This is the time of fulfillment.
Beforehand was the time when the promises of the covenant were given. The Lord had promised to Abraham that he would multiply his seed so that, through him, all nations would be blessed. He promised that a royal heir would sit on the throne of David forever. Earlier still he had promised to put enmity between mankind of the serpent, and that the serpent's head would finally be crushed. Now was the time when the fulfillment of these promises would begin. Jesus was explicit about some of what was being fulfilled in his brief sermon in the synagogue at Nazareth:
"The Spirit of the Lord is upon me,
because he has anointed me
to proclaim good news to the poor.
He has sent me to proclaim liberty to the captives
and recovering of sight to the blind,
to set at liberty those who are oppressed,
to proclaim the year of the Lord's favor."
...
And he began to say to them, "Today this Scripture has been fulfilled in your hearing" (see Luke 4:18-19,21).
Many of the promises of God pertained to the promised land of Israel. And although a few tribes remained on the land itself, the majority had been scattered. Those that remained did not enjoy self-rule but were under the thumb of one foreign empire after another until the Roman occupation in the time of Jesus. The fulfillment of which Jesus spoke would also reveal the true meaning of the promised land. It would begin in the hearts of believers who had experienced the power of the resurrection of Jesus in their own lives and are therefore Paul could write that whoever is in Christ "is a new creation" (see Second Corinthians 5:17). The terrain of the new promised land was therefore to be found in the hearts of the faithful. But the world itself would one day share in this promised transformation. We read that even now it is experiencing "labor pains", longing for that day (see Romans 8:22).
Jesus said to them,
"Come after me, and I will make you fishers of men."
But the promised land would still be lacking if those who had been exiled remained scattered throughout the world. Therefore Jesus came to seek and to save the lost (see Luke 19:10). He would bring about the unification of all peoples in himself. Their memories of being delivered from Egypt would be replaced by a new and more perfect exodus in which the people would say: "‘As the Lord lives who brought up the people of Israel out of the north country and out of all the countries where he had driven them.’ For I will bring them back to their own land that I gave to their fathers" (see Jeremiah 16:15). To accomplish this, the Lord had promised, "Behold, I am sending for many fishers, declares the Lord, and they shall catch them" (see Jeremiah 16:16), a promised now fulfilled in the calling of Peter and the others to become fishers of men. As Jesus would later teach, "the kingdom of heaven is like a net that was thrown into the sea and gathered fish of every kind" (see Matthew 13:47).
In order to respond to the inbreaking of the Kingdom into history, into time and space, Jesus called those who heard him to repent and to believe. Basically, this meant that in order to receive the fulfillment of the promises it would first be necessary to believe in that fulfillment, to have a mind made new, restored and reoriented by the person of Jesus himself, and to live in accord with that reality. A small glimpse of what it would mean to live in accord with that reality is given to us by Paul who demonstrates that one consequence of it is that we don't entirely lose ourselves in anything, however good it might be, in this world, but that we remember that we are citizens of heaven (see Philippians 3:20)
those using the world as not using it fully.
For the world in its present form is passing away.
We too are meant to be a part of the fulfillment of the Kingdom, and to find our own fulfillment therein. Whether or not we are professional evangelists we are all called to become lures that draw others into the Kingdom by our words and by how we live our lives. We can do this only when we aren't so lost in the good but temporary things of the world that we forget about what matters most. To that end we must repent, and begin to live lives directed by minds renewed in Christ, and to live as footholds of the inbreaking Kingdom in our world.
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