He ascended into Heaven, and sitteth at the right hand of God, the Father almighty; from thence He shall come to judge the living and the dead.
The Person and Work of Jesus is centred around the cross and the resurrection, but they are not the end of it all. Added to the resurrection is the fact that Jesus ascended, is seated at God’s right hand, and from there will return to judge.
But if we remove these from our faith, we won’t have the biblical Jesus. After Jesus rose from the dead, we read that He appeared to people over a space of forty days. Could He not have simply stayed on Earth?
In theory, he could have. He was risen from the dead, never to die again. He could have begun His reign as King over Israel and over the world. In fact, that’s exactly what the apostles thought might happen. On His last day, His disciples asked him:
Acts 1:6 Therefore, when they had come together, they asked Him, saying, “Lord, will You at this time restore the kingdom to Israel?”
But that was not the plan of God. The plan of God involved Jesus ascending, receiving authority, and taking it up in the future.
Actually, all three are connected, and the ascension symbolises these three.
First, it symbolised that Jesus had gone to an actual place. Jesus did not simply disappear, making us wonder where He was, or if He was still truly a Man, one of us. No, by ascending, it showed visibly that Jesus is our forerunner, and since we are embodied beings who live in places, so Jesus was actually going to a place.
John 14:1-3
“Let not your heart be troubled; you believe in God, believe also in Me.
“In My Father’s house are many mansions; if it were not so, I would have told you. I go to prepare a place for you.
“And if I go and prepare a place for you, I will come again and receive you to Myself; that where I am, there you may be also.”
Heaven is a place, and Christ’s ascension showed that He was going there. One man has gone there in bodily form. Though we do not understand what dimension of God’s creation Heaven occupies, we are assured it is a place. We do not expect to see it through a telescope. When the Russian cosmonauts first returned from space and said he had not seen God anywhere, this does not surprise us. Paul told us:
40 There are also celestial bodies and terrestrial bodies; but the glory of the celestial is one, and the glory of the terrestrial is another… It is sown a natural body, it is raised a spiritual body. There is a natural body, and there is a spiritual body. (1 Cor. 15:42-44, 40)
When Jesus ascended into heaven, there was now something and someone who had never been there before. There had never before been a Resurrected Man in Heaven. For the first time, there was a Man, the God-Man, dwelling in this place called Heaven. We could not have gone to heaven, unless Jesus had gone there first.
But that leads us to the second thing. He sat at the right hand of God. Now we can’t help wrongly imagining a throne for God the Father, and then a throne on the right of that throne, and Jesus sitting on that. But that is not what it means. It means that the Triune God, represented by God the Father, now gave Jesus, the God-Man the place of full authority over heaven and earth. That’s what the right-hand throne meant, the place of honour. God the Son had always been Lord of all, but now there was a difference. God the Son had added to Himself a true human nature, so this God-Man, the Person who is Jesus Christ, was now exalted to sovereign lordship over all.
It’s what is pictured in Psalm 110:1:
The LORD said to my Lord, “Sit at My right hand, Till I make Your enemies Your footstool.”
Psalm 2:6:
“Yet I have set My King On My holy hill of Zion. “I will declare the decree: The LORD has said to Me, ‘You are My Son, Today I have begotten You. Ask of Me, and I will give You The nations for Your inheritance, And the ends of the earth for Your possession.
By the way, this is one of the physical pictures of the ascension. As Jesus ascended, literally, the whole world was under His feet, and it visibly portrayed:
Ephesians 1:20-22
which He worked in Christ when He raised Him from the dead and seated Him at His right hand in the heavenly places, far above all principality and power and might and dominion, and every name that is named, not only in this age but also in that which is to come.
And He put all things under His feet, and gave Him to be head over all things to the church,
From that place of authority, Jesus sent His Spirit into the world. From that place of authority over all things, including sin and death, He lives as our High Priest, praying for us, presenting Himself as our eternal atonement. Unless Jesus had ascended and sat at the right hand of God, none of His authority over Heaven and Earth for us to make disciples would have been given, no Spirit would have come.
Thirdly, from that place He will come to judge the living and the dead. The ascension is part 1 of a two-part action. He returns to heaven to gather the church by His Spirit, and then He returns again.
“Men of Galilee, why do you stand gazing up into heaven? This same Jesus, who was taken up from you into heaven, will so come in like manner as you saw Him go into heaven.”
It was all at once ordinary and extraordinary. Ordinary – it was His body, but extraordinary – power over gravity. So will the return of the Lord be. It will be visible, physical, bodily, but it will also defy what we know about gravity and dimensional travel.
When He returns, He will judge. That means the end of rampant evil, of injustice, of false religion, of false teaching, or crime, of vice and greed, and abuse. It means the vindication of believers, of the faithful, of those who have lived for Christ. This is why the Psalmist says:
Psalm 98:8-9
Let the rivers clap their hands; Let the hills be joyful together before the LORD, For He is coming to judge the earth. With righteousness He shall judge the world, And the peoples with equity.
The Second Coming is not a nice end to the story. If Jesus doesn’t return, then plenty of prophecies in Scripture turn out to be false. If Jesus doesn’t return, then He doesn’t take up His authority and use it to finally end evil and set up His kingdom here. If He doesn’t come back, then there is no deadline for receiving or rejecting Christ, things can go on as they always have.
Some calculations place the Ascension on May 14th, 33 A.D. Whether or not that’s correct, there was an actual day on the calendar when Jesus ascended.
