The One who is seated at the Father’s right hand is still human.1
That should stop us in our tracks. Jesus Christ, the eternal Son of God, remains the man who was born of Mary, the man who grew up among His people, the man who knew hunger, weariness, friendship, and sorrow. The One who is right now reigning over creation is the One who wept beside a grave and suffered death Himself. His life was bodily. And so also was His resurrection. And so also was His Ascension. The humanity He took for Himself when He came among us, now belongs to Him forever. Our human Brother is on the throne.2
We tend to pass over the Ascension rather quickly. We know about Christmas, Good Friday, Easter, and Pentecost. Somewhere between Easter and Pentecost, Jesus goes to heaven. We acknowledge it, and then quickly move along. But take a moment and hang out right there. The Son who came from the Father to meet us in our humanity is now taking that very same humanity into the Father’s presence.
The Son came with a mission. And the whole movement of that mission—into our humanity, through His life, death, and resurrection, and then back into the Father’s presence in the Ascension—happened with our humanity united to Him. His work of salvation for us didn’t stop at forgiveness or at His rising from the dead. In Christ, it reaches its goal with us in communion with the Father.3
In other words, Jesus doesn’t merely come down to where we are and repair our condition. He goes so much further! He brings the humanity He assumed back with Him into fellowship with God. The Ascension reveals to us the mind-blowing, true destination of all His saving work: human beings, in Christ, brought into the Son’s own communion with the Father.
God comes to humanity in the Son → and the Son takes humanity back to God.
His saving work isn’t just a thing that reaches us here where we are; it brings us all the way home into communion with the Father.
He came into our actual condition. He assumed our fallen human nature. He lived within it without sin. And He healed it from the inside through His faithful life, His death, and His resurrection.4 And right now, that healed, risen humanity is with the Father. The Jesus who ascended is fully human and fully God. He is forever united to us in the humanity He made His own. And He is eternally one with the Father in the divine life He has always shared with Him.
Humanity now has a permanent place in the life of God!5 Think of what that means when shame tries to tell us we could never belong near Him. When loneliness feels like the deepest truth about us. When we can imagine God tolerating us but struggle to imagine being wanted, welcomed, loved.
In Jesus Christ, our humanity has been brought near to the Father. And by the Spirit—the Spirit of Christ who now lives in us—we share in His communion with the Father. We remain His creatures, fully human, but we are received by grace into the communion of love between Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. This is the welcome the Father Himself has given us through His Son.
Our life is hidden with Christ in God. And yet, despite this reality, we spend so much time looking inside ourselves to decide whether we belong. We inspect our faith. We revisit our repentance. We evaluate yesterday’s prayers and this morning’s obedience. We remember how distracted we were during worship and wonder what that says about our standing with God. Even our desire to be faithful (or, in some moments, our lack of it) becomes an occasion for anxious self-measurement.
But none of that is where our acceptance lies. Our acceptance rests in Jesus Christ.
He stands before the Father for us right now. His sacrifice is complete; His priestly ministry continues. He brings us—the human us—into the Father’s presence in Himself, holding us in the communion He has established for us through His own faithful human life.
The King who governs all things is also our High Priest; He’s the Brother who truly understands our human weakness and is interceding for us. Before we begin to pray, He is already praying for us.6 When our attention wanders, His faithfulness holds us regardless. When we cannot find our words, we are nevertheless perfectly represented by the One who has fully joined Himself to us—joined Himself to our very humanness—and will be so joined forever!
This means we can tell the truth. We can confess the sin we have been defending. We can bring the grief we have been trying to contain. We can acknowledge that our faith feels weak. And we can do so confidently and without fear. Why? Because Christ’s always-on, always-faithful, always-perfect intercession for us gives us courage to repent and believe, to pray and obey. By His Spirit—who is in us—we are sharing in what He is offering perfectly to the Father on our behalf.
Even my faltering prayers can begin right there in all their falteringness: “Jesus, You are praying for me. Gather my prayer into Yours.”
The Ascension also turns our attention to the life we have ahead of us. In Acts, the disciples stand looking into the sky, and the question comes: “Why do you stand looking into heaven?” The same Jesus will return. And in the meantime, we have been given a world in which to bear witness to Him.
And to do so, we were promised the Holy Spirit. And the Holy Spirit came. Peter’s Pentecost sermon makes the connection explicit: the very same Jesus whom God raised from the dead has been exalted to His right hand and has poured out the promised Holy Spirit—His Spirit—in us. The ascended Lord now shares His life with His people here, in the history we are actually living, through His Spirit living in us.
