R.C. Sproul: The Ascension Of Jesus Christ

seems like every year or so somebody takes a poll to discern what favorite New Testament chapter is every poll such as that that I've seen always has the same two chapters ranked one and two second most popular chapter is first Corinthians 13 the most popular chapter perennial II in the polls is the 14th chapter of the Gospel of John we're all familiar with the words of that text where Jesus says to his disciples let not your hearts be troubled let's look at that briefly at the beginning of chapter 14 where Jesus says let not your heart be troubled you believe in God believe also in me in my father's house are many mansions if it were not so I would have told you I go to prepare a place for you and if I go and prepare a place for you I will come again and receive you to myself that where I am there you may be also and where I go you know and the way you know now as popular as these words are with the Christian community I wonder if we understand why Jesus said these words in the first place as I constantly lament that we read tend to read the Bible according to chapters and verses as if the Gospels were written with chapters and verses and the theory is that these versification Xand chapter divisions were inserted into the text by an itinerant circuit rider on horseback and a couple times when the weather was bad he made some bad decisions but any time we see a new chapter in the scriptures we ought to see what immediately precedes it to see if it may shed light on the information that we find in the new chapter now I don't know for sure why Jesus said these words to his disciples why he said to them let not your heart be troubled but I can speculate and I don't think the speculation is difficult in light of what immediately precedes this strong testimony of comfort that he gives to his friends in the upper room so let's go back to chapter 13 to see what anticipates chapter 14 chapter 13 beginning and verse 31 jesus says this so when he had gone out jesus said now the son of man is glorified and God is glorified in him and if God is glorified in him God will also glorify him in himself and glorify him immediately now here's where it comes verse 33 little children I shall be with you a little while longer you will seek me but as I said to the Jews where I am going you cannot come so now I say to you a new commandment I give to you that you love one another as I have loved you that you also love one another and by this we'll all know that you are my disciples if you have love for one another now back in the 50s in this country the bestseller lists frequently saw books about biblical events and days and the film industry had some fantastic commercial successes with the film renditions of books by cost Dane and Lloyd see Douglas like the robe and the silver chalice or the big fisherman but one of the movie triumphs of the 50s was a movie of biblical times that had a strange title it was a Latin title simply Quo Vadis or his people in America called it Quo Vadis and the words quo vadis or quo vadis as they were pronounced then in their anglicized way are taken directly from the latin text of the verse that I just read they are the words that Simon Peter uttered to Jesus in the upper room when Jesus announced to his disciples yet a little while and you will see me no more I am going away and where I am going you cannot come and the words Quo Vadis mean where are you going and this was the occasion when Peter spoke those words that Jesus Jesus where are you going where is this to where you are departing that we can't follow that we can't come what's happening here now it's in that context that Jesus says let not your heart be troubled yes I'm going away yes in a little while you will look for me and you will not see me but you have to understand the significance of my departure you have to understand where I'm going why I'm going there and what I will be doing when I get there now all of this he says in the context of this lengthy discourse where he talks about his own entering into glory where the father is going to restore to the son the glory that the son had with the father from the foundation of the world Jesus is anticipating the end of his humiliation and the moment of his triumphal entry not in the Jerusalem but into the heavenly Jerusalem and so Jesus is comforting his disciples by saying that he's going through his father he's going to his father's house and he says in my father's house are many mansions and one of the reasons I'm gleaming you and one of the things I'm going away to do is that I am going to prepare a place for you and Jesus says something here that I think is one of the most comforting things he ever utters while he's on the earth he said if this were not so I would have told you that is if you people here are living with a false hope of Resurrection if you were clinging to a wish projection a mere mythological fantasy of life after death I would have corrected that I would have told you so but the reality is there is a heaven and there are many places of residency there and I am going there ahead of you to prepare a place for you in my father's house if we believe that one statement of Jesus it would turn the church upside down and turn the world upside down