Acts 1; Colossians 1-2
Amen. Turn to Jeremiah 23 and then we have Colossians 2 and 3 and then Acts chapter 1. As you know, we want to think about the ascension of the Lord Jesus and how it benefits us, but also a few quirky things about the two natures of Christ and his presence here, here and there. So in Jeremiah chapter 23, you have the prophet declaring that God can be where he wants and see what he wants and know what he wishes. So Jeremiah chapter 23, beginning at verse six, in his days, Judah, in his days, Judah will be saved and Israel will dwell securely. And this is the name by which he will be called, the Lord is our righteousness. Therefore, behold, the days are coming, declares the Lord, when they shall no longer say, as the Lord lives, who brought up the people of Israel out of the land of Egypt, but as the Lord lives, who brought up and led the offspring of the house of Israel out of the north country and out of the countries where he had driven them, then they shall dwell in their own land.
Concerning the prophets, my heart is broken within me, all my bones shake. I am like a drunken man, like a man overcome by wine because of the Lord and because of his holy words. For the land is full of adulterers because of the curse of the land mourns. The pastures of the wilderness are dried up. Their course is evil and their might is not right. Both prophet and priest are ungodly.
Even in my house I have found their evil, declares the Lord. Therefore their way shall be to them like slippery paths in the darkness into which they shall be driven and fall for I will bring disaster upon them in the year of their punishment, declares the Lord. In the prophets of Samaria, I saw an unsavory thing. They prophesied by Baal and led my people astray. But in the prophets of Jerusalem, I have seen a horrible thing.
They commit adultery and walk in lies. They strengthen the hands of evildoers so that no one turns from his evil. All of them have become like Sodom to me and its inhabitants like Gomorrah. Therefore, thus says the Lord of hosts concerning the prophets, behold, I will feed them with bitter food and give to them poison water to drink for from the prophets of Jerusalem ungodliness has gone out into all the land. Thus says the Lord of hosts, do not listen to the words of the prophets who prophesy to you, filling you with vain hopes. They speak visions of their own minds and not from the mouth of the Lord.
They say continually, to those who despise the word of the Lord, it shall be well with you. And to everyone who stubbornly follows his own heart, they say, no disaster shall come upon you. For who among them has stood in the counsel of the Lord to see and hear his word? Or who has paid attention to his word and listened?
Behold, the storm of the Lord, wrath has gone forth, a whirling tempest. It will burst upon the head of the wicked. The anger of the Lord will not turn back until he has executed and accomplished the intent of his heart. In the latter days, you will understand it clearly.
I did not send the prophets, yet they ran. I did not speak to them, yet they prophesied. But if they had stood in my counsel, then they would have proclaimed my words to my people. and they would have turned them from their evil ways and from the evil of their deeds. Am I a God at hand, declares the Lord, and not a God afar off. Can a man hide himself in secret places so that I cannot see him, declares the Lord. Do I not feel heaven and earth, declares the Lord.
And then Colossians chapter two, Colossians 2, 6 through 10, and then just a little jump over to 3, 1 to 4. In Colossians chapter 2, verse 6. The Apostle Paul says, therefore, as you received Christ, Jesus, the Lord, so walk in him, rooted and built up in him, and established in the faith just as you were taught, abounding in thanksgiving.
See to it that no one takes you captive by philosophy and empty deceit, according to human tradition, according to the elemental spirits of the world, and not according to Christ. For in him, the whole fullness of deity dwells bodily. And you have been filled in him who is head of all rule and authority in him. Also, you were circumcised with a circumcision made without hands by putting off the body of the flesh by the circumcision of Christ. And then over to chapter three, verse one, if then you have been raised with Christ, seek the things that are above where Christ is seated at the right hand of God and set your minds on things that are above, not on things that are on earth. For you have died and your life is hidden with Christ in God. When Christ, who is your life, appears, then you will also appear with him in glory. And in the very beginning of Acts, in Acts chapter one, we have the account of Jesus’ ascension up into heaven.
So for 40 days after the resurrection, The Lord spent time with his disciples, uh, readying them for his absence and for their ministry to let the glory of God cover the face of the earth. And in Acts chapter one, verse six, it says, so when they had come together, they asked him, Lord, will you at this time restore the kingdom to Israel? He said to them, it is not for you to know the times or seasons that the father has fixed by his own authority, but you will receive power when the Holy Spirit has come upon you. And you will be my witnesses in Jerusalem and in all Judea and Samaria and to the end of the earth.
