Jesus is Still With Us

Last Sunday we began our series on the book of Acts and explored how Jesus taught his disciples about the kingdom in the days after his resurrection and told them to wait in Jerusalem for the Holy Spirit to be given to them.

After he said this, he was taken up before their very eyes, and a cloud hid him from their sight. They were looking intently up into the sky as he was going, when suddenly two men dressed in white stood beside them. ‘Men of Galilee,’ they said, ‘why do you stand here looking into the sky? This same Jesus, who has been taken from you into heaven, will come back in the same way you have seen him go into heaven.’ (Acts 1:9-11)

Many of us can get stuck wondering where Jesus went when he ascended, but the significance is what he accomplished as our great High Priest and king (see Hebrews 6-10). On the Day of Atonement (Leviticus 16), the High Priest was ‘hid from the sight’ of the people when he went behind the curtain and cloud of incense into the Holy of Holies to offer sacrifices, interceding for the sin of the people in the presence of God. In the same way, Jesus is our great High Priest who went ‘behind the cloud’ into the presence of his Father, offers his own once-for-all sacrifice for our sin, and ‘intercedes for us at the right hand of God’ (Romans 8:34). Now that Jesus Messiah has defeated the powers of sin, Satan, and death, he has also fulfilled the prophecy of Daniel 7:13-14, that the reign of the ‘Son of Man’ would begin an everlasting heavenly kingdom. (To learn more about this, read articles here and here).

But Jesus is still with us! The Son of God did not abandon his human body or even his nail-scarred hands and feet when he ascended to his Father, but on his throne, he is still united to our humanity and the evidence of his suffering for us. Paul also makes it clear that Jesus is still present to us in body through his people united by the Holy Spirit. And it is through his Spirit that together we can have an even closer relationship with God, who doesn’t just live with us - he lives in us. As Jesus says in John 14:3, he is going to prepare a place for us, and we look forward to the day when he returns in his same human body to take us to be with him.