Then he led them out as far as Bethany, and lifting up his hands he blessed them. While he blessed them, he parted from them and was carried up into heaven. And they worshiped him and returned to Jerusalem with great joy, and were continually in the temple blessing God.
(Luke 24:44-53 ESV)
Let me run through this with some of my thoughts. Pardon my rambling; I pray you are blessed.
“Every word of God proves true” (Proverbs 30:4). Everything promised either has been
fulfilled, or God is bringing it to fulfillment according to his wise and
sovereign plan. God is trustworthy in
what he speaks, and he is powerful enough to accomplish his promises. The word “must” in verse 44 carries weight
and speaks of God’s covenant-keeping character.
The Old Testament scriptures – like the New - are ultimately
about Jesus. He is the interpretive
key. These scriptures were written
hundreds of years earlier, but Jesus is bold enough to claim that the Law, the
Prophets, and the Psalms speak primarily of him. Look back to the previous parts of this
chapter or back the Sermon on the Mount.
“Do not think that I have come to abolish the Law or the Prophets; I
have not come to abolish them but to fulfill them. For truly I say to you, until heaven and
earth pass away, not an iota, not a dot, will pass from the Law until all is
accomplished.” (Matthew 5:17-18) It is
also instructive that in John’s Gospel our Lord is referred to as the incarnate
Word – not that he is the Bible, but that his very presence is the ultimate
revelation of God to man, and in him all truth and all reality and all that has
been previously promised is summed up. “And
he is before all things, and in him all things hold together.” (Colossians
1:17)
This truth helps to ground me by helping me to realize that
ultimately the Bible is not about me, but about Jesus with me as a background
player in his bigger Drama. Knowing that
the Bible does not revolve around me gives me a breath of fresh air in my
interpretive method; I do not read the Bible as a glorified self-help
book. No! The meaning of the text is determined by the
Author, not by me. I agree with
postmodernists that all truth is interpreted, and we must account for the
influence of the reader in that interpretation.
Nevertheless, we affirm that if God is real, his interpretation is the
correct one and is the one we are really after if possible. We trust that if God did not even spare his
own Son, he will not leave us in the dark as to the truth if we seek it with
humility. God does not mean to be
misunderstood by those who would seek him in true faith.
The disciples’ minds were opened by Jesus to understand the
Scriptures. Therefore, previously they
did not understand the Scriptures.
Certainly this does not mean that they had no knowledge or familiarity
with them, but they lacked understanding.
The conclusion here is that there are wrong interpretations of
Scripture. In the case of the Pharisees,
there can be careful and detailed interpretations of Scripture, which include a
strict obedience, that are still damning in the end; their adherence to the Scriptures
did not open their eyes to the One the Scriptures pointed to, and indeed, they
ended up conspiring to kill him!
Today, we do not need
to content ourselves with mere familiarity with the Scriptures or with vacuous
talk of them, but we desire the sort of understanding that the disciples were
given. We want truth and meaning, not
merely misinterpreted fact. We must
interpret the whole Bible, not merely the New Testament, in terms of
Jesus. And we must interpret our whole
lives, not merely the Bible, in terms of Jesus as well. There is not a square inch of existence that
does not ultimately belong to him.
“…he opened their minds to understand the Scriptures.” They did not open their own minds. They needed the help of another. Jesus was pleased to perform this opening of
their minds. Humility requires that we
see ourselves in a similar position of inability apart from Christ. If we are to see anything aright, we need to
see it through eyes opened by him and for him.
Jesus summarized the
Gospel concerning himself to his disciples in verses 46 through 49. What is this Gospel? Christ, the Messiah, suffered and died. He rose from the dead. Again, this is not a program for
self-improvement or enlightenment; it is a declaration of news, very good news! It is a declaration of something that has
been done for us that we could not do, but that we desperately needed
done. If this dying and rising is
relegated to a corner, or if it is taken as a mere symbol and not an objective
historical reality, it is no longer news.
It becomes a sort of symbolic juice to rev up our emotions to improve
ourselves or the world or something else.
This, I believe, is one of the distinguishing factors of Christianity -
that it is rooted in a history of God’s acts consistent with his character, and it
is not first a sort of philosophy of life, though it has much to say about how
we should live.
Jesus gives his Gospel a missionary emphasis. Repentance and forgiveness of sins are to be
proclaimed everywhere. That means that
everyone needs this message. Salvation
is found in the name of Christ alone. As
Christians, we are God’s primary means of that vital proclamation, and we should take
that responsibility as seriously as Christ did, which involved his own dying. Indeed, verse 48 says that the disciples are
witnesses of these things. This is a new
and fundamental part of their identity.
And it is a fundamental part of ours, too. If what we carry to the world is news, rooted
in historical events that have radical implications for our present and future
condition, our posture must be that of joyful herald. News is meant to be heralded! That is what preaching is. That is what evangelism is. Repentance is not a popular message, but it
is the one we must carry. While salvation
in Christ’s name is counter to the pluralistic spirit of our age, let us yet declare
with Paul that we are unashamed of the Gospel which is the power to save.
(Romans 1:16)
Jesus sends the promise of the Father and power from on
high, which we realize is the Holy Spirit.
Christ goes away so that another may come.
“But you will receive power when the Holy Spirit has come upon you, and
you will be my witnesses in Jerusalem and in all Judea and Samaria, and to the
end of the earth.” (Acts 1:8) The
disciples are instructed to stay in the city to wait. It is our inclination to plan and act in our
own power and self-sufficiency. But the
glory belongs to God, and the work belongs to his Spirit working in us and
through us. We are in a hurry, but God
in his sovereignty is not. Sometimes God places his
people in the desert for forty years. It
is clear that God’s mission is dependent on his Spirit’s power to accomplish
it and not our ingenuity or urgency.
Just as Jesus died and rose, he also ascended after blessing
his disciples. What should our response
to these things be? I think we should
join with the disciples in worship. The
crucifixion, resurrection, and ascension are not mainly doctrines to be picked
apart and analyzed. First, they are bare
historical facts about the actions of a God who loves us and acts on our behalf, and the
upshot of all of this is worship. We
should be inspired to worship our glorious God.
And the aroma of that worship should be infused with great joy (verse
52). We should be the most serious and
most joyful people in the world. Others may
see that as an oxymoron, but we know that it is not! It is one of the most beautiful truths in the
world. Jesus walked the path to the
cross for the joy that was set before him, and we walk this life with all its
difficulties for the joy set before us.
Our joy is God himself, and he is greater than any sorrow. With the ascension, we know that he is alive
and waiting for us, and more than any other thing that we wait for, we await
his presence as our true reward.
