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This week our daily devotions are from a Truth For Life article entitled “Risen and Ascended: 5 Ways Jesus Is Still Working”.
Now that Jesus is back in heaven, we are led to ask a very basic question: What is He doing? Though His earthly work is finished, surely He’s still doing something.
Well, He does a tremendous amount. His job description, if you like, is vast. It’s a longer list than a simple article can contain, but here are five key aspects of Christ’s present ministry.
The Lord Jesus Christ reigns sovereignly over all things. The book of Hebrews makes this plain:
He is the radiance of the glory of God and the exact imprint of his nature, andhe upholds the universeby the word of his power. After making purification for sins, he sat down at the right hand of the Majesty on high. (Heb. 1:3, emphasis added)
Our Lord returned to His Father in heaven, and He is quite literally running the world. That should be enough in itself, shouldn’t it? But we can and should be more precise in what Christ’s governing all things entails.
Adapted from “The Ascension — Part One and Part Two” by Alistair Begg
This week our daily devotions sill be from a Truth For Life article entitled “Risen and Ascended: 5 Ways Jesus Is Still Working”.
The Gospel story doesn’t end with a distressed Christ. It doesn’t end with a crucified Christ. Nor does it even end with a resurrected Christ. It ends with an ascended Christ, who is Lord and King, reigning on high from heaven, awaiting the appointed time for His return.
Nevertheless, the ascension of Jesus into heaven is arguably the least-considered aspect of His work. The average person in the street will probably know something about the birth of Jesus. They will probably know something about the death of Jesus. But if you were to ask them where Jesus presently is or what He is currently doing, they would probably give you a blank stare.
Still, the ascension of our Lord Jesus Christ is of paramount importance, and the Scriptures encourage us to focus on the fact that He is, indeed, an ascended Christ.
The Gospel story doesn’t end with a distressed Christ. It doesn’t end with a crucified Christ. Nor does it even end with a resurrected Christ. It ends with an ascended Christ, who is Lord and King, reigning on high from heaven, awaiting the appointed time for His return.
Nevertheless, the ascension of Jesus into heaven is arguably the least-considered aspect of His work. The average person in the street will probably know something about the birth of Jesus. They will probably know something about the death of Jesus. But if you were to ask them where Jesus presently is or what He is currently doing, they would probably give you a blank stare.
Still, the ascension of our Lord Jesus Christ is of paramount importance, and the Scriptures encourage us to focus on the fact that He is, indeed, an ascended Christ.
What Happened at the Ascension?
In order to begin to grasp the significance of Christ’s ascension, we first must understand, even very simply, what happened at this event. The Gospel of Luke offers this account:
And he led them out as far as Bethany, and lifting up his hands he blessed them. While he blessed them, he parted from them and was carried up into heaven. And they worshiped him and returned to Jerusalem with great joy, and were continually in the temple blessing God. (Luke 24:50–53)
In a sense, the ascension marks the end of the beginning and the beginning of the end. It is, as Luke puts it in his second volume, the end of “all that Jesus began to do and teach” (Acts 1:1, emphasis added). Christ finished His earthly ministry but was only just starting His heavenly work.
J. I. Packer illustrates the ascension by saying, “It is as if, having travelled successfully in the firm’s interest, the Son was now recalled to headquarters to become managing director.”1 The Son had traveled on the Father’s business and had completed the task He’d been given; now He was going back to heaven to be the Father’s right-hand man.
Jesus departed from His disciples with His hands raised in blessing upon them. Is that the picture you have of Christ in your life: able, ready, and willing to bless?
1 J. I. Packer, Revelations of the Cross (Peabody, MA: Hendrickson, 1998), 56.
Written by Mrs. Cecil Frances Alexander (1818–1895). She was the wife of a bishop in Northern Ireland, and along with her sister, she founded a school for the deaf. Of the four hundred hymns she wrote, a number were focused on instructing children in the faith. For Easter she wrote “There Is a Green Hill Far Away,” in which she explains that only Christ could pay the price of sin.
There is a green hill far away, Outside a city wall, Where the dear Lord was crucified, Who died to save us all.
Refrain O dearly, dearly, has He loved, And we must love Him, too, And trust in His redeeming blood, And try His works to do.