The Holy Spirit—also called the Spirit of Christ—brings us Christ Himself; it is His Spirit. We do not presently see Jesus walking among us as the disciples did. His body cannot physically be with all of us, but His Spirit can. And in this way, we become the Body of Christ. Through the Spirit we are joined to Him, made alive in Him, and drawn into the ministry that he continues even now. He is reigning now from Heaven. And He is acting in us now here on earth. Our witness, our service, our prayers are all a continuing participation in His.7
Christ is doing something → and by the Spirit, He joins us to Himself. → And, so, then, our witness, service, and prayers become creaturely participation in what He is doing.
Our actions are enclosed within His ministry. In fact, they are generated by His ministry. And they depend on His ongoing ministry. We do not extend Christ’s work because His work is otherwise deficient without us, nor do we become Christ in His place. He remains the living Lord and the acting subject of His ministry. Yet by His Spirit, He gives us a real share in it.
When we pray to the Father, we are not beginning a relationship with the Father from scratch; we are drawn into Christ’s own priestly communion with the Father. When we bear witness to others, we are not making Christ present by our own power; the living Christ is already present and active by His Spirit whether we participate or not, and when we do, He takes up our testimony into His witness. When we serve another person, our service becomes an instrument of His continuing love.
That frees us to enter the day without carrying the salvation of the world on our shoulders. It is not dependent upon us. Not in any way. We can listen carefully to a neighbor, speak the truth about Jesus, seek reconciliation, care for someone who is lonely. We can serve with courage and leave the results with the King. He is the King. He reigns! Not our actions. And that means His reign gives our small acts of faithfulness their place and purpose.
And the Spirit of Christ who is in us keeps directing us, over and over again, to the same Jesus—the only Jesus Christ there is—the truly human Jesus given to us in Holy Scripture. And we need that, because we are quite capable of producing a Jesus who agrees with us, endorses our resentments, and blesses our plans. A white nationalist Jesus. A black liberation Jesus. A trans Jesus. A Marxist revolutionary Jesus. A demythologized Jesus. A reconstructed “historical Jesus”. A therapeutic Jesus. But Jesus Christ is not ours to invent.8 He has given Himself to us in a very particular life and in a very particular history. The apostolic witness brings us again and again and again back to this Jewish man from Nazareth who lived among us, died for us, rose bodily, and ascended to the Father. Through that witness—that witness of a particular Jewish man named Jesus—the Spirit makes the living Lord known and teaches us to receive Him as He gives Himself.
And it is that Jesus who remains human even now. The humanity He assumed in the Incarnation did not end at the resurrection or Ascension. Nor did He leave behind the particular humanity He had lived and take on some generalized or neutral human form. The eternal Son did not become humanity in the abstract; He became this man—Jesus of Nazareth, born of Mary, a Jew of Israel.9 And it is this same Jesus who was crucified, raised bodily from the dead, and taken into the Father’s presence. His resurrection glorified His humanity; it did not replace it. His Ascension did not dissolve His human particularity into some universal humanity. The One who reigns with the Father is still Jesus—the embodied human being who lived among us, suffered for us, died, and was raised from the dead.
That tells us something about our own embodied lives. If the eternal Son has permanently taken embodied human existence to Himself, then bodily creaturely life cannot be spiritually trivial or disposable. Our bodies are not spiritually unimportant, and the ordinary work of caring for bodily life matters to God. Preparing a meal, repairing a home, doing our work, tending a garden, helping someone wash and dress—all of this takes place within the good creation He has not abandoned and will one day renew.
We can receive these ordinary things from the Father and offer them back in thanksgiving. Our work becomes a place to practice truthfulness and generosity. Our meals become occasions of welcome. Our care for a weakening body becomes an act of love for someone whose future is held in Christ.
This reaches us when we are sick, when we are aging, when we grieve. We know how much remains unfinished. Bodies weaken. People die. Reconciliation can take years, and some wounds remain painfully open. Christ’s glorified humanity gives us a definite hope in the midst of that suffering: the future God promises us already has its living reality in Jesus. When He appears, what is hidden with Him will be revealed. His risen life is the pledge of our resurrection and of creation’s renewal.
Jesus remains embodied → therefore embodied human life matters to God → therefore ordinary bodily care and creaturely work matter → because creation is destined for renewal, not disposal.