And when he had said these things, as they were looking on, he was lifted up and a cloud took him out of their sight. And while they were gazing into heaven, as he went, behold, two men stood by them in white robes and said, men of Galilee, why do you stand looking into heaven? This Jesus who has taken up from you into heaven will come in the same way as you saw him go into heaven.
Amen. God’s word for us. Um, As you know, there has been lots of confusion over the person of Jesus. the work of Jesus in all sorts of areas. You know that in the early church, the councils put together creeds and confessions to help us. And so in the early church, they wanted to make sure that the natures of Christ, his humanity and his divinity were known to the church, that he was both God and man without confusion, without mixture. Um, and, and so, uh, those things pop up in our, our creeds and we, we learn them and we recite them.
Um, we want to remember also that Jesus, uh, really did in his body ascend up into heaven after his death. Now we know of two other ascensions, uh, Enoch, and Elijah, they did not taste death, but went on up. Of course, Jesus died, rose again, and then went up after the 40 days. We also want to remember that Jesus is present in heaven, but he’s also present here with us.
And we don’t want to be confused about it. We want to understand its benefits to us. We want to understand that he is our king sitting on his royal throne, and he’ll come again to us one day. I think you also are aware we are not really church year people.
If you go to Catholic churches, Episcopal churches, Lutheran churches, and then some mainline Protestants like Methodists, Presbyterians, and Baptists, they’ll do the church year where every Sunday is called something. It has a color, it has a theme, it has certain songs that are sung. And that’s rather interesting on my way in every Sunday morning. I listen to something on the radio classical radio from Durham Chapel Hill area. I forget what it’s called. It’s like Sunday something but it’s Songs and readings based on whatever the day in the church year is and it’s it’s rather interesting and encouraging and I was thinking this morning on my way in the redeeming thing about this because of who produces it is they don’t preach and they just let the songs and the readings do the work.
Uh, if they, if there was, if there was one of those eight minute specials, it would probably wreck it or mess it up. Uh, but perhaps you’ve been around the church here and you know, what’s coming up is Lent, right? Mardi Gras. Oh wait, not that part. Uh, but, but you got Lent, there’s the lengthening of days until Jesus.
And you know, there’s, there’s, there’s, there’s just something all the time. Um, Lent Lent for me is two things. It’s what you get out of the, filter on your dryer. And then more personally, it’s what comes out of your belly button, you know, because it collects there. But Lent is a really big deal.
So we’re not church year followers, but we do recognize the big ones. Valentine’s Day, Mother’s Day. No, not those. We do think about Advent, the promises and the prophecies of the coming of Jesus. We do think about Christmas. We have a Christmas Eve service. We nix the Advent calendar though, none of that light and strange fire business in the church over shrubbery.
We do look at Easter or Resurrection Sunday, but our position is that every day in general, where every Sunday in general is just simply the Lord’s Day. Now there are times and themes that it’s appropriate to remember the life and ministry of Jesus. Sometimes Trinity Sunday is a big deal in conservative churches. But there’s another one, Ascension Sunday. We often overlook 40 days after Easter. There’s Ascension Day, it falls on a Thursday. But it’s several Sundays after Easter. And then there’s Pentecost. So maybe Advent, Christmas, Easter, Ascension Day, Pentecost, Trinity Sunday. Those are the ones. And of course, we’re Reformed, so we have to remember October 31st and, you know, pin the 95 theses on the chapel door, all that kind of stuff. But back to the Ascension.
I mentioned earlier when we recited the creed or the confession that every confession or creed is written in a historical context. Most of y’all have been through the confession of faith in some former fashion, and you know that the study guide we’ve used for years around here has sort of shown us because of the 1600s, an anti-Catholic bent. The confession of faith is quick to point out things that are true of the biblical and Protestant church, but not true of the big and wieldy Roman Catholic church. Well, when you come to the Heidelberg, because it’s an early confession, the Westminster in the 1500s, the Heidelberg is in the, or in the 1600s, the Heidelberg is a hundred years earlier in the 1500s, and it’s in the context of Germany.
