His Ascension and Our Union
His Ascension and Our Union
Luke xxiv. 50–51; Acts i. 9–10
His Transfiguration Consummated (John xvii. 5)
Our Supernatural Salvation (Acts ii. 33)
His Transformation Completed (Matthew xxviii. 18)
Our Sanctified Security (John xiv. 13)
His Trustiness Continued (Acts vii. 56)
Our Simple Satisfaction (John xvii. 23)
All the events in our Lord’s life to which we have no corresponding experience happened after the Transfiguration. From then onwards our Lord’s life was altogether vicarious. Up to the time of the Transfiguration, He had exhibited the normal perfect life of a man; from the Transfiguration onwards, everything is unfamiliar to us. Gethsemane, the Cross, the Resurrection—there is nothing like these experiences in our human life. From the Transfiguration on, we are dealing not so much with the life our Lord lived as with the way He opened the door for us to enter into His life. At His Ascension our Lord enters Heaven and keeps the door open for humanity. His Cross is the door for every member of the human race to enter into the life of God. Because of His Resurrection our Lord has the right to give eternal life to every individual man (John xvii. 2); and by His Ascension He becomes the possessor of all power in heaven and in earth (Matthew xxviii. 18).
His Transfiguration Consummated
“And now, O Father, glorify Thou Me with Thine own self with the glory which I had with Thee before the world was ” (John xvii. 5).
When our Lord as a Man had fulfilled all God’s demands of Him, and when by obedience He had transformed His natural life into a spiritual life, He reached the place where it was all spiritual, earth had no more hold on Him, and on the Mount of Transfiguration His real nature, viz., His essential Deity, broke all through the natural and He was transfigured. He had fulfilled all the requirements of His Father for His earthly life, and God’s presence, symbolised in the cloud, waited to usher Him back into the glory which He had with the Father before the world was. But He turned His back on the glory, and came down from the Mount to identify Himself with fallen humanity, because through Calvary there was to issue the newly constructed humanity. If Jesus Christ had gone to heaven from the Mount of Transfiguration, He would have gone alone. He would have been to us a glorious Figure, One who manifested the life of God’s normal man and how wonderful it is for God and man to live as one, but what good would that have been to us? We can never live in the power of an ideal put before us. What is the use of Jesus Christ telling us we must be as pure in Heart as He is when we know we are impure? But Jesus Christ did not go to heaven from the Mount. Moses and Elijah talked with Him, not of His glory, nor of His Deity, but of His death, the issue which He was about to accomplish at Jerusalem. By His death on the Cross Jesus Christ made the way for every son of man to get into communion with God.
It was on this point that the enemy of God and of man assailed our Lord in the Garden of Gethsemane: ‘You will never get through as Son of Man; You will get through as Deity, but not as Deity Incarnate.’ Our Lord’s object in becoming Deity Incarnate was to redeem mankind; and He did get through as Son of Man, which means that any and every man has freedom of access straight to God by right of the Cross of Jesus Christ. That is regeneration being made effectual in human lives, and the Holy Spirit is the One Who makes this marvellous Redemption actual in us.
On the Mount of Ascension the Transfiguration is completed. There is a similarity in the details of the two scenes, because the Ascension is the consummation of the Transfiguration. Our Lord does now, without any hesitation, go back into His primal glory; He does now go straight to the fulfilment of all the Transfiguration promised. But He does not go back simply as Son of God: He goes back to God as Son of Man as well as Son of God. The barriers are broken down, sin is done away with, death is destroyed, the power of the enemy is paralysed, and there is now freedom of access for any one straight to the very throne of God by the Ascension of the Son of Man. As He ascended our Lord stretched out His hands, the hands that He deliberately showed to the disciples after His resurrection, and the last the disciples saw of Him was His pierced hands. Those pierced hands are emblematic of the Atonement, and the angels’ declaration was that it is “this same Jesus” Who is to come again, with the marks of the Atonement upon Him. The Atonement means that the whole of the human race has been atoned for, Redemption is complete, and any man can get straight to the throne of God without let or hindrance through the wonder of all that our Lord has done. He is now at the right hand of the Father, not only as Son of God (John i. 18), but as Son of Man.
Our Supernatural Salvation. “Therefore being by the right hand of God exalted, and having received of the Father the promise of the Holy Ghost, He hath shed forth this, which ye now see and hear” (Acts ii. 33). Salvation means the incoming into human nature of the great characteristics that belong to God, and there is no salvation that is not supernatural. It is easy to say that human love and Divine love are one and the same thing; actually they are very far from being the same. It is also easy to say that human virtues and God’s nature are one and the same thing; but this, too, is actually far from the truth. We must square our thinking with facts. Sin has come in and made a hiatus between human and Divine love, between human virtues and God’s nature, and what we see now in human nature is only the remnant and refraction of the Divine. Human virtues according to the Bible are not promises of what human nature is going to be, but remnants of what human nature once was. This explains why we so often see remnants of original nobility in men and women who have not been born again into the Kingdom of God. As Christians we must learn to trace things to their right source. God makes very distinct the difference between the qualities that are Divine and those that are human. John xv. 13 has reference to human love, which lays down its life for its friends. Romans v. 8 has reference to the Divine love, which lays down its life for its enemies, a thing human nature can never do. This does not mean that human beings cannot forgive; they can and do forgive; but forgiveness is not human, it belongs entirely to the Divine nature, and is a miracle when exhibited in the human.
