Jesus' Ascension

7th Sunday after Easter
Scripture: Acts 1:9-11

It is important that we have a firsthand account of Jesus’ ascension. We discover this in Acts 1:9-11. “After He said this, He was taken up before the very eyes of the disciples in a cloud that hid Him from the disciples.” Two men dressed in white stood beside them.

“Men of Galilee, why do you stand here looking into the sky?” they asked. “This same Jesus who has been taken up from you into Heaven will come back in the same way you have seen Him go into the heavens.”

There are two reasons for firsthand accounts of Jesus’ ascension.

1. It was necessary that there should be an eyewitness.
2. We know that for someone to be a credible witness in a court of law, he or she should be an eyewitness.

If Christianity were but a think-so-too, it would have died off many years ago.

1. A real witness is not the witness with words, but with deeds. 
2. One of the most suggestive facts is that in Greek the word for “witness” and the word for “martyr” come from the same word.
3. An eyewitness must be loyal no matter what the outcome. Thus the disciples did become martyrs.

Jesus spent 40 days after His resurrection from the dead as an eyewitness to the power of God to win the victory over sin and death. Thus, it is absolutely correct to say that we do not regard Heaven as just someplace beyond the sky.  A place of Heaven is a place of blessedness where we will one day and forever be inseparable from God.

If Jesus was to give His followers irreversible proof that He was going to His Heavenly glory, wherein one day His faithful followers will go to be with Him, one day His followers would go with Him.

But we don’t need to worry about when the second coming will transpire.  But it will happen. But it is foolish and useless for us to speculate on how it will happen, for Jesus told us His Father in Heaven has fixed the time and date, and not even Jesus knows the hour or the day.

Jesus’ second coming means that Christianity is not stationary. Rather, it’s going somewhere. God the Father has a plan for each one of us, so history is not a haphazardous conglomeration of events. It also is going somewhere.

God so loved His creation and mankind that when mankind stumbled and fell from grace and glory He sent His beloved Son Jesus, the Christ, to redeem us. Even when mankind murdered Him, God did not forsake His creature, man, but once again gave mankind another chance for the blessed eternal life.

We need to realize, with all that’s going on in our world today, that God is still in control. While Satan seems to be in control at this moment, when the final battle between Satan and God happens, God and His creature man win the battle.

In the meantime, we must forge ahead as the battle rages on, offering our small bits of spiritual energy toward the final goal, aiding the winning of the battle along with and for God. Let us pray!