And Lutherans were coming up with a few wacky beliefs about the humanity of Jesus. So you know the big debate. When we come to the Lord’s Supper, how is Jesus present? Well, if you’re Roman Catholic and the priest says hocus pocus, rings the bell, what does the bread and what does the wine actually turn into? It turns into the real body and blood of Jesus. His ongoing sacrifice continues in that mass or that meal. Then you got the Zoingleans. It’s just a memorial, just a happy memory, nothing doing, just bread, just grape juice, Welch’s, because they’re Baptist.
And then he got us Calvinists to believe that Christ is present with us in a special way. So we’re raised up with Christ where he is seated and in some special spiritual way he communes with us. And we say in our confession it’s not after a corporal or bodily manner and it’s not some crazy mystical business. Um, it’s just Christ is present with his people in a spiritual way, just as he is with us in a spiritual way in the rest of the service and our Christian lives.
We come to the Lutherans and they have a little belief called the ubiquity, uh, of Christ. And they believe that his body, because I can’t even explain it, but something about his body, uh, being everywhere, uh, after his ascension, that his, his body is with his divinity. And so when, uh, in the Lutheran church, they serve the Lord’s supper, I guess what they believe that his body is in and with and by and under and all, all the rest.
And so that’s why you have these extra three questions. What do we understand, uh, by the words he ascended into heaven? Is Christ not with us even to the end of the world? And then what about the location of His body, His divinity? So the first question, and we’ll just hit these quickly and get to the benefits. Question 46, what do you understand by the words, He ascended into heaven? The answer is, I understand these words, He ascended into heaven to mean that Christ in the sight of his disciples was taken up from the earth into heaven.
And there he continues, uh, on our behalf until he comes again to judge the living and the dead. So Jesus really did leave this earth. He really did go up into heaven and he did it in the sight of eyewitnesses. You read some of the gospel accounts, uh, particularly John and he’ll say in a little roundabout vague way, some of us saw this. It’s important for the apostolic witness to be an eyewitness to the life and the ministry of the Lord Jesus Christ. And Paul gets sort of squeezed in there because he saw the risen and exalted Christ on the road to Damascus. But they were indeed eyewitnesses. They saw him taken up into heaven.
And now what had Jesus said a bunch, a bunch of times to his disciples? I’m going to go and prepare a place for you so that one day you can come and be there with me. My father’s house are many mansions. If I were not so, I would not have told you, but I’m gonna go, I’m gonna prepare a place so that where I am, you may be also. That’s one of our promises.
And then you got Jesus, you know, in his high priestly prayer, praying for the disciples. You know, Jesus is going to die. Jesus is going to rise. Jesus is going to ascend. And he says, uh, in his prayer to God, the father, I pray for them. Um, they’ll be left behind though. They’ll live on this earth. They’ll live in this world with all of its hardships and troubles. And, uh, Jesus is praying, uh, for God to be with and bless, uh, and guide us. And then he says, I’m not going to leave you as orphans, but after I leave, the comforter will come, the Holy Spirit, the Paraglet. And so there’s some necessity to Jesus leaving. There’s some necessity to his being gone.
He’s got to go sit on his throne, right? He’s got to receive his kingdom. He has to be the high priest who, when he finishes his work, sits down and he’s not a high priest of this earth. He’s a high priest of heaven. So he’s got to go sit down there. And so there’s all kinds of reasons why he ascended into heaven. But the big truth is he was taken up. Second, big truth is he continues there on our behalf until he comes again. From time to time, I’ll ask you all the little trick question and confession of faith class.
Where is the body of Jesus? And for a while, everybody would kind of look like, well, it’s probably not there, but it has to be there, right? And you’ve got the old Scottish theologians who made a wonderful little statement. The dust of the earth is on the throne of glory. And we’ll talk about that in a moment, how important that is for us. So what do we understand when we say he ascended into heaven? He is really there and he continues to be there. And there’s that little phrase on our behalf, which we’ll speak of in more just a moment.
All right, second question, number 47, but is not Christ with us even to the end of the world as he promised? Well, where did he promise that? Well, when he gave the great commission to his disciples, go into all the world, and preach the gospel, baptizing, uh, people in the name of the father, son, and Holy spirit and teaching them all that I have commanded you. And then, uh, you got to use the King James, right? Low. I am with you always. And so how is he with us? If he left us? Well, we have a good answer for that. Uh, Christ is with us to the end of the world as he promised. Well, how’s that?