Beware of philosophies. It is much more satisfactory to listen to a philosopher than to a proclaimer of the Gospel, because the latter talks with the gibes and the cuts of God, and they go straight to that in man which hates the revelation of the gap there is between man and God. If we accept the revelation, it will mean that we must be born from above, and the Gospel message is that we can be born from above the second we want to.
Intellectually, we are inclined to ignore sin. The one element in man that does not ignore sin is conscience. The Holy Spirit deals with conscience first, not with intellect or emotions. When the Holy Spirit gets hold of a man and convicts him of sin, he instantly gets to despair, for he recognises that the holiness of Jesus Christ is the only thing that can ever stand before God, and he knows there is no chance for him. When conviction of sin comes in this way there is only one of two places—either suicide or the Cross of Jesus Christ. The majority of us are shallow, we do not bother our heads about Reality. We are taken up with actual comforts, with actual ease and peace, and when the Spirit of God comes in and disturbs the equilibrium of our life we prefer to ignore what He reveals.
Salvation is always supernatural. The Holy Ghost brings me into union with God by dealing with that which broke the union. It is dangerous to preach a persuasive gospel, to try and persuade men to believe in Jesus Christ with the idea that if they do, He will develop them along the natural line. Jesus Christ said, ‘I did not come to send peace, but a sword’; there is something to be destroyed first. Jesus Christ does not produce heaven and peace and delight straight off, He produces pain and misery and conviction and upset, and a man says, ‘If that is all He came to do, then I wish He had never come, But this is not all He came to do: He came to bring us into a supernatural union with His Father. When a man believes in Jesus Christ, i.e., commits himself to Jesus Christ—belief is a moral act, not an intellectual act—then the Ascended Lord, by the Holy Ghost, brings the man into oneness with His Father, it is a supernatural union.
The two centres of Christian life are Experience and Revelation. Are we thinking along the line of the revelations Jesus Christ has given? We can never get into touch with God by our own effort; but we must maintain touch with God by our own effort (Philippians ii. 12–13). Jesus Christ can take anyone, no matter who he is, and presence him with His wonderful Divine salvation. The nature of God is shed abroad in our hearts by the Holy Ghost, but we have to maintain contact with His nature by obedience. Some sections of the Christian community teach that because we are all right in the anticipation of God, therefore it does not matter how we live actually. That is not true; we must not only be right in heart towards God, our life must show that we are right. Jesus Christ’s life must work through our flesh, and that is where we have to obey. So many go into raptures over God’s supernatural salvation, over the wonderful fact that God saves us by His sovereign grace (and we cannot do that too much), but they forget that now He expects us to get ourselves into trim to obey Him. We have to live in this mortal flesh as sons and daughters of God; we have to bring out to our finger tips the life that is hid with Christ in God, and we can do it because our ascended Lord has all power. If our flesh and blood does not allow the Son of God to manifest Himself in us, we are actually antiChrist, we preach what our life denies, we proclaim a creed which our practical life spits at in ridicule. It is unconscious blasphemy to deny by our life that Jesus Christ can do what He claims He can. If we are born again, we are born into the life of God, and we have to see to it that we obey His life, and the faithfulness of the Holy Spirit is shown by the way He conscientiously chases us into a corner by touching every point where we have not been obeying.
His Transformation Completed
“And Jesus came and spake unto them, saying, All power is given unto Me in heaven and in earth ” (Matthew xxviii. 18) (cf. Matthew xi. 27).
In Matthew xi. 27 our Lord states that the revelation of the Father is entirely confined to the Son, He is the only Medium for revealing the Father. In Matthew xxviii. 18 He says, “All power is given unto Me in heaven and in earth.” Then has He power to make a saint of me? If not, He has totally misunderstood Himself and has misled me. Has He all power on earth? What about this ‘piece of earth’ I have to look after, has He power over it? Am I professing by my lips that I am a Christian while my actual ‘piece of earth’ laughs to scorn what Jesus Christ says? He says, “All power is given unto Me”; am I demonstrating that He has no power at all?
As Son of Man Jesus Christ deliberately limited omnipotence, omnipresence, and omniscience in Himself; now they are His in absolute full power. As Deity, they were always His; now as Son of Man they are His in absolute full power. At the throne of God, Jesus Christ has all power as Son of Man. That means He can do anything for any human being in keeping with His own character.