if we really believe that our Lord has departed from us in order to prepare a place for us we wouldn't be able to wait to get there and our whole view of death would change well this discourse goes on as you know for several chapters and it's called the Upper Room discourse and I want to just turn your attention to the sixteenth chapter of John for a second where Jesus elucidates more of these matters chapter 16 he says these things I have spoken to you that you should not be made to stumble they will put you out of the synagogues yes the time is coming that whoever kills you will think that he offers God service and these things they will do to you because they have not known the father nor me but these things I have told you that when the time comes you were a remember that I told you of them then verse 5 but now I go away to him who sent me and none of you asked me where are you going but because I've said these things to you sorrow has filled your heart now that's the point I want us to get that when Jesus announces his imminent departure from this planet the initial response of his disciple is a response of sorrow I can spell it by now it's funny the things that stay in your memory from your childhood the early years of my life were during the years of world war ii and my most vivid recollections of those days are being seated in my mother's lap as she used to type every night and her type typewriter she would type these letters or whatever they were called to servicemen and at the end of each note that she would type to my father she would let me hit the x key in the O key that I could send my hugs and kisses to my father that I remember when I was about three years old my father home on furlough and he was there just for a few days and I remember most vividly the day of his departure because he was going to be picked up by a military bus which was stopping about 300 yards from our front door and when it came time for my dad to leave I remember he had all his belongings in this big duffel bag and he kissed my mother goodbye and the only person that went with him to the bus stop was me and what he did was that he took the duffel bag and he threw it over one shoulder and he took my hand and together we went to the bus stop and this is one of the earliest memories I have as a child of having my father stoop over kissed me goodbye grabbed his duffel bag again get on the bus and ride off into the distance and I remember coming home sobbing and bawling Shakespeare said parting is such sweet sorrow there was nothing sweet to me about that it was a dreadful moment of separation and even as a small child I understood something of that in fact the week after that I was brought home to my mother in a police car where the police had picked me up about four miles from our house wandering along a highway outside of Pittsburgh and the police had asked me what I was doing and I told the police that I was walking to Italy because I was going to go see my dad I had no idea of how far Italy was as far as I knew it was around the next bend but we've all had those moments of separation with people we love and when Jesus tells his disciples that he is going to leave them they are overwhelmed with the spirit of sorrow now when we read the account of his actual departure that we find for example at the end of the Gospel of Luke and at the beginning of the book of Acts I want us to pay attention of a couple things first we will look at the book of Acts and then we will look at a Luke's account of it in his own Gospel the book of Acts in the first chapter and verse 4 we read as follows and being assembled together with them he commanded them not to depart from Jerusalem but to wait for the promise of the father which he said you have heard from me for John truly baptized with water but you shall be baptized with the Holy Spirit not many days from now therefore when they had come together they asked him saying Lord will you at this time restore the kingdom to Israel and Jesus said it's not for you to know that times or seasons which the father has put in his own authority but you shall receive power when the Holy Spirit has come upon you and you shall be my witnesses in Jerusalem in all Judea and Samaria and to the end of the earth and now when he had spoken these things while they watched he was taken up and a cloud received him out of their sight and while they looked steadfastly toward heaven as he went up behold two men stood by them in white apparel who also said men of Galilee why do you stand gazing up into heaven this same Jesus who was taken from you into heaven will so come in like manner as you saw him go into heaven and then all Luke says here is that they returned to Jerusalem on the Mount of Olives cetera now at the end of his gospel when he gives the other record of this we read in verse 50 of chapter 24 of Luke's Gospel and he led them out as far as Bethany and lifted up his hands and blessed them and it came to pass while he blessed them that he was parted from them and carried up into heaven and they've worshiped him and returned to Jerusalem with great joy and were continually in the temple praising and blessing God I remember as a student at the University of Amsterdam the 60s I was studying some scholarly information concerning