The time we have while we await His return is itself a gift of mercy.10 Christ has ascended from our sight, but He has not withdrawn His presence or His reign. The kingdom has already broken into our history in His death and resurrection, yet its fullness remains hidden until He appears again. We live in that space between what Christ has already accomplished and what will one day be revealed openly to all.
And that space in between is grace. The fact that Christ has not yet appeared in the unveiled glory of His kingdom means that time is still being given for the gospel to be heard, for repentance and faith, for forgiveness and reconciliation, for witness and service. God has not abandoned the world to itself while we wait. In His patience, He continues to hold open the day of grace.
Nor are we simply waiting for something that is entirely absent. By the Holy Spirit, the life of the coming kingdom is already reaching us here. We already share in the risen life of the One who is coming. We already receive foretastes of the future that will one day fill all creation. The age to come has begun in Jesus Christ even while this present age continues.
So today is not merely another day before Jesus returns. It is a day given to us in the patience of God: time to repent, time to believe, time to ask forgiveness, time to forgive, time to bear witness, time to love our neighbor. We can receive that time without panic and without passivity. We do not have to bring the kingdom ourselves, and we do not have to fear that history is slipping out of Christ’s hands. Our future is held by the One who has already risen from the dead and who will come again.
And the risen life He shares with us by the Spirit is already doing something in us in this in-between time: it is restoring us toward the humanity we were created for. He is making us truly human.11 Jesus is not divine life added onto humanity; He is the true human being. In Him we see human life rightly related to the Father—trusting Him, receiving from Him, responding to Him in faithfulness, and giving Himself freely in love. He is what humanity is when humanity is reconciled to God.
The life of Jesus is not merely an example placed before us for imitation. Christ has drawn us into His own relationship with the Father.
By the Spirit, we are given a real share in His communion with the Father. That changes the very ground on which we live. If my identity and belonging no longer have to be secured by self-protection, self-justification, achievement, or others’ approval, I become freer to turn outward. I can attend fully to another person because I do not have to spend my energy defending or establishing myself. I can forgive without needing to win. I can serve without making my service prove my worth. I can rejoice in the good of another without experiencing it as a threat to me. Communion with God opens us toward others.
Apart from Christ, our humanity is distorted; we are curved inward upon ourselves—fearful, defensive, self-protective, grasping. In Christ, human life is restored to its proper orientation: toward the Father, toward other people, and toward creation in love. And this restoration is grounded in what Christ has already accomplished in our humanity. The humanity He assumed has been reconciled and healed in His own person through the whole course of His incarnate life—through His faithful obedience, through His suffering and death, through His resurrection, and through His Ascension. He did not merely act upon humanity from the outside, shouting instructions at us through the quarantine glass. He entered the quarantine zone. He took our humanity to Himself and lived our human life faithfully before the Father.
In His death, He carried our estrangement and sin thoroughly into judgment. And in His resurrection, human life emerged from death healed and renewed. And in His Ascension, He carried that risen humanity into the Father’s presence. The Ascension is therefore not the moment when the healing of humanity begins, nor is it simply that being in heaven heals us. The healing belongs to the whole saving life and work of Jesus Christ. What the Ascension reveals is where that reconciled humanity now belongs: in communion with the Father.
And because the Spirit of Christ in us unites us to Christ, the healing accomplished in Him simply becomes ours by participation. We are not healed by becoming something other than human, and we are not spiritually elevated beyond our creatureliness. We are healed as we are joined to the Son in whom our humanity has already been reconciled to God. Sharing in Christ’s life makes us more, not less, human. It restores us toward what human life was created to be: life received from the Father, lived before the Father, and opened outward in love toward others and toward His good creation.
The Ascension tells us something astonishing about both Jesus Christ and ourselves. The One who sits at the right hand of the Father is still the man Jesus. He has not left His humanity behind. He has taken it with Him into the Father’s presence, healed and reconciled, and by the Spirit He gives us a share in His life there.
That means our life with God does not finally rest on the strength of our faith, the steadiness of our prayers, or our ability to hold ourselves together. It rests in Jesus Christ. Our humanity is represented in Him. Our prayers are gathered into His. Our obedience takes place within His faithfulness. Our life is hidden with Him in God.
And the One who holds us there is also at work here. By His Spirit, the ascended Christ shares His life with His people in the middle of ordinary history. He draws us out of ourselves and toward the Father, toward one another, and toward the good creation He will renew. He teaches us to live more truly as the human beings we were made to be.