Our Sanctified Security. “And whatsoever ye shall ask in My name, that will I do, that the Father may be glorified in the Son” (John xiv. 13). That is where our salvation abides in its perfect security. Couple with these words our Lord’s other statement, “All power is given unto Me.” You say, ‘Oh well, then I can ask anything I like.’ Try it! I defy you to do it. Our Lord says also, ‘Ask what you will,’ i.e., what your will is in. There is very little our wills are in, consequently it is easy to work up false emotions. When you have been touched by the Holy Spirit and have received His quickening, note what you evade in prayer. There is nothing that will detect spiritual rottenness quicker than to ask, i.e., with the will. We shall find we have to stop asking a number of things, and this will simplify prayer. Our Lord says, “Ask,” and we will always find that we do not ask when we talk about it. ‘I’ll pray about it’—but we won’t. To say we will pray about a thing often means we are determined not to think about it. Contact with Jesus Christ made the disciples realise that they were paupers, and they said, “Lord, teach us to pray” (Luke xi. 1).
If we are perplexed over the question of sanctification, or about the baptism of the Holy Ghost, we ourselves are the reason why we are bothered. God has written a Book, and the phrases ‘sanctification’ and the ‘baptism of the Holy Ghost’ are His, not man’s; why do we not go to Him about it? We are the reason why we do not go; we dare not go. If we honestly ask God to baptise us with the Holy Ghost and fire, anything that happens is His answer, and some appalling things happen. If we accept the revelation that our body is the temple of the Holy Ghost, are we prepared to ask God to fulfil the purpose of the Holy Ghost in our body? If we are, watch the consequences—that friendship must go, that book, that association, everyone of them must decay off like a lightning flash. If anyone has a difficulty in getting through to God, it is never God who is to blame. We can get through to Him as soon as we want to, there is nothing simpler. The trouble is when we begin to sympathise with the thing that is proud and strong in independence of God.
If we have been supernaturally saved by the Redemption of Jesus Christ, we know we are unfit, therefore we do not bother any more about ourselves, and as we walk in the light we have perfect freedom of access into the very heart and presence of God. The life of communion with God that Jesus lived on earth is what He has made possible for us by His Ascension.
Do not ask others to pray for you; our Lord says, ‘Pray yourself, ask .’ We each have our families, our Sunday School classes, our communities, our nation; how many of us are praying for them, or are we shirking the responsibility? We have to ask the thing that our will is in, and we cannot put our will into things God has not brought before us. “Whatsoever ye shall ask in My Name, that will I do.” “In My name,” not in Christian jargon, or in the piety of spurious devotion, but ‘in My nature .’ “The effectual fervent prayer of a righteous man availeth much.” The prayers of some people are more efficacious than those of others, the reason being that they are under no delusion, they do not rely on their own earnestness, they rely absolutely on the supreme authority of the Lord Jesus Christ (Hebrews x. 19).
His Trustiness Continued
“And said, Behold, I see the heavens opened, and the Son of man standing on the right hand of God” (Acts vii. 56). Stephen sees our Lord after His Ascension, and He is the same Jesus (cf. Revelation i. 17–15). Some teach that the Jesus of actual history is not the Christ, and that the risen Jesus is a conception of the divinely inspired imagination of the disciples. But it was “this same Jesus” that ascended—the marks of the Atonement were upon Him. When we look for the characteristics of the ascended Lord in the accounts of the historic Jesus, we are on the right track. We will find His characteristics in the New Testament, and He will exhibit these same characteristics to us in almighty power.
Our Simple Satisfaction. “That they may be made perfect in one” (John xvii. 23). The baptism of the Holy Ghost delivers us from the husk of independent individuality. By personality is meant the thing in every individual that the Spirit of God awakens and brings out into real communion with God. Individual self-assertiveness is the husk, personal identity with our Lord is the kernel. Individuals can never be made one; persons can. Individuality is all ‘elbows,’ it separates and isolates. A child is an individual, and it ought to be independent. Our Lord can never be defined in terms of individuality and independence, but only in terms of personality. The thing that is marked all through His life is personality, not independence and self-assertiveness. In the natural life when two people fall in love with one another, the individuality is transfigured because the personalities are merged. Identity is not domination, but oneness between two distinct persons in which neither dominates, but the oneness dominates both. In the natural life if the individuality re-asserts itself, there will be hitches and difficulties, and the same with the spiritual life. Jesus said, ‘If you would be My disciple, you must deny yourself, give up your right to yourself to Me.’ The natural independence of individuality springs from independence of God. If I will give up my right to myself to Him, the real true nature of my personality will answer to God straight away by the indwelling Holy Ghost. Jesus prayed, “that they may be one, even as We are one”; and when Paul urges us to put on the new man. he is urging on the most practical line that we put on in our actual life the habits that are in perfect accordance with this oneness with God, and that we do it all the time. Then there will come the simple satisfaction of knowing that God is answering the prayer of Jesus Christ. If you want to know what God is after in your life, read John xvii. He prays that “they may be one, even as We are one.” How close to God is Jesus Christ? “I and My Father are One.” That is what He asks for us, and the Father will not leave us alone until the prayer is answered. Are we hindering the power of God in our life? Then never let us blame God. We may not only be supernaturally saved, we may be supernaturally sanctified. If we will submit to God and obey Him, we shall know that all that the Lord Jesus is in Himself is ours straightaway with the greatest ease and power and satisfaction by the right of His Ascension. He is King of kings and Lord of Lords from the day of His Ascension until now.