the Ascension of Jesus and I had worked on this segment of Christology for the entire day focusing on the significance of the inset of the Ascension and that night at 10 o'clock in the evening I wanted to go to bed is was my custom but when I went to bed I couldn't sleep and so I got up and I began to to pace and to walk and to think and I can remember walking around that third storey apartment in the Netherlands 3 o'clock in the morning just saying to myself over and over and over again it's incredible it's incredible it's incredible and I realized I never understood the significance of this redemptive historical event and I thought the church in our day doesn't understand the significance of this redemptive historical event we get all excited about the atonement we get all excited about the resurrection we get all excited about the return of Jesus but we hardly even celebrate the Ascension of Christ we act as if we were still living in the old testament we look at Envy with envy at the people who lived on the earth when Jesus was here and we long to be numbered among those who are alive at his return and we think in the interim in between time we are of all people the most unfortunate because we have to live in his absence now when Jesus told his disciples that he was leaving they were filled with sorrow their hearts were troubled but what we find in this little verse in the Gospel of Luke is that after Jesus was taken from them after he ascended before their very eyes they returned to Jerusalem rejoicing and they were found praising God all around the town now what happened between the time that Jesus first told them I'm leaving and that when they were filled with sorrow and the time when he actually left and their hearts were filled with joy how do we account for that radical change in their disposition towards his departure how could anyone be happy about Jesus leaving the reason for their joy is simple they came to understand why he left where he was going and what he would be doing now remember remember the men who walked on the road to Emmaus and they talked to Jesus did not know they were speaking to Jesus and Jesus asked them what things and these men said that we had hoped that this Jesus would be the Messiah we hoped that he would redeem us we hoped that he would be our King but he let us down now if you had an invitation to the coronation of Jesus Christ as the king of kings and as the Lord of lords would you want to see it would you want to go to it if you couldn't go to it you'd certainly want to see it on television or in the newsreel but you wouldn't want to miss it now what happens here is this that throughout his teaching ministry Jesus kept referring not to first of all to his ascension but to his dissension where he said not everyone ascends into heaven but only those are only of the one who has descended from heaven in our language the word ascend means simply to go up and our tendency is to think of the rising up into the sky of Jesus from the Mount of Olives that we've just read about here that his ascension merely refers to his going up in the air up in the sky to go back home to be with God in heaven no the concept of ascension from the earliest period in biblical literature in the Old Testament it's not just going up a hill or ascending to a city or ascending into heaven but ascending to a particular place for a particular purpose and that particular purpose is to be enthroned in heaven as the king of kings and so when Jesus leaves this earth he leaves for his coronation he leaves for his investiture as the king and we act as if the kingdom of God were something completely in the distant future and we forget the fundamental announcement of the New Testament is that our King reigns right now now that rain is invisible but the last question the disciples asked him before he leaves us are you now when you restore the kingdom to Israel and he says it's many forbiddeth what I'm gonna do that your job is what to be my witnesses in Jerusalem Judea Samaria the uttermost parts of the earth as Calvin put it he says the task of the church is to make the invisible reign of Jesus Christ visible by our fidelity and by our celebration and our joy about his going into heaven to become the king of the Kings to be enter into the heavenly sanctuary as our great High Priest and when he goes there to send the spirit to act as his presence in his absence from us to empower the church for its mission he said I won't leave you comfortless and I have to go away that the Holy Spirit may come upon you for you shall receive power and I stood and watched the glory of the Shekinah cloud transporting Jesus to his throne and the angels came and said men of Galilee why are you standing here gazing into heaven who wouldn't be standing there gazing into the same Jesus who has departed from your midst isn't finished yet this is the inauguration of his kingship but he will come to clean consummate it in the same glory I think the Ascension of Jesus is one of the most important moments in all of biblical history to which the psalmist look forward in the Ascension Psalms and the throne 'men psalms of the Old Testament where our king is given his grow

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Published: Sun Oct 12 2014