He’s true man, and he’s true God. And with respect to his human nature, he is no more on earth. So when his disciples saw him go up, his body, the one born of the Virgin Mary, that body, the man nailed to the cross, that body, the man laid in the grave, that body, the one raised from the dead, and eyewitnesses saw him for 40 days, that body is no more on earth.
But with respect to the Godhead, The majesty, grace and spirit. He is at no time absent from us. Now here’s where a good lesson in the Trinity is helpful. We have God, the father, God, the son, and God, the Holy spirit. We, we sort of break it up. We say one God, three persons. And then sometimes we say in the three persons, the work that they do, God, the father loves us. Jesus, the son saves us. God, the Holy Spirit sanctifies us. Now, did Jesus save us? Of course he did. But did God save us?
Well, yes, he’s God, the father, God, the son, God, the Holy Spirit. So when you speak of one, you speak of the other. And so when Jesus sends the Holy Spirit to be with us, the spirit is the spirit of Christ. And so if the spirit of Christ is with us, then it’s as if Christ himself is with us. We are united to Jesus. We are filled with the spirit, not left as orphans. And so God has been gracious. And so where’s the human nature? It’s in heaven. Where’s the Godhead? It’s everywhere. God is everywhere in majesty, grace, and spirit. There is no time. that he is absent from us.
Remember the shorter catechism, what does it say? The souls of believers are at their death, made perfect in holiness, their bodies still united to Christ, do rest in their graves. So even in the grave, or maybe you get into those little theoretical things in your mind, what if I ever get locked in a box and buried in the dirt and, you know, have a little straw coming up, you know, or, know, I get locked in the basement of an abandoned house and nobody finds me for 40 years.
You know, all that crazy stuff. Y’all watch too much TV. Who is with you? Jesus, who is with you? God. All those great blessings. Okay, now to the third question. We’re still working towards the benefit question, but the third question, number 48, are not but are not in this way the two natures in Christ separated from one another, if the manhood is not wherever the Godhead is. Okay.
I think it was Calvin who made the joke that hell is for the people that ask stupid theological questions. I think it was he who made that joke. I could be wrong and could be attributing something terrible to him, but there’s some little funny like that. Hell is for people who ask dumb theological questions.
Um, so it’s, it’s as if we get in our mind that Jesus was not eternal. Jesus was not forever in heaven with, uh, God, the father and God, the Holy spirit. We think of only Jesus as, you know, little baby Jesus, you know, Jesus Christ, meek and mild shepherd on this earth, 33 years. And that’s the only way we can think of him. And so we can’t fathom that he was. without a body for like a Brazilian years and eternity, right? We don’t think that way, but we have to remember that he assumed his human nature in real space, time, and history, but it was for eternity, not always so.
The question speaks of the division of the two natures of Christ. And the answer is, although his human nature is not present wherever his Godhead is, The two natures in Christ are not at all separated from one another. Since the Godhead is incomprehensible and omnipresent, it must necessarily follow that the same is not limited. I scribbled in here by the human nature or it says here with the human nature. So God, the son becoming human, The human nature of Jesus cannot limit his divinity. So if the Godhead goes somewhere, the body can’t go. Does the Godhead go without the body of Christ? Of course it does. But because they are inseparable and indissolvable and all those things, the union is still there.
And it’s something that’s hard to understand. something we just have to take as true from the scripture. But the alternative, it’s not good if we say, well, You know, the human nature does this sometimes and then the divine nature does this. That’s modalism. That was a bad heresy. Or we, you know, we have people that said, well, it’s really one nature and it just looks like two. I think that was monophytism, something like that. Then you got the Nestorians and you’ve got all these others who came up with these awful heresies because they just couldn’t take God at his word that this, wonderful hypostatic union between the natures was able to be. It’s our minds that are limited. It’s not God who is limited.
