What Does It Mean That Jesus Ascended into Heaven?

The Apostles’ Creed

I imagine in God the Father almighty, maker of heaven and earth; and in Jesus Christ his solely Son our Lord, who was conceived by the Holy Spirit, born of the Virgin Mary, suffered underneath Pontius Pilate, was crucified, useless, and buried: he descended into hell; the third day he rose once more from the useless; he ascended into heaven, and sitteth on the best hand of God the Father almighty; from thence he shall come to guage the short and the useless. I imagine within the Holy Spirit; the holy catholic church; the communion of saints; the forgiveness of sins; the resurrection of the physique, and the life eternal.

What Heaven Means

“He ascended” echoes Jesus’s “I ascend” (John 20:17; cf. John 6:62). “Into heaven” echoes “taken up from you into heaven,” the angels’ phrases within the ascension story (Acts 1:11). However what’s “heaven”? Is it the sky or outer area? Does the Creed imply that Jesus was the primary astronaut? No, each it and the Bible are making a unique level.

“Heaven” within the Bible means three issues: (1)The infinite, self-sustaining lifetime of God. On this sense, God all the time dwelt “in heaven,” even when there was no earth. (2) The state of angels or males as they share the lifetime of God, whether or not in foretaste now or in fullness hereafter. On this sense, the Christian’s reward, treasure, and inheritance are all “in heaven,” and heaven is shorthand for the Christian’s ultimate hope. (3) The sky, which, being above us and extra like infinity than the rest we all know, is an emblem in area and time of God’s everlasting life, simply because the rainbow is an emblem of his eternal covenant (see Gen. 9:8–17).

Bible and Creed proclaim that within the ascension, forty days after his rising, Jesus entered heaven in sense 2 in a brand new and momentous method: thenceforth he “sitteth on the best hand of God the Father almighty,” ruling all issues in his Father’s identify and along with his Father’s almightiness for the long-term good of his individuals. “On the best hand of God” signifies not a palatial location however a regal perform (see Acts 2:33ff.; Rom. 8:34; Eph. 1:20ff.; Heb. 1:3, 13; Heb. 10:12ff.; Heb. 12:2). He “ascended far above the heavens” (that’s, reentered his preincarnate life, a life unrestricted by something created) “that he would possibly fill all issues” (that’s, make his kingly energy efficient all over the place; see Eph. 4:10). “Ascended” is, after all, a pictureword implying exaltation (“going up!”) to a situation of supreme dignity and energy.

The Ascension

What occurred on the ascension, then, was not that Jesus grew to become a spaceman, however that his disciples had been proven an indication, simply as on the transfiguration. As C. S. Lewis put it, “they noticed first a brief vertical motion after which a imprecise luminosity (that’s what “cloud” presumably means . . . ) after which nothing.”¹ In different phrases, Jesus’s ultimate withdrawal from human sight, to rule until he returns to judgment, was offered to the disciples’ outward eyes as a going up into heaven in sense 3. This could not puzzle us. Withdrawal needed to happen one way or the other, and going up, down, or sideways, failing to seem or out of the blue vanishing had been the one attainable methods. Which might signify most clearly that Jesus would henceforth be reigning in glory? That solutions itself. So the message of the ascension story is: “Jesus the Savior reigns!”

Our Hearts in Heaven

In a weary world wherein grave philosophers had been counseling suicide as man’s most suitable choice, the unshakable, rollicking optimism of the primary Christians, who went on feeling on prime of the world nevertheless a lot the world appeared to be on prime of them, made an enormous impression. (It nonetheless does, when Christians are Christian sufficient to point out it!) Three certainties had been, and are, its secret.

The primary issues God’s world. It’s that Christ actually guidelines it, that he has received a decisive victory over the darkish powers that had mastered it, and that the manifesting of this reality is just a matter of time. God’s struggle with Devil is now like a chess sport wherein the result’s certain however the dropping participant has not but given up, or just like the final part of human hostilities wherein the defeated enemy’s counterattacks, although fierce and frequent, can’t succeed, and are embraced within the victor’s technique as mere mopping-up operations. One needs that our reckoning of dates “AD” (anno Domini, within the 12 months of our Lord), which begins in intention (although most likely a number of years too late) with Jesus’s delivery, had been calculated from the 12 months of the cross, resurrection, and ascension; for that was when Jesus’s lordship grew to become the cosmic undeniable fact that it’s at this time.

The message of the ascension story is: “Jesus the Savior reigns!”

The second certainty issues God’s Christ. It’s that our reigning Lord “intercedes” for us (Rom. 8:34; Heb. 7:25), within the sense that he seems “within the presence of God” as our “advocate” (Heb. 9:24; 1 John 2:1) to make sure that we obtain “grace to assist” in our want (Heb. 4:16) and so are saved to the tip within the love of God (cf. the Good Shepherd’s pledge, John 10:27–29). “Intercede” denotes, not a suppliant making an enchantment to charity, however the intervening of 1 who has sovereign proper and energy to make requests and take motion in one other’s curiosity. It’s actually stated that our Lord’s presence and life in heaven because the enthroned priest-king, our propitiation, so to talk, in particular person, is itself his intercession: only for him to be there ensures all grace to us, and glory too.

An eighteenth-century jingle places this certainty into phrases which make the center leap:

Love moved thee to die;
And on this I rely,
My Saviour hath cherished me, I can’t inform why:
However this I can discover,
We two are so joined He’ll not be in glory and go away me behind.

The third certainty issues God’s individuals. It’s a matter of God-given expertise, in addition to of God-taught understanding. It’s that Christians take pleasure in right here and now a hidden lifetime of fellowship with the Father and the Son which nothing, not even demise itself, can contact—for it’s the lifetime of the world to return begun already, the lifetime of heaven tasted right here on earth. The reason of this expertise, which all God’s individuals know in some measure, is that believers have truly handed by means of demise (not as a bodily however as a private and psychic occasion) into the everlasting life which lies past. “You’ve died, and your life is hid with Christ in God” (Col. 3:3; cf. Col. 2:12; Rom. 6:3–4). “God . . . after we had been useless . . . made us alive along with Christ . . . and raised us up with him, and made us sit with him within the heavenly locations in Christ Jesus” (Eph. 2:4ff.).

The prayer used on Ascension Day within the Anglican Prayer E book prays God to “grant . . . that like as we do imagine thy only-begotten Son our Lord Jesus Christ to have ascended into heavens; so we may in coronary heart and thoughts thither ascend, and with him regularly dwell.” Could we be enabled, within the energy of those three certainties, to do exactly that.

This text is customized from Growing in Christ by J. I. Packer.

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