By Neil Earle
Recall for a moment a most memorable scene in that most memorable book, the Book of Revelation. It’s found in Revelation 4 and 5.
John has been invited into heaven (but not raptured!). He sees a throne scene with One seated on it resplendent in brightness so that his face was not visible. Before him are imposing beasts and elders – counselors of dignity as befitting any earthly monarch of the time John was writing. The seven spirits are the visionary representation of the omniscient all-seeing Holy Spirit of God who already appears in Revelation 1:4.
John has dropped in on a mighty big worship service (4:8). Everyone is praising the One sitting on the throne. Then John notices this majestic being has a book in his hand sealed with seven seals. This book contains the future outline of the human race. But – a problem! No one is found worthy in heaven or earth worthy to the book. But an elder tells John, “Don’t worry. The Lion of the tribe of Judah is worthy to open the book.” John looks towards the throne again and he sees… not a Lion but a Lamb in the midst of the throne. And almost incredibly, the Lamb is bearing marks of slaughter “as if it had been slain” (5:6).
The Lamb of course is Christ. But amazingly, John sees him very much as he was when he appeared to the disciples back on earth in the upper room (Luke 24:36). Astonishingly, here in heaven, Jesus bears the marks of his crucifixion. That is why though our Mediator is in heaven he is called the Man Jesus Christ, in 1 Timothy 2:5. To Trinitarian theologians such as Thomas Torrance this is a significant insight, one which disciples of John Calvin have always paid attention to. For it shows that even in his ascended, exalted state, Jesus has not cast off the evidence of his incarnation. All heaven remembers when they see the symbolic Lamb with marks of slaughter that this was God who became a man, the God who returned to heaven as the God-Man making reconciliation between heaven and earth.
It is a mind-expanding concept.
Thomas Torrance explained it this way:
“[Thus] the church is founded not simply on the words of Jesus to Peter but upon the oneness of God and man which in the birth of Jesus was inserted into our human existence, which reached through the whole course of his earthly life and particularly of his ministry, into the atonement and resurrection, and then into the ascension…”
The ascension of Jesus the God-Man is absolutely essential to God’s plan of salvation. One Christian writer puts it this way. “The ascension completes the resurrection. Without the resurrection Christ’s death would be meaningless as far as the great issues of life are concerned. And without the ascension the resurrection would also be incomplete. We would have a resurrected person, but not one who was now at God’s right hand in the place of authority.”
This alone should set Christian hearts a-thumping, but there is more of course:
“The New Testament was written by men who were thoroughly convinced that Jesus was at the right hand of the Father, and that through the ministry of the Holy Spirit they were in union with this ascended Lord.” True. This gave them the confidence to face their deadly foes among the Jewish hierarchy and led Stephen the first martyr to face death with absolute assurance (Acts 4:13; 7:59-60). As Griffith Thomas phrased it: “The spiritual value of the Ascension lies not in Christ’s physical remoteness but in His spiritual nearness. He is free from earthly limitations and His life above is the promise and guarantee.”
Pastor Valwoord stated: “The ascension is the important link between His work on earth and His work in heaven which begins with the ascension.” The Holy Spirit effects that link. As K.Giles puts it in The Dictionary of Jesus and the Gospels, “The Spirit is none other than the presence of Jesus (Acts 16:7), albeit in another form.” Many teachers understand this, that the ascension and enthronement of Jesus at the father’s right hand makes possible our capacity for ministry to this world and also our being enabled to live and act for him.
Or as Torrance put it: “The koininia (fellowship) thus created by the atonement and resurrection of Christ is fully actualized in our midst by the outpouring of the Holy Spirit (see Acts 2: 33) and is maintained by the power of the Spirit as the church continues in the fellowship of word and sacrament…”
It is in this sense that Paul said believers already have access to heaven through the One who was God and man. Paul told the Ephesians that the process of incarnation, resurrection and ascension has “made us alive together with Christ and raised us up together and made us sit together in the heavenly places in Christ Jesus” (Ephesians 2:5-6). We are accepted in the Beloved Son who even now bears the marks of his victory over the forces of sin and death (Ephesians 1:6).
This is a major theme in Torrance theology and it means that the good news is really really good indeed: “Jesus acted out the will of God to be one with us and gather men and women into the heart of God…The chasm that separates man from God is the black abyss of hell. And Christ descended into that hell in order to redeem. He is the Mediator descended into the black pit of human alienation from God in order to save. In his own incarnate person – true God and true man – he united man and God and bore the guilt of man before the presence of God. (Incarnation, pages 107, 255).
Through his resurrection and ascension Jesus now ever lives to make intercession for us. If our sins are important to us – and they should be since they potentially block the way to God – then the Ascension is mightily important indeed. It completes the picture of what Jesus did from Bethlehem to Calvary to the Upper Room.
Torrance student Gerrit Dawson has summarized some of this quite colorfully. Notice how he shows salvation begins not with our sins (“negative righteousness”) but with Gods loving desire to share his glory with us (“positive righteousness”), sin being a subset – though an important one – of God’s move to rescue us.
“In short, the story goes like this. The Son of God came to us as the man Jesus to restart the human race (the Second Adam). He took to himself our very bone and skin, heart and mind. Jesus was the root out of which a new humanity would arise. This is possible because in Jesus God truly joined himself to our ruined, wrecked, sin-sick, fallen humanity, then transformed it“(Romans 8:3).
And this – Trinitarians remind us – is based on God’s love more than it is our sins. It is love that constrains us, as Paul said and this directly applies to the Father, Son and Holy Spirit for God is love. Dawson continues:
“In our flesh he won the victory of perfect obedience even through the agony of Gethsemane and death upon the cross (Philippians 2:8). Then, passing through death into resurrection, Jesus in our flesh was transformed. He was outfitted for heaven, the realm of God, clothed with a body fit for life in the intimate and immediate presence of his Father (John 20:17).“
And here Dawson comes to the point we raised earlier: “Even now he remains in our skin, glorified yet still essentially us (1 Timothy 2:5; Revelation 5:6, 12). For, in his ascension, he has taken what we are, in our embodied existence; into the eternal Triune life of God…Christ joins us to himself. He unites us to his new humanity by sending the Holy Spirit into our hearts (Acts 2:33). The Spirit quickens us to new life, creates faith in us, and enables us to be born from above into the body of Christ our head. Our hope is that in Christ, we too, are a new creation right now (2 Corinthians 5:17)…We are given to share, as the Spirit unites us to the one who has already united himself to us, in the positive righteousness of his obedient and loving life (John 14:23)…beyond the ‘negative righteousness’ of the remission of sins…”
The news is pretty good so far, but there is more, as Dawson concludes: “Then, on the last day, even our lowly bodies will be transformed to be like Christ’s glorious body (Philippians 2:21). We, too, will be outfitted for perfect communion in the Triune God” (An Introduction to Torrance Theology, pages 71, 57).
Perfect communion in the Triune God…which we enjoy already in part. Oh yes, these are great mysteries but they relate to Christ and his work with the Church through the Spirit. Jesus told his first disciples early in their careers, If I told you earthly things and you cannot believe, how shall you believe if I tell you heavenly things (John 3:12)? Early Christians had to invent new words to help explain all of these things – for example, trinity, incarnation, perichoresis, homoousia. But the rest of the New Testament fills out more of the picture for us. Incarnation, Resurrection, Ascension – Christianity’s triple punch, then, now and always.