So the two natures are not at all separated from each other. So if anybody ever corners you and says, not your money or your life, but Is Jesus divisible or your life? You’ll just say, of course not. The two natures in Christ can never be separated because I learned that in the Heidelberg Catechism on a Sunday rainy night. And you’ll get to live and keep your wallet. Another one of those theoreticals, right? But the divine nature cannot be limited by the human nature. Now, can the human nature be limited by space and time and gravity and laws of nature? Absolutely. Well, then you say, because you’re a smarty pants, well, how did it ascend to heaven? Because God did it, right? That’s a good answer.
Um, so you, you see what’s going on here. This is probably a little bit speaking into the whole Lutheran controversy, just like in our Westminster confession, we have little forays into Roman Catholicism because, um, They got bad views of justification. So you study justification and you know, merit is not infused and taken away and all that business so that all that kind of thing is explained. So what fun.
All right, let’s do the last question. This is why we all paid admission. What’s in it for me? What benefit do we receive from Christ ascension into heaven? There’s three benefits. Christ ascension into heaven is of several advantages to us, but you’re going to get three.
First, he is our advocate. Second, we have a sure pledge. And then third, he sends us his spirit as a pledge. So think about the advocate. We have an advocate in the presence of the Father in heaven. Well, what is an advocate? Think of an advocate like a lawyer. You get in trouble, you gotta go to court, you have to appear before the judge. What is the old saying? He who represents himself as a fool for a lawyer, Yeah, ask my brother about he who has his father for a lawyer is a fool. My dad represented my brother in court.
They were shooting fireworks. And he was 16. It was back in Elon in the day. He was 16. And his buddies were minors, so he got the book thrown at him. So he’s worse than a jailhouse lawyer, I think. But anyway, advocate, think father. Think representative. Think case leader.
What does John tell us? If anyone sins, we have an advocate with the father, even Jesus Christ, the righteous, the propitiation for our sins. And so when we sin, and as horrible as it makes us feel, as wreck of our conscience and a wreck of our heart we become when we see our sin and smell its stench and realize what we have done in the sight of God. We then quickly have to remember we have an advocate with the father who will plead our case and he will plead his own blood. He will plead his own righteousness and we can rest assured that before the father, our advocate will succeed. Um, but also our advocate in the presence of his father, uh, praise for us. Uh, what does Romans eight tell us?
Uh, it tells us wonderfully that we have, uh, we have a advocate, we have a representative in the heavenly places. And so we, we have, We have a surety, we have a great blessing knowing that our savior is in heaven acting on our behalf, praying on our behalf, interceding for us with our, when our sighs and groans are too deep for words, he interprets them and lifts them up. There’s also that wonderful Psalm that says, where Christ says, I will hear the praise of my brothers and I will lift it up into the sanctuary. There’s a sense where God is hearing or Christ is hearing our worship and offering it to God. And it’s accepted.
There’s a sense where we pray and the spirit intercedes with us and for us. There’s a sense where Jesus, the seated priest is advocating on our behalf. That’d be some expensive lawyering, wouldn’t it? To pay that eternal, forever billable hour. But that’s what Christ is for us. He is our advocate in the presence of the Father.
So Jesus didn’t just, you know, happy, happy, go back to heaven because he missed home. He went there to continue to work on your behalf. He went there to continue to plead your case. Satan, what does he do? He ever accuses. Think of that story in Zechariah where the priest had dirty clothes and Satan comes to accuse him.
And so you can think of the heavenly court like that or in the book of Job. There’s lots of dark things going out on against you, but If God is for us, what’s the rest of the phrase? Who can be against us? The second thing, second benefit, is we have our flesh in heaven as a sure pledge that he, as the head, will also take us, his members, up to himself.
Every week or so, I go spend a little time with dad, and when we leave his house, we have to drive past where mom is buried. And so we’ll, we’ll talk about it. He goes and puts his, these, these little rocks he puts on top of her headstone. And right now there’s the Duke basketball and cause that was a big deal to her. So we’ll chat about that and he’ll, he’ll just kind of start musing about the resurrection. He’ll start thinking about what is to come. And the other day we got to talk about, got to talking about the, what is it? The intermediate state.
So for now, And until Jesus comes again, our souls are in heaven when we die, but our bodies are in the grave. Now at the resurrection body, souls will be the body raised up, the soul united with the body and that resurrected body will live on in heaven. But no one except Jesus, Elijah and Enoch, I assume have a body in heaven. The rest are the spirits of those made perfect.
