He basically says not to get hung up on whether the people who saw Jesus ascend were thinking that He was going to float up into the sky and sit down in a throne sitting on a cloud next to God the Father. We don't know if they were thinking that or not.
We realize today, with the benefit of two thousand years of theology and retrospect, that He wasn't going to go sit on a cloud. He was leaving this space and time altogether. Going to another dimension, you might call it. A place outside of our physical reality. That's why it was comically absurd when the atheistic Russian cosmonaut radioed back from his space orbit to report that he didn't see God up there. While there might have been SOMEONE who was wondering if he'd see God, it certainly wasn't us Christians.
One thing to think about is that if Jesus was leaving this planet altogether, He would go "up" just as the disciples saw Him. Of course, He could have simply vanished. Or He could have gone "down". But those would have been potentially confusing. Is He still here? Did He go back to hell again?
Another thing to realize is that Jesus's ascension shows us what eternal bodies can do. One day, once we have gone to sleep and woken up again to eternal life, we will have similar bodies. And it looks like we will be able to enter locked rooms without using the door. We'll be able to eat and drink if we feel like it. We will be able to fly.
I don't know about you, but those things are exciting to me.
God, thank You for giving us so many blessings in this life...and so much to look forward to in the next.
1 comment:
Yep.
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