The Life of All Lives - Our Saviour Jesus - 10
The Ascension of Christ
It has never been part of Christian teaching that after his resurrection, Jesus remained on the earth, whether permanently or for an indefinite period. On the contrary, the account given in Acts chapter 1 is that after a period of 40 days, he ascended back to heaven.
This was in accordance with what Jesus himself had told his disciples before the crucifixion. In John chapter 14, it is recorded that he said to them, “In my Father’s house are many rooms; if it were not so, I would have told you. I am going there to prepare a place for you.” Later, he told them, “I came from the Father and entered the world; now I am leaving the world and going back to the Father.”
Why did Jesus ascend back to heaven? Would it not have been more effective for him to remain on the earth and be seen by thousands and millions of people; to go on a global ‘comeback’ tour, performing miracles and confounding those who had rejected him? Would not this have led to the instant, universal acceptance of the Christian gospel by all, and relegated unbelief to a thing of the past?
Perhaps this is how it would have been if men had written the script, but two astonishing facts cut the ground from underneath such a notion.
The first is that miracles did not bring about universal faith when Jesus performed them. The second is that the Christian church grew with astonishing speed anyway!
We’ll think about these two facts for a moment.
The most vivid illustration of the first is the raising of Lazarus from the dead, which is recorded in John chapter 11. Few would dispute that raising a person from the dead is just about the most dramatic and compelling event anyone could ever witness. Here, in the small town of Bethany, Jesus raised a man who had been dead for several days. We read that many of the Jews who had come to visit Mary, and seen what Jesus did, put their faith in him – but by no means all of them. Some went to the Pharisees (who they knew hated Jesus) and told them what Jesus had done.
What was their reaction? Did they shrug their shoulders philosophically, acknowledge that Jesus must be who he claimed to be after all, and put their faith in him? Not a bit of it! They immediately called a meeting of the ruling council, and we read “from that day on they plotted to take his life.” The miracle resulted in their attitude hardening, not softening. As the saying goes, ‘The heat that melts the wax hardens the clay.’
Notice the interesting fact that the Pharisees didn’t doubt the account of the raising of Lazarus. The people who had brought the story to them were hardly likely to make it up. It wasn’t the fact of the resurrection that was the problem – it was what it meant that was the problem!
Our second point is that the Christian church grew with great speed despite the ascension of Jesus back to heaven. The Acts of the Apostles describes how the gospel spread from Jerusalem to Judea and Samaria and ‘to the ends of the earth.’
We can actually say that the Christian church spread far and wide, and with great speed, not despite the ascension of Jesus, but because of it. Let me explain why.
I remind you of what Jesus said to his disciples shortly before the crucifixion. It is recorded in John chapter 16. He said, “Now I am going to him who sent me, yet none of you asks me, ‘Where are you going?’ Because I have said these things, you are filled with grief. But I tell you the truth: It is for your good that I am going away. Unless I go, the Counsellor will not come to you; but if I go, I will send him to you. When he comes, he will convict the world of guilt in regard to sin and righteousness and judgment: in regard to sin, because men do not believe in me; in regard to righteousness, because I am going to the Father, where you can see me no longer; and in regard to judgment, because the prince of this world now stands condemned.”
When Jesus spoke of the ‘Counsellor’ he was referring to the Holy Spirit. He was telling them that the Holy Spirit would not be sent unless he went away. When the Holy Spirit came, he was to have a specific role, and that role would not be limited geographically as the ministry of Jesus was. He would have a worldwide ministry. He would convict of sin, righteousness and judgment. He would guide them into all truth. He would tell them ‘what is to come’ – that is, he would reveal the underlying principles of God’s plan for the future.
Jesus said the Holy Spirit would bring glory to him by ‘taking from what is mine and making it known to you.’ The great ministry of the Holy Spirit is to glorify Christ in the world by opening blind eyes to the truth of the gospel, imparting new life to men and women ‘dead in trespasses and sins’, and enabling them to believe savingly in Christ.
What a phenomenal ministry that is! And what a mission he is accomplishing! Men, women and children in droves have been – and are still being – brought into the Kingdom of God, and not one of them without the vital, gracious ministry of the Holy Spirit.
Maybe we can now begin to make sense of the words of Christ in John chapter 16 that perhaps took us by surprise at first: ‘It is for your good that I am going away.’ How could that possibly be so? It is true because the ascension of Jesus to heaven was the necessary precursor to the descent of the Holy Spirit. That happened on the day of Pentecost, which we read of in Acts chapter 2.
You see, the truth is that Jesus is still at work in the world today. At the beginning of Acts, Luke tells us that in the gospel that bears his name he wrote about ‘all that Jesus began to do and to teach until the day he was taken up to heaven’. Did you notice that word ‘began’? The four evangelists only tell us the beginning of the story. The work goes on, and the evidence is there for us to see. The ascension was a necessary step in God’s great plan of redemption, a plan that is still being worked out in the world today.