We do not yet see what we shall be. We still know weakness, sin, grief, and death. But the future of humanity is already present in Jesus Christ.12 A human being has passed through death, risen bodily, and entered the Father’s presence. And He has not gone there without us.
Our hope, then, is not that we will somehow find our own way to God. Our hope is that the One who came all the way to us has taken our humanity all the way home.
Our Brother is on the throne.
This essay has an accompanying call to worship:
A man is on the throne.
The Ascension of Jesus Christ has changed everything. Not just something. Not just a detail in our creed. Everything. The truth about God. The truth about ourselves. The truth about what it means to live as Christians.
The Incarnation wasn’t a temporary thing. “This same Jesus, who has been taken from you into heaven, will come back in the same way.” —Acts 1:11. “There is one mediator between God and mankind, the man Christ Jesus.” —1 Timothy 2:5. The Incarnation wasn’t a temporary arrangement that ended when Jesus finished His earthly mission. The Son didn’t assume humanity for a few decades and then discard it upon returning to the Father. The same Jesus who was born of Mary, crucified, buried, and raised is the Jesus who ascended. His humanity is glorified, but it is not replaced. Jesus doesn’t cease to be the man Jesus when He becomes invisible to us. The humanity He assumed belongs permanently to who He is.
The King who reigns isn’t ashamed to belong to us. “He is not ashamed to call them brothers and sisters.” —Hebrews 2:11. “Since we have a great high priest who has passed through the heavens, Jesus the Son of God…” —Hebrews 4:14. The astonishing thing about the Ascension is not simply that the Son returned to the Father, but that He returned in the humanity He had made His own. The King upon the throne is therefore not distant from the human condition He governs. He is our High Priest precisely because the eternal Son has truly joined Himself to us. His brotherhood doesn’t diminish His deity; it shows us the depth of His solidarity with us. The One who represents humanity before God is Himself truly God and truly one of us.
Forgiveness is the doorway; communion is the destination. “Christ also suffered once for sins, the righteous for the unrighteous, to bring you to God.” —1 Peter 3:18. “I in them and you in me.” —John 17:23. Forgiveness is indispensable, but it’s not the final destination of salvation. Christ doesn’t merely remove guilt and leave us standing at a distance. He brings us to God. The movement of grace is therefore not simply from guilt to acquittal, but from estrangement to reconciliation and from reconciliation into communion. The Son comes from the Father into our alienation in order to bring us—in Himself—back to the Father. God forgives us because He intends fellowship with us. The end of the gospel is not merely that the condemned are acquitted, but that the estranged are brought home.
Christ heals humanity from within humanity by entering our actual condition. “God… sent his own Son in the likeness of sinful flesh and for sin.” —Romans 8:3. “He had to be made like his brothers and sisters in every way.” —Hebrews 2:17. And yet He was “without sin.” —Hebrews 4:15. Jesus didn’t save humanity from a safe distance. He entered our condition—our mortality, weakness, temptation, suffering, and death—without becoming sinful. He lives a faithful human life from within our condition, carries that humanity through judgment and death, and raises it into new life. Salvation is therefore not merely something done to us from the outside. In Jesus Christ, human life itself is taken up, lived faithfully before the Father, brought through death, and raised healed and renewed.
The Ascension reveals humanity's destiny: communion with God. “Your life is hidden with Christ in God.” —Colossians 3:3. “God raised us up with Christ and seated us with him in the heavenly realms in Christ Jesus.” —Ephesians 2:6. This doesn’t mean that human beings cease to be creatures or are absorbed into the being of God. It means that in the incarnate Son, our humanity has been brought permanently into communion with the Father. The man Jesus Christ is now with the Father, and our life is said to be hidden with Him there. Salvation therefore doesn’t end with God merely removing our guilt from a distance. In Christ, human life itself has been brought near to God. Our place with the Father is secure because it is established first in Jesus Christ.
We don’t pray our way into God’s presence; we pray from within Christ’s welcome. “He always lives to intercede for them.” —Hebrews 7:25. “Christ Jesus… is at the right hand of God and is also interceding for us.” —Romans 8:34. Prayer doesn’t begin with our ability to reach God. It begins with the ascended High Priest who already stands before the Father for us. Our weak prayers therefore do not have to establish their own access to God. Christ has already opened that access and continues to represent us there. Even when we don’t know what to say, our standing before the Father doesn’t collapse, because the One who intercedes for us never stops praying. Christian prayer rests not with our spiritual competence but with His continuing faithfulness.
