Daily Devotionals

Music For the Soul

Devotional: November 23rd

THE EXALTED CHRIST

So then the Lord Jesus, after He had spoken unto them, was received up into Heaven, and sat down at the right hand of God. - Mark 16:19

How strangely calm and brief this record of so stupendous an event! Do these sparing and reverent words sound to you like the product of a devout imagination, embellishing with legend the facts of history? To me their very restrainedness, calmness, matter-of-factness, if I may so call it, is a strong guarantee that they are the utterance of an eye-witness, who verily saw what he tells so simply. There is something sublime in the contrast between the magnificence and almost inconceivable grandeur of the thing communicated, and the quiet words, so few, so sober, so wanting in all detail, in which it is told.

That stupendous fact of Christ sitting at the right hand of God is the one that should fill the present for us all, even as the Cross should fill the past, and the coming for Judgment should fill the future. So for us the one central thought about the present, in its loftiest relations, should be the throned Christ at God’s right hand.

We are taught to believe, according to His own words, that in His ascension Christ was but returning whence He came, and entering into the "glory which He had with the Father before the world was." And that impression of a return to His native and proper abode is strongly conveyed to us by the narrative of His ascension. Contrast it for instance with the narrative of Elijah’s rapture, or with the brief reference to Enoch’s translation. The one was taken by God up into a region and a state which he had not formerly traversed; the other was borne by a fiery chariot to the heavens; but Christ slowly sailed upwards, as it were, by His own inherent power, returning to His abode, and ascending up where He was before.

But whilst this is one side of the profound fact, there is another side. What was new in Christ’s return to His Father’s bosom? This, that He took His manhood with Him. It was the Everlasting Son of the Father, the Eternal Word, which from the beginning "was with God and was God," that came down from heaven to earth to declare the Father; but it was the Incarnate Word, the Man Christ Jesus, that went back again. This most blessed and wonderful truth is taught with emphasis in His own words before the council, "Ye shall see the Son of Man sitting on the right hand of power." Christ, then, today bears a human body; not, indeed, the "body of His humiliation," but the body of His glory, which is none the less a true corporeal frame, and necessarily requires a locality. His ascension, whithersoever He may have gone, was the true carrying of a real humanity, complete in all its parts, Body, Soul, and Spirit, up to the very Throne of God.

Where that locality is it is bootless to speculate. Scripture says that He ascended up "far above all heavens"; or, as the Epistle to the Hebrews has it, in the proper translation, the High Priest "is passed through the heavens," as if all this visible material creation was rent asunder in order that he might soar yet higher beyond its limits, wherein reign mutation and decay. But wheresoever that place may be, there ts a place in which now, with a human body as well as a human spirit, Christ is sitting at the right hand of God.