************ Sermon on Heidelberg Catechism Q & A 46-48 ************
Doctrine: The Apostles' Creed, "He ascended into Heaven"
By: Rev. Adrian Dieleman
This sermon was preached on October 1, 2000
Q & A 46,47,48
Luke 24:50-53
"He Ascended Into Heaven"
Introduction
If I was to ask you, what do we remember on December 25, I am sure every person here could tell me about Christmas and the birth of the baby Jesus. But, if I was to ask you what we remembered on June 1 of this year, I suspect most of you would give me blank looks.
We pay lots of attention to how Christ entered the world. It would do us well to pay an equal amount of attention to how Christ went out of this world. We all celebrate Christmas but not all of us celebrate Ascension Day.
"He ascended into heaven," says our Creed. The apostles saw Him go up into the sky "while he was blessing them" (Lk 24:51), says Luke, "and a cloud hid him from their sight" (Acts 1:9).
I want to remind you that in the Apostles' Creed we have the essentials of the Christian faith. The ascension, in other words, is part of true faith; it is part of saving faith. In order to be saved, washed, and cleansed by the blood of Jesus, I need to believe that Jesus' body ascended into heaven.
Do you believe this? I want to tell you this morning that you need to believe this. I want to tell you this morning that the ascension is essential to your salvation and redemption as children of God.
I Christ Ascended into Heaven
A When we talk about the virgin birth we confess that "the eternal Son of God ... took to himself ... a truly human nature" (Q & A 35). In talking about the ascension we confess that it is this human nature of Christ which entered heaven. Christ entered heaven with the same body in which He had been born, suffered, died, and rose. It was a real human body which ascended into heaven and sits at God's right hand. It is our flesh and blood that ascended into heaven, sits at God's right hand, and now intercedes for us.
I was somewhat disappointed by what I found out from my Catechism students last year: most of my students did NOT want to believe that what went to heaven on Ascension Day was our flesh and blood. They did NOT want to believe that Jesus is in heaven in the flesh. The reason: they wanted to emphasize the divinity, majesty, glory, and power of Jesus but they did so at the expense of His humanity.
We know that Christ physically ascended into heaven because His disciples were witnesses to this fact (Lk 24:51; Acts 1:9,10). Furthermore, Jesus appeared in glory to the martyr Stephen at the moment of death (Acts 7:55), to Paul on the Damascus Road (Acts 9:3), and to John on the Island of Patmos.
So, with the church of all ages, we confess, "He ascended into heaven."
B As with so many other events in His life, Christ's ascension into heaven fulfills the words of the Old Testament Scriptures:
God has ascended amid shouts of joy
the Lord amid the sounding of trumpets.
(Ps 47:5)
Lift up your heads, O you gates;
be lifted up, you ancient doors,
that the King of glory may come in.
Who is this King of glory?
The Lord strong and mighty,
the Lord mighty in battle ...
(Ps 24:7-10)
The physical ascension of Christ into heaven also fulfills the Old Testament shadows or types of the Christ Who was to come. I think of Enoch (Gen 5:24) and Elijah (2 King 2:11), both of whom were taken bodily into heaven even as Jesus was taken bodily into heaven. I think of the High Priest who once a year entered the Holy of Holies in the Temple or Tabernacle, even as Jesus entered the original or true one in heaven (Heb 9:24).
C Every parent hears it sometime: "Mommy, Daddy, where is heaven?" or, "Where is Jesus?" When one of my sons asked me a number of years ago I found myself pointing upwards. Of course, I'm not really correct. When the first man, a Soviet cosmonaut, entered space he looked around for God and heaven and told us, since he could find neither, that there is no God.
Before the space age and modern telescopes we were quite safe in pointing upwards as the locale of heaven and God. Even though we know this is inadequate, we still point upwards when talking about the where of God and heaven – probably because there is no other direction in which we can point.
D This raises or ought to raise the question of what exactly does the Bible mean when it tells us that Christ ascended into "heaven"?
In the Bible heaven is, first, what you see when you look up into the sky. It's the vault over the earth. At night the stars show themselves as "the host of heaven." Heaven is the third, or upper, story of the world as God created it. We live on the earth, the dry land; underneath is the pit, the nether world, the cellar. Over and above us is heaven, like a huge dome. According to Scripture, ours is a three-story universe composed of heaven, earth, and hell.
Second, heaven is the place where God lives. God is everywhere, but He is present differently in heaven than He is on earth. "Heaven is my throne," says God, "and the earth is my footstool" (Is 66:1). In his prayer to dedicate the temple Solomon says,
(1 Ki 8:27) "But will God really dwell on earth? The heavens, even the highest heaven, cannot contain you. How much less this temple I have built!"
Heaven is the place from which God governs the universe. It is God's residence, His seat of government. Heaven is God's headquarters.
Jewish writings tell us that heaven is divided into ten different levels. But the Bible does not speak about these levels, except for Paul's mention of being "caught up to the third heaven" (2 Cor 12:2). It appears that the higher the level the closer one approaches the holy God and, the higher the level the greater the ecstasy and joy one experiences. Scripture tells us, for instance, that Jesus "ascended higher than all the heavens" (Eph 4:10). This does not mean that Christ went ten or twenty thousand feet higher than the angels; rather, it means Christ is closer to God than is anything else in all creation.
Third, heaven is also another word for God. If you look at the Gospels you should notice that the phrases "kingdom of God" and "kingdom of heaven" are used interchangeably.
Christ "ascended into heaven." This means three things. First, in the flesh He went upward, towards the sun and the moon and the stars. But that was not His ultimate destination. Second, we know that in the flesh He went to heaven, to the abode of God, to the place from which God rules heaven and earth and all that is in them. Third, we know that in the flesh He also went to God Himself and now sits at His right hand.