And in the same way, the return of Christ is going to be the same thing, an actual date on our calendar. It might be in October. It might be in March. It might be in July. It might be in none of those months. But it will be an actual day, with a personal, visible Christ returning the same way He went. And when He returns, He will come with all the authority given to Him, and rule.
I believe in the Holy Spirit.
In this early creed, the statement is quite bare. It is the starting line of the third paragraph, obviously links to the statement “I believe in God the Father Almighty,” and in the statement “I believe in Jesus Christ his only Son”. We are meant to see that it is the Holy Spirit who is the third Person of the Godhead, and we believe in Him in the same way we believe in the Father, and the Son.
The later Nicene Creed spelt out more about the Holy Spirit. It reads “[we believe] in the Holy Ghost, the Lord and Giver of life, who proceedeth from the Father and the Son, who with the Father and the Son together is worshiped and glorified, who spake by the prophets.”
The Holy Spirit is sometimes called the “Forgotten Member of the Trinity” or the “Anonymous member of the Trinity”.
That’s partly because of how we name Him. We are used to the trinitarian formula of Father, Son and Holy Spirit. Father and Son are a pair, but Holy Spirit doesn’t immediately seem to fit in.
But even that name (Father, Son and Spirit) is more of an analogy. Only one of the three has a personal name we recognise: Jesus. And it is God the Trinity who bears the name Yahveh. So the first and third person do not have names, they have titles which help us to know their roles.
But there are other ways that Scripture names the three persons that might help us understand the Third Person better. It calls the Spirit the Advocate, or the Comforter. This is how Jesus refereed to Him, and Jesus unmistakeably said He, Him. He can be grieved, resisted, lied to, insulted or obeyed – which implies He is a Person. He is clearly a person distinct from the Father and the Son, but yet also called Lord, called the Spirit of God, Spirit of Christ. He is present at Creation in Genesis 1:3. He can be blasphemed, which shows He is God.
But how do we understand Him and His work? The Gospel of John helps us more than any other book. In that book, John uses the word sent numerous times. The Father sends the Son into the world to save it. The Son comes, and as He is about to complete His work, He tells His disciples that the Father is going to send the Comforter or Helper. But then a chapter later, in chapter 15, Jesus says that He will send the Helper from the Father. So you have the Father who is not sent, but is the Sender – He sends both the Son and the Spirit. You have the Son, who is Sent, but also a Sender, He sends the Spirit. And then you have the Spirit who is entirely Sent.
Now as Christians have reflected on this through the ages, it has suggested a pattern as to how the Triune God works, at least externally to us, and in His works. The first person is the source and origin of God’s will. The second person is the expression of that will. The third person is the enactment of it.
Many images have been suggested. The first person is like the Sun, the second person is the Light, and third person is the Ray. The first is the Speaker, the second is the Spoken, the Word, the third is the Speech, or the Voice, the Breath.
To use homely illustrations: “the Father is where we need to go, the Son is the way we take to get there, and the Holy Spirit is what enables us to travel. The Father is the city we are driving to, the Son is the road, and the Spirit is the car.”
The Spirit is the enactment of what God does. He is the power, the implementation of God’s purposes. It’s for that reason, that He has mistakenly been thought of as a force or an impersonal power. But he is not an impersonal force or power. He is force, power, act in its ultimate form, in its most personal form.
Perhaps that helps us understand why He is most often called Spirit. Spirit in Scripture is what animates something, giving it life. Breath, wind, and spirit are related terms in Scripture: not visible, but these give and bring life, move things, and so is the Spirit of God.
In the life of a Christian, the Spirit is the very one who makes us a Christian, regenerating us, immersing us into the death and resurrection of Jesus, immersing us into the body of Christ, then sealing us to the day of redemption, indwelling us, and then doing His work of convicting us when we sin, producing in us His fruit, which is Christlikeness, illuminating the Scriptures to us, leading us. He gifts us and enables us.
This is where people go so wrong on the Spirit. They take advantage of the fact that He is entirely focused on action, and they give Him a new personality. That personality is usually whimsical, unpredictable, quirky, strange, mystical. Using that, they come up with all kinds of weird manifestations of supposed Spirit-led prophecy and Spirit-led worship. But the Spirit is Christ’s Spirit, He is the Father’s Spirit. All that He does will be the implementation of the Father’s will. All that He does will be to testify of Jesus Christ. His work is to show us the Son, who shows us the Father. If something is being claimed to be of the Holy Spirit, then it will always look and sound like Christ, not completely different to Him.
What does this acting, moving Spirit look like within God? Here we tread carefully, for we do not know the infinite mystery of God’s life within Himself. But if His external works represent something internal to Him, then we can say this. Spirit also means inner knowledge and love.
1 Corinthians 2:11
For what man knows the things of a man except the spirit of the man which is in him? Even so no one knows the things of God except the Spirit of God.
The Spirit is God’s own knowledge of Himself, as He sees Himself in His Son, and the Son sees Himself in the Father. That knowledge, and the love that is felt is not merely a feeling. In God it is the Third Person.
Should we worship and praise and pray to the Holy Spirit? The answer is, if He is “with the Father and the Son together… worshiped and glorified” then we can sing to Him, as many of our songs do. We can pray to Him. The normal, and regular pattern of our prayers should be to pray to the Father, through the Son, by the Spirit. But if each of the persons are fully God, and fully personal, we can speak to Him, as we speak to the Son or the Father.
And as the New Testament commands us, do not grieve the Spirit, do not quench the Spirit, but instead be filled with the Spirit, walk in the Spirit. Let God’s own animating love and will animate you.
This is what we mean when we say, we believe in the Holy Spirit.