Already Reigning, Not Yet Fully Come

None of this means the kingdom is finished. Jesus taught His disciples to pray, in the prayer that has been prayed more times by more people than any other sentence in human 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 the very people Jesus had just told the kingdom was "in your midst." 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.