II The Human and Divine in Heaven
A As I already said, when we talk about the virgin birth we confess that "the eternal Son of God ... took to himself ... a truly human nature" (Q & A 35). Let us review, for a moment, exactly what this means.
We believe that by being thus conceived
the person of the Son has been inseparably
united
and joined together
with human nature,
in such a way that there are not two Sons
of God
nor two persons,
but two natures united in a single person,
with each nature retaining its own distinct
properties.
Thus his divine nature has always remained
uncreated
without beginning of days or end of life,
filling heaven and earth.
His human nature has not lost its properties
but continues to have those of a creature--
it has beginning of days;
it is of a finite nature
and retains all that belongs to a real
body.
(Belgic Confession Article 19)
In Q & A 47 & 48 the Catechism asks whether any of this has changed with the resurrection and ascension of Christ. When Christ's body took on immortality and physically ascended into heaven, did He somehow and in someway cease being human? Has His humanity taken on all the attributes of divinity, so that in the body He is now everywhere present, can do all things, and knows all things? Has His humanity lost the characteristics of being human? Has His humanity been somehow swallowed up by His divinity? This, I would have to say, is what my Catechism students wanted to believe.
B This issue of how Christ's human and divine nature are related to each other now that He is in heaven is intertwined with another issue that was a hot subject for debate at the time of the Reformation, namely, the presence of Christ in the Lord's Supper. Jesus says we are to eat His body and drink His blood in remembrance of Him until He comes again. How do we do this? How is it that Jesus is present in the bread and the wine? Is He physically present, that is, is His human nature somehow present in the bread and the wine? Or, is He spiritually present, that is, is it only His divine nature that is present in the bread and the wine? Or is He present both physically and spiritually, as both human and divine?
C When it comes to the relation of the human and divine in Jesus there are two errors the church has to guard against. The first is to so change or confuse the two natures of Christ that they no longer retain their own distinct properties. This is the error we fall into if we make the humanity of Jesus like His divinity: everywhere present, all-knowing, all-powerful. This is the error we fall into if we say Christ is humanly/physically/bodily present in the Lord's Supper. It is this error that is addressed by Q & A 47.
Before he ascended into heaven Christ gave a promise to His disciples: "And surely I am with you always, to the very end of the age" (Mt 28:20b). Since Christ said this in the flesh, to disciples grieving about His leaving, doesn't this mean that Christ remains physically present on the earth; and, doesn't this further imply that He can be physically present in the bread and wine?
In response to this the Catechism says, "Christ is true man and true God." He was conceived and born that way. He died that way. He arose that way. He ascended that way. And, He is such to this day. As a true man, His is and has to be a body bound by the confines of space – that is, it can be in only one spot at one time; it was this way on earth and it is this way in heaven. This means that at this time His humanity is no more on this earth. His ascension marks the end of His humanity on earth. His humanity is now in heaven at the right hand of God.
How, then, is Christ with us until the end of the world even as He has promised us?
In his human nature Christ is not now on earth;
but in his divinity, majesty, grace, and Spirit
he is not absent from us for a moment.
(Q & A 47)
This means, I am sure you realize, that Christ cannot be humanly/physically/bodily present in the bread and wine of the Lord's Supper. It is for this reason that Reformed churches tell their members before they eat and drink, "let us lift up our hearts to the Lord; let us lift them up to the God of our salvation" (Lord's Supper Form, new P.H. pg 981; cf pg 986). Lift up your hearts to heaven where Christ is, seated at the right hand of the Father. In other words, we don't embrace Christ with our jaws and teeth but with our faith.
D There is also a second error that we have to avoid when we talk about the relation of Christ's two natures. This error is to so divide or separate the two natures from each other that they are no longer united in one person. It is this error that Q & A 48 addresses.
Q & A 48 asks if we aren't guilty of dividing or separating the two natures of Christ if we say His humanity is not present wherever His divinity is:
Certainly not.
Since divinity
is not limited
and is present everywhere,
it is evident that
Christ's divinity is surely beyond the bounds of
the humanity he has taken on,
but at the same time his divinity is in
and remains personally united to
his humanity.
(Q & A 48)
Difficult to understand this? Imagine a dot in a circle: the dot does not and can not get out of the circle, but the circle is far bigger than the dot. Likewise, the divine nature – the circle – is far bigger than the human nature – the dot – although the human can never get separated from the divine.
The Catechism tries to neither confuse or change nor divide or separate the two natures of Christ. Christ's divinity keeps its properties – it can be and is everywhere present – and His humanity keeps its properties – limited to one spot at one time.
Forgive me for being so technical. We should not speak too much or too often about the two natures of Christ because the relation of the human and divine in Jesus is mysterious and beyond our understanding. And, when we think and talk of Jesus we must first remember that He is a person, a person with Whom you and I must have a living relationship.
Yet, with the church of all ages we confess that this person as "true man and true God" is in heaven right now.
III Benefits
"So what?" you may say to this. What difference does it make that Christ is now in heaven? Let me remind you of what the Bible tells us.
The starting point is John 16:7. Jesus says, "But I tell you the truth: It is for your good that I am going away ..." In other words, we are better off with Jesus in heaven than on earth.
There are at least three benefits or goods of Christ's ascension. First of all, an ascended Christ pleads our cause in heaven in the presence of His Father (cf Rom 8:34; 1 John 2:1).
Second, the physical presence of Christ in heaven is a guarantee that Christ will someday take us also into heaven (cf Jn 14:2-3).
Third, an ascended Christ is able to send us the Spirit (cf John 16:7).
Conclusion
True faith, saving faith, says with the church of all ages: I believe in Jesus Christ. I believe in Jesus Christ Who was born of the virgin Mary. I believe in Jesus Christ Who, for our good, physically ascended into heaven.