We may not know, we cannot tell, What pains He had to bear; But we believe it was for us He hung and suffered there.
He died that we might be forgiv’n, He died to make us good, That we might go at last to Heav’n, Saved by His precious blood.
There was no other good enough To pay the price of sin; He only could unlock the gate Of heaven and let us in.
O dearly, dearly has He loved, And we must love Him, too, And trust in His redeeming blood, And try His works to do.
And He said, “My presence shall go with you, and I will give you rest.” (Exodus 33:14)
The devout soul rejoices in God as his great Inheritance. When He is always present to our mind, when we are constantly making use of Him, when we find ourselves naturally turning to Him through the hours of the day, then such quiet peace and rest settle down upon us that we cannot be moved by any anxiety of the present or future.
Adapted from “Our Daily Walk” devotional by FB Meyers
It was now about the sixth hour, and there was darkness over the whole land until the ninth hour, while the sun’s light failed.Luke 23:44-45
Following Jesus’ crucifixion, right around midday, the land was swallowed up in darkness. Imagine how unsettling that must have been! All of a sudden, people surely felt more vulnerable, more on edge. There may have been some who had been present at the arrest of Jesus and remembered that He had warned, “This is your hour, and the power of darkness” (Luke 22:53). But the majority probably said to one another, I wonder what this darkness is about? I wonder why this is taking place?
In one sense, they should have known the answer to that question. Jesus’ death occurred during the celebration of the Passover in Jerusalem—a celebration that had taken place annually for hundreds of years. During this time, the Jews would recall that the final plague God sent over Egypt before the arrival of the angel of death and the death of the firstborn sons was that of darkness over all the land. They would recall that after the darkness came death: that on that occasion, only those who were protected by the blood of the Passover lamb awakened in the morning to find their firstborn still with them. And now, here, in the greater exodus previewed by that first one, darkness preceded the death of Christ, who was and is the perfect Passover Lamb.
It is as Sin-Bearer—as the perfect, spotless Lamb—that Jesus entered into the presence of the sinless God. What’s more, He carried with Him no substitutionary sacrifice aside from Himself. Prior to this moment in history, to enter the holy place of God’s presence in the temple in Jerusalem, the high priest had to make a sacrifice for his own sin, and then make sacrifice for the sins of those whom he represented. But this High Priest entered the heavenly presence of the holy God carrying nothing. Why? Because He Himself needed no sacrifice, for He was perfect, sinless; and yet He Himself was the sacrifice. Jesus was the Lamb. There was nothing else He could carry, and nothing else He should carry. As Peter explains, “He himself bore our sins in his body on the tree” (1 Peter 2:24).
And so the darkness of God’s judgment did not have the last word. Because Jesus became sin, incurring the full fury of God’s wrath, we can be transferred into God’s kingdom, “into his marvelous light” (1 Peter 2:9). There is nothing else in all the world that demonstrates how real God’s love is for sinners and how real our sin is to God.
Well might the sun in darkness hide And shut his glories in When Christ the mighty Maker died For man the creature’s sin.[1]
Isaac Watts, “Alas, and Did My Savior Bleed” (1707).
It was now about the sixth hour, and there was darkness over the whole land until the ninth hour, while the sun’s light failed. And the curtain of the temple was torn in two.Luke 23:44-45
As Jesus’ ministry progressed, one of the great concerns of the Jewish religious establishment was that He had, it appeared, claimed that He would destroy the temple and raise it again in three days (John 2:19). Indeed, this was one of the main charges brought against Him (Mark 14:58). When Jesus was on the cross, then, passersby mocked and ridiculed Him, shouting, “You who would destroy the temple and rebuild it in three days, save yourself!” (Matthew 27:40). But there He remained, hanging on the cross, in the darkness.
And then, in the midst of the darkness and the upheaval of the crucifixion, all of a sudden something mysterious and utterly unexpected happened: God Himself desecrated the temple.