Uh, they’re in that inter, what did I just call it? The intermediate state. Uh, so we, we were chatting about that cause you know, you, you’ve got all this stuff, uh, no pun intended, but floating around about heaven, you know, that, Oh, a child dies, they get angel’s wings. Um, you know, Dale Earnhardt’s up there with angel’s wings.
Uh, you know, just all these, you know, hokey hokey things, but what do we know and how does it assure us? Well, we know that our own flesh, Jesus is in heaven. We know that that is a sure pledge that he will also take us, his members, up to himself. What did he promise?
I’m going to go and prepare a place for you so that there where I am, you may be also. That was his let not your hearts be troubled speech. They were troubled because he said he was going up to the father. And that ought to give us assurance. He is the first of humanity to be in heaven. He is already there. And that’s a sure pledge. Colossians reminds us, seek the things above where Christ is seated. Okay. The third thing, he sends his spirit as a pledge by whose power we seek those things which are above. where Christ said it on the right hand of God and not on the things of earth.
When the summer comes along, our family goes to the same beach. We’ve gone to the same place for all these years now. Already got plans to go this year. And it used to be before these whole electronic locks came along. Now we just show up and the lock is set to let us in at four o’clock on Saturday. And then our access, whatever the code they give us, it’ll quit working at 10 a.m. the next Saturday. That’s how it works. But it used to be they would mail us about two weeks before our booking, they would mail us a key.
Now it wasn’t just a little key. It was a big, had a big square thing on it. It was like a hotel looking key, but we would put that on the main key ring of the car we would drive. And so for two weeks we grabbed the car keys, family would get in the car, we’d go somewhere and we would see that key to our place down at the coast. And it was to us a pledge of something to come that we could not wait for.
And I don’t know if we have that in our lives now, but we should really keep loose tent pegs. We drive our stakes so far in the ground, we build a brick and granite and we act as if life is here and forever. But how often do we seek the things that are above? And we live in this world, we live in this economy and it’s good to invest in a house and you probably need not to have some crummy things about your house. Cause if you ever had to sell it, it wouldn’t wouldn’t sell. So you do market based things. Can’t say all that’s ungodly, but we do like it a little too much.
Uh, but what does, uh, the scripture command us? It commands us to seek the things that are above because we are citizens of heaven. We just don’t live there yet. Um, I’ll be in a few months, a citizen of the beach for a week, but I don’t yet live there, but it gives me a little hope. I can’t wait. It’ll be fun. Um, sand and surf and time away and all the rest. Uh, but we, we should set our minds on that home.
Think of the, uh, chapter 11 of Hebrews when it talked about Abraham and Sarah and Moses by faith, they look for things that they never got on earth. And it’s all because it was in a city that was future, a city whose foundations was not in heaven and it was not on earth. And so as we live life in the spirit, as we live life in Christ, we are to be like Ephesians says, with our mind raised up into the heavenly places, we live in a more heavenly sphere. And that doesn’t mean we walk around and chant like monks and don’t interact with humans on this earth and say goofy Christian things all the time.
We probably should do more than we do, but our minds ought to be really on another plane. Our minds and hearts really ought to be on that other plane where Christ is seated, where our priest is seated, where the king sits on his throne and in that place of dominion and power.
So how do we, how do we sort of wrap all this up and put a bow on it? Well, Think back to the garden. Think back to when Adam was placed in the garden to sit on a throne, as it were, and to rule over a realm, and to protect it, and to keep it, and to make it flourish, and to kick out enemies like serpents and snakes, and to make it where the people within his realm obeyed the Lord, and that glory was spread through offspring and generations. That’s now what Christ is fulfilling. What Adam has failed to do, Jesus is forever fulfilled. And so we have that great second Adam sitting on the throne, and that ought to give us some good comfort.
Let’s give him thanks. Pray with me. Father, we thank you for the chance to think about where our big brother is, where he is seated and a little of what he is doing. And we thank you that it benefits, uh, it benefits us greatly and richly give us the minds to think a little bit more heavenly thoughts, reading our Bibles, maybe reading a little theology, give us minds that, that, uh, want to pray to our advocate, uh, give us minds that, that seek him in our hours of temptation and trial. And even when Satan accuses, And bless us, we pray with these truths in Christ’s name. Amen. We have number 306, Jesus, my great high priest.