Jesus Ascends to Heaven

After rising from the dead, Jesus appeared in the flesh to His disciples on several occasions, helping them understand how He fulfilled all that the Scriptures say concerning the Messiah. Luke 24:13–49 records several of these meetings. Yet Jesus did not stay bodily present with His church after His resurrection for long (for only forty days after His resurrection; see Acts 1:3), for as we see in today’s passage, He ascended bodily into heaven.

Our Lord’s ascension occurred at or near Bethany (Luke 24:50–51). We might be tempted to skip over this event quickly because Luke devotes very little space to it in his gospel. Yet that would be a mistake, for the ascension constitutes one of the most important events in the entire history of our salvation. This is because the ascension is related to the heavenly session of Christ, His being seated at God’s right hand. As Paul tells us in Ephesians 1:20–21: “[God] worked [His great might] in Christ when he raised him from the dead and seated him at his right hand in the heavenly places, far above all rule and authority and power and dominion, and above every name that is named, not only in this age but also in the one to come.” Jesus was anointed by the Holy Spirit in His baptism as the messianic King, but He was not invested with His full messianic authority over the cosmos until He ascended to heaven and sat down at the right hand of God, the place of authority. God promised in Psalms 2 and 110 that He would put a man, the perfect Son of David, over all creation. Our Creator made humanity to take dominion over creation (Gen. 1:28), and in Jesus that dominion is finally and fully achieved. According to His divine nature, Jesus always ruled over all, but now in His human nature He rules over all with His mediatorial authority as the perfect Prophet-Priest-King, just as God always intended for the human race.

Because Jesus ascended to heaven in His human nature, all His people ascended with Him and are seated with Him positionally in the heavenlies (see Eph. 2:6). The church father Leo the Great comments: “The nature of our human race ascended over the dignity of all heavenly creatures. It passed the angelic orders and was raised beyond the heights of the archangels. In its ascension, our human race did not stop at any other height until this same nature was received at the seat of the eternal Father. Our human nature, united with the divinity of the Son, was on the throne of his glory. The ascension of Christ is our elevation.”