“The curtain of the temple was torn in two,” Luke tells us. This was the very curtain that hung in the temple to symbolically bar the way into God’s presence. It was the great sign that imperfect people could not be in the same space as the holy God. All through the Old Testament, anyone who had presumed to come into God’s presence without observing the ceremonial cleansing rituals and making the necessary sacrifices had died (for instance, Numbers 3:2-4). But now, suddenly, as Jesus was on the very verge of death, this symbol of restrictive exclusivity was destroyed. By destroying it, God declared that the old priestly ritual for entrance into His presence had been abolished and the barrier of sin dividing humanity from their Maker had been obliterated. There is no longer any need to keep our distance from God. Instead, “we have confidence to enter the holy places by the blood of Jesus, by the new and living way that he opened for us through the curtain” (Hebrews 10:19-20).
Our access to God isn’t restricted to a temple or a church or any other building, nor must it be through a merely human priest or a guru. No, 2,000 years ago God broke into history to establish direct access to Himself through Jesus. Now there is “one mediator between God and men, the man Christ Jesus, who gave himself as a ransom for all” (1 Timothy 2:5-6). The temple curtain being torn in two was divine vandalism on your behalf! You don’t have to be sidetracked by priests and rituals anymore. They can be nothing but pointless. Instead, you can come to God, just as you are, confident of welcome and mercy and help, all because of Jesus.
He said, “Jesus, remember me when you come into your kingdom.” And he said to him, “Truly, I say to you, today you will be with me in paradise.”Luke 23:42-43
Jesus was crucified between two convicted criminals—and those criminals both heard the words of Christ, yet they responded very differently. The first dying man regarded the cross as a contradiction. He concluded that because Jesus was on the cross, He was no Savior. So he ridiculed the man on the middle cross: “Are you not the Christ? Save yourself and us!” (Luke 23:39). But the second man saw the cross as confirmation. He recognized that because Jesus was on the cross, He must be the Savior.
This once hard-bitten criminal had seen and heard enough of Jesus in His final hours to conclude that He was innocent of any crime. And the Holy Spirit had opened his eyes to realize that his predicament was far greater and different from what he had formerly thought. Not only was he being punished justly, receiving the condemnation his sins deserved, but his punishment would extend into eternity if he lacked the forgiveness of which Jesus spoke.
Following this realization, the condemned man made a humble request to Jesus for what he knew he didn’t deserve: “Jesus, remember me when you come into your kingdom.” Presumably, he had processed the evidence, concluding, If this man is the Messiah, then He’s the long-promised King. If He’s that King, then He’s going to have a kingdom—the eternal kingdom of God. And when He reaches His kingdom, then perhaps He will remember me when He arrives there.
Jesus’ reply is wonderful: “Truly, I say to you, today you will be with me in paradise.” Not only did Jesus promise that this man—even this man—would go to heaven; He also emphasized the immediate nature of that reality for this dying man: “today”! We may imagine them finishing their conversation not hanging on crosses at Calvary but sitting in the kingdom of God.
This criminal offered nothing and asked the King for everything. And He said yes. This should never fail to strike us and reassure us, for you and I are in the same position as that criminal. We have nothing to bring to Jesus, as though our deeds might be the key that opens the way into His kingdom. All we bring is all that the criminal brought: our sin. But that is why Jesus hung on the cross: so that we might bring our sin to Him and that He might take it and bear it. That is why Jesus’ promise to the criminal is also His promise to every believer who dies: “Today you will be with me in paradise.” Let that knowledge be your joy and fuel for your praise today. One day, you—even you—will be with your King in paradise.
He showed them his hands and his side. Then the disciples were glad when they saw the Lord. John 20:20
The first Easter did not look like a typical Easter celebration.
Before Jesus’ resurrection was discovered, the day was marked by tears, devastation, and bewilderment—not joy, hope, and praise. The disciples were gathered out of fear, to protect one another, not to sing “Christ the Lord is risen today, Alleluia!”[1] They sat in sadness; their story had come to a grinding halt, with the next page blank.
Or so they thought.
The Bible does not attempt to deny or idealize the grief felt by Christ’s followers after His crucifixion. They didn’t understand what had happened, and they certainly didn’t know what would happen next. Their sadness reveals humanity’s limitations in knowing the bigger picture. Despite the Old Testament prophecies and Jesus’ own foretelling of His death (Mark 8:31; 9:31; 10:33-34), John’s Gospel tells us that they “as yet did not understand the Scripture, that he must rise from the dead” (John 20:9). They didn’t understand that when Jesus said from the cross, “It is finished” (19:30), He was not expressing defeat but declaring victory.
