forbidding us to speak to the Gentiles that they may be saved; to fill up their sins always. But wrath has come on them to the uttermost.
Why did Paul describe this outpouring of divine wrath as past ("has come," aorist tense ephthasen) if it was future? Jesus spoke of the arrival of His kingdom in comparable terminology (Matthew 12:28; Luke 11:20). The verb connotes "arrival upon the threshold of fulfilment [sic] and accessible experience, not the entrance into that experience." [Note: Kenneth W. Clark, "Realized Eschatology," Journal of Biblical Literature 59 (1940):379.] The messianic kingdom was present in Jesus’ day only in that the King had arrived and could have established it then, but the Jews did not enter into it because they rejected Him. Likewise God’s wrath had come on the Jews to the utmost in Paul’s day for their rejection of Messiah, but they had not entered into it’s full manifestation yet, namely, the Tribulation.