Ascension Day

"When He ascended on high, He led captivity captive and He gave gifts to men. He....ascended far above all the heavens that He might fill all things." Ephesians 4:8-10

In our observance of the annual liturgical calendar, Ascension Day is often overlooked as the church concentrates on observing Resurrection Sunday and then Pentecost. The fifty days between the two events are often considered unimportant, but nothing could be farther from the truth as revealed in the scriptural accounts. Resurrection may be part of the foundation laid, Pentecost may be the empowering moment, but it is in the forty days leading up to Ascension, and then the ten days of prayer and waiting that we find the raw materials used to form the church of Jesus Christ. In Acts 1:1-3, it records that for the forty days between Resurrection Sunday and Ascension Thursday, Jesus Christ presented Himself alive with many infallible proofs, spent the time instructing His disciples concerning the kingdom of God, and gave them final commands. Of the day of Ascension the synoptic gospels and the book of Acts offer the following details. Matthew records that Jesus met His disciples on a mountain. There He declared that all authority had been given to Him in heaven and on earth, and He commissioned them to go to all nations, baptizing and making disciples. He left them with the promise that He would be with them even to the end of the age. Mark declares that after Jesus spoke, He was received up into heaven and sat down at the right hand of God, and that the apostles went about preaching the word in power with the Lord working with them by confirming their words with signs and wonders. Luke indicates that Jesus led them out as far as Bethany and He lifted up His hands and blessed them. In Acts he adds that Jesus promised that the Holy Spirit would come upon the apostles in Jerusalem and that it would be the power that they required to function as His witnesses. As He was received up into the clouds out of their sight, angels appeared to the disciples with the promise that just as Jesus had ascended into heaven, so He would return to the earth in the same manner. I think you can agree that this is anything but an unimportant time in the work of Jesus bringing deliverance to our world.

Ascension is a critical event within the Paschal cycle. When the Lord took upon Himself human flesh and ultimately went to His death on the cross, He humbled Himself as it says in Philippians 2:6-8. "Although he existed in the form of God, [He] did not regard equality with God a thing to be grasped, but emptied Himself, taking the form of a bond-servant and being made in the likeness of men. And being found in the appearance as a man He humbled Himself by becoming obedient to the point of death, even death on a cross." Philippians 2:9 continues. "Therefore God also highly exalted Him and bestowed on Him the Name that is above every other name...." This supreme glorification of Christ took place when He ascended and sat down at the right hand of His Father in glory. Daniel 7:13-14 may give us a glimpse of that moment "I kept looking in the night visions, and behold with the clouds of heaven, One like the Son of Man was coming. And He came up to the Ancient of Days and was presented before Him, and to Him was given dominion, glory and a kingdom...." Four major things were accomplished at the Ascension. First Christ entered into the glory that was His rightfully from all eternity (John 17:4-5 and Psalm 110:1-2); second, from heaven He sent forth the promise of the Holy Spirit (John 16:7-15); third, as the Great High Priest He entered into the Holy of Holies not made with hands to make intercession for us (Hebrews 8:1-2, 6; 7:11-15,24-28; 10:19-22); and finally, He went into heaven to prepare a place for us (John 14:1-4).

We can commemorate Ascension Day in our families by looking to the skies as the apostles did on that day and recalling His promises. The day is, above all, intended to remind us, as Paul says in Ephesians 1:20-23 that Christ is the head over all things to His church, and that we, with him, have been seated in the heavenlies awaiting the culmination of the age and the inauguration of the everlasting kingdom (Ephesians 2:4-7). Ascension Day marks the opening of a parenthesis in the story of our salvation. Jesus now sits at the right hand of God waiting for that day when His enemies are made His footstool, when He will once for all time deliver the kingdom up into the hands of His Father and bring in the culmination of these last days that we live in. The closing of the parenthesis is nothing less than His return in glory. As we look to the heavens may our prayer be "Amen. Come Lord Jesus Christ." Revelation 22:20