This victory meant resurrection. And as the resurrected Savior came to the disciples in their darkness, fear, and sadness, He brought transformation. Their unbelief turned to belief and their sadness to gladness. That gladness was rooted in the fact that they understood that Jesus had risen from the dead. Their faith and their future returned and were rooted in this wonderful reality. The darkness of their despair made the light of the resurrection all the more glorious.
If you are looking for a god that will just make you glad, you shouldn’t look for the God of the Bible. He does make us glad—more so than anyone or anything else—but He often starts by making us sad. We are saddened by this broken world, saddened by our own sin, saddened that on the cross Jesus died for our wickedness, disobedience, and disinterest. It is only through truly feeling such sorrow that we can fully understand the gladness that comes with our account being settled, our debt being paid, and our wrongs being forgiven.
We can know the gladness of a love that loves us even though we are not worthy of it—that loves us when we don’t want to listen. What kind of love is this? It is the love of God for men and women, for you and me! Today, look away from yourself and look at Him. This is love, and when we know we are loved in this way, we are able to see the healing in the harm and that sadness can be the soil in which eternal gladness grows. About which part of your life—perhaps a part full of pain, or regret, or anxiety—do you need to hear this today? Remember that whatever you are walking through, it remains true that Christ the Lord is risen. Hallelujah!
Mary Magdalene went and announced to the disciples, “I have seen the Lord.”John 20:18
What turns fear to faith?
After Jesus’ crucifixion, the disciples were in complete shambles, dejected and huddled together in fear of persecution. One of them, Judas, was already dead by suicide. Another, Peter, had caved in under pressure and denied Jesus, their leader and teacher, whom they had witnessed being brutally killed. Their hopes and dreams had seemingly died along with Him. Yet just weeks later, this same dejected bunch were on the streets of Jerusalem boldly declaring Jesus as the resurrected Messiah. What turned these men from craven fear to courageous faith? What can make the same change in us? Only the risen Jesus.
The disciples’ Jewish background led them to believe that the Messiah would appear and remain forever. This initially caused them to be crushed by Jesus’ death, for it seemed to mark utter defeat rather than glorious victory. Their shift to confidently proclaiming Jesus as Messiah after His death has only one possible explanation: they must have seen the resurrected Jesus. If they had not, they would have just fondly, or perhaps bitterly, remembered Him as their beloved teacher—but nothing more. What possible forgiveness and hope can be found in a dead man? But with a risen Messiah, suddenly everything changes.
The Bible tells us in firsthand accounts that the disciples encountered the risen Christ (see for instance John 20:11 – 21:23). Some make the argument that the disciples hallucinated, only “seeing” Him because of their all-consuming faith. But remember, they didn’t initially have faith in a resurrection! In fact, Scripture tells us that they sat behind locked doors in fear and disappointment (20:19). And even if they had imagined a risen and reigning Christ, they probably wouldn’t have imagined a Jesus who cooked and ate fish on the beach, who still had scars from His brutal death, and who walked the streets and encountered them in numerous ways. Nor would they have portrayed themselves as so cowardly or included the reports of women (whose testimony was not considered valid in that culture). Rather, they would have presented themselves as the brave and prominent figures who first discovered the empty tomb. Any kind of alternative explanation for the empty tomb demands even more “faith” than trusting in what has been revealed to us in the word of God does.
The resurrection changes everything. We must consider the facts surrounding Jesus’ return from the dead—but we must also consider the glorious good news that it offers us. Without the literal bodily resurrection of Jesus, Christianity is worthless; “Your faith is futile” (1 Corinthians 15:17). But since Jesus has indeed risen and is indeed reigning, then in Him is forgiveness that can be found in no other, and in Him is a future hope like no other. Have you, with the eye of faith, seen the Lord risen and reigning? Then you will, like Mary and like the disciples, see your doubt-filled fear turn to trusting faith as you boldly proclaim this hope to your own heart and to this fearful world.
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