already: by this point in time (often sooner than expected)
This little adverb marks that something has come to pass by the moment being talked about. Its work is to fix a point on a timeline and say that the event has reached or passed it: the thing is done, the state is in force, the hour has arrived. Very often it carries a note of surprise or urgency, that what we might have thought still lay ahead is in fact here.
Most of the time the natural English word is "already." The axe is already at the root of the trees, the man has already done wrong in his heart, the condemnation is already in force. A second, closely related use simply marks a moment that has now arrived, where English prefers "now" or "by now": the hour is now late, it was now dark, the day was already far spent. These are two shades of a single idea, the arrival of a point in time, not two separate words.
Because it pins down timing rather than naming a thing, it has no theology of its own. Its weight comes from what it is attached to. When the Gospel of John says a person is condemned "already," or the apostle Paul says some people teach that the resurrection is "already" past, the small word does heavy lifting: it presses a future reality into the present and makes the hearer reckon with it now.