Paul understands perfectly that Christianity is not a religion, not a teaching, and not even a special kind of spiritual or mystical experience. Christianity is a spiritual process on a cosmic scale, into which a person is included by God's mercy for the sake of his own salvation. And salvation does not consist in somehow mysteriously pulling a person out of the world lying in evil and placing him in a quiet corner arranged for him in advance, where after the death of the body his soul will enjoy joy and peace, resting after a difficult and stormy earthly life.

Many people would sincerely like the end of their earthly life to turn out exactly this way, and this is how they imagine what in the Middle Ages and later in the Christian world came to be called paradise. But God has prepared something far more grand for us. He offers us the chance to become participants in His plan to return the world to the state in which it was meant to exist according to the design of its Creator - the state of God's Kingdom. This plan far exceeds the scale and duration of any person's earthly life.

Of course, as we enter this process, we ourselves will have to change. This is true both at the present, earthly stage of our path and at all the later ones, which together could conditionally be called the afterlife, though it would perhaps be more correct to call our present stage pre-life. Of course, this is not what we sometimes expect and strive for, not a quiet, cozy corner where we can rest from earthly labors. But the fullness of life awaiting us at the end of the path, in the Kingdom, is such as cannot be found in any corner.

This is the prospect Paul speaks about and reminds the recipients of his letter about. Perhaps he does so because not only in the Middle Ages and the modern era, but already in the earliest Christian times, it happened that someone forgot this prospect, hoping only for a quiet and cozy afterlife in exchange for faith in Christ. But the apostle firmly dispels all such hopes. Christianity is not for those who seek cozy corners; it is for those who seek the Kingdom and the fullness of life.

Continuing the discussion of the general resurrection, Paul evidently does not separate it from the history of the Kingdom gradually unfolding in our transfiguring, but not yet fully transfigured, world. And for the apostle, only resurrection, and by no means the immortality of the soul, is the true victory over death.

In fact, for him the whole history of the Kingdom turns out to be a sequence of stages following one another on the way to this victory. The main victory has already been won: Christ has risen from the dead, and His resurrection becomes the pledge of the Kingdom's final triumph at the end of time (v. 20). He is the first, but others will follow Him. The pivotal confrontation of the present age, in the apostle's thought, is the confrontation between Christ and the Kingdom with its fullness of life, and the death that entered the world after the fall - a death that cannot be defeated by hoping only in the immortality of the soul (vv. 21-22). But resurrection is a process requiring time, time that can also be measured by the clocks of our transfiguring, though not yet fully transfigured, world. This is not surprising: the Kingdom is not alien to our world; it enters it in order to transform it completely, and the history of the Kingdom cannot unfold apart from the history still continuing by inertia in our world, although its meaning and driving force were exhausted with the Savior's coming.

According to the evangelist's testimony, the process of the general resurrection began at the moment of the Savior's death on the cross (Matt. 27:50-53), and it will be completed, according to Paul, on the day of His return (v. 23). On that day the Church will reveal to the world its fullness as the fullness of the body of Christ, of which the apostle spoke. Those who sought the Kingdom and found it in the present age will be able to enjoy fully that fullness of life which today, even after touching the Kingdom, we experience only in part.

For those who sought nothing, that day will become the day of the last Judgment, at which their destiny in eternity will be decided (vv. 24-25). Without such a judgment, the completion of the present historical stage is impossible, just as without it the full and final triumph of Christ and the Kingdom over the death that entered the world with the fall is impossible (vv. 26-28). Only such a prospect gives meaning to Christianity and Christian life; otherwise it is not worth beginning at all, for if the world will forever remain as it is now, then it is better, following the well-known saying, "to eat, drink, and be merry while we are alive" (vv. 29-33). Christianity is not a religion but life in the Kingdom, and therefore following Christ makes sense only for the one to whom this Kingdom is more important than anything he has or can find in our still untransformed world.