The church doesn’t replace Christ’s ministry; it participates in it. “As the Father has sent me, I am sending you.” —John 20:21. “You will receive power when the Holy Spirit comes on you; and you will be my witnesses.” —Acts 1:8. The church doesn’t inherit Christ’s mission because Christ has departed and needs replacements. The risen Lord remains alive and active. By the Holy Spirit, He joins His people to what He is already doing. We bear witness of Him because He first bears witness of Himself through the Spirit. We serve, and when we do, it is within the movement of His love. We pray because He has already opened communion with the Father and is already interceding for us. We are therefore neither spectators nor substitutes for Jesus. We are participants in a ministry that is His—and remains His—before it ever becomes ours.
The real Jesus confronts every Jesus we manufacture. “If someone comes to you and preaches a Jesus other than the Jesus we preached…” —2 Corinthians 11:4. “He will glorify me because it is from me that he will receive what he will make known to you.” —John 16:14. We don’t begin with an idea of what God, humanity, salvation, justice, or Messiah ought to be and then reshape Jesus until He fits it. The Spirit doesn’t direct us toward a Christ produced by our preferences; He glorifies the Christ who actually came. The apostolic witness continually brings us back to this Jesus—born, crucified, risen, and ascended. A Jesus manufactured from our ideology, resentments, ambitions, fears, or desires will inevitably begin to resemble us. The living Jesus instead confronts us, corrects us, and calls us to receive Him as He has actually given Himself.
God didn’t save us through generic humanity, but through this particular Jesus. “Jesus of Nazareth was a man accredited by God to you by miracles, wonders and signs.” —Acts 2:22. “God sent his Son, born of a woman, born under the law.” —Galatians 4:4. The universal significance of Jesus doesn’t depend upon His becoming generic, neutral, or detached from history. He was born from a particular woman, within a particular people, under Israel’s law, in a particular place and time. The risen Lord isn’t “humanity in general.” He is Jesus of Nazareth. His birth from Mary, His Jewish identity, His suffering, crucifixion, bodily resurrection, and Ascension belong to the identity of the One who reigns. Grace doesn’t overcome particularity by dissolving it. God reconciles the world through this particular human being.
The apparent delay of the kingdom is not absence but patience. “The Lord is not slow in keeping his promise… Instead he is patient with you, not wanting anyone to perish, but everyone to come to repentance.” —2 Peter 3:9. The apparent delay of Christ isn’t empty time. Scripture interprets it as patience. The kingdom has already broken into history in Christ, but its final unveiling hasn’t yet come, and this interval gives time for the gospel to be heard, for repentance and faith, for forgiveness and reconciliation, for witness and service. Every ordinary day before His appearing therefore exists within the patience of God. History hasn’t been abandoned while Christ waits to return. The day remains open because mercy is still being extended.
Grace doesn’t make us superhuman; it restores us to true humanity. “Those God foreknew he also predestined to be conformed to the image of his Son.” —Romans 8:29. “We all… are being transformed into his image with ever-increasing glory.” —2 Corinthians 3:18. Salvation doesn’t rescue us from humanity; it restores humanity toward its truth. In Jesus we see human life rightly ordered toward the Father in trust, obedience, thanksgiving, and love. By the Spirit, we are conformed to Him. Sanctification therefore doesn’t mean becoming progressively less creaturely or less human in order to become “spiritual.” It means that distorted humanity is being healed as we are conformed to Christ. In Him we become freer to receive our life from the Father (who is the source of life), freer to love other people, and freer to live gratefully within God’s creation. Becoming like Christ means becoming more fully what human beings were created to be.
Christian hope has already taken bodily form in Jesus. “Christ has indeed been raised from the dead, the firstfruits of those who have fallen asleep.” —1 Corinthians 15:20. “When Christ, who is your life, appears, then you also will appear with him in glory.” —Colossians 3:4. Christian hope isn’t grounded merely in something God has promised eventually to do. In the risen Jesus, the beginning of that future has already appeared. A human being has passed through death into resurrection life and has entered the Father’s presence. Scripture therefore calls Christ the “firstfruits”: what has happened to Him anticipates what God intends for those who belong to Him. What we shall be is still hidden from us, but it is not undefined. Its living reality already exists in Jesus Christ.
WHAT. A. MESSAGE.
This brings me new insight into Jesus being a bridge to God…being the WAY…
W O W
just
WOW
♥️