Dominion Regained

This Thursday is Ascension Day. Some church groups celebrate it, and many of us actually simply ignore it. For us, Christmas and Easter constitute the only church year that really matters. I’m not even sure if Pentecostal churches celebrate Pentecost each year. And so, I suspect most of us don’t pay much attention to Ascension Day, the ascension of the Lord Jesus, despite the fact, as we saw yesterday, that it’s mentioned quite frequently in Scripture.

The opening verses of Acts tell us that for forty days following His resurrection, Jesus met with His disciples and taught them more about the kingdom of God. Actually, I think that’s the explanation for the amazing biblical theology of Simon Peter’s sermon on the day of Pentecost. It wasn’t just that he was now filled with the Spirit; it was that Jesus had filled him full with Scripture. That rich biblical theology of his sermon didn’t come to him on the spur of the moment, I don’t think. It was surely what he had been taught by the Lord Jesus during those weeks of seminar teaching.

But why did Jesus not close out the last day of those seminars by saying to them: “That’s the end of the seminars, and you won’t see Me again. I’m going back to the Father permanently now”? Probably for two reasons.

The first was that He wanted to make clear to them, not just by word, but also by action, that He really was leaving them permanently until He would come back again at the end. I suspect that if He just said His farewells in a relatively undramatic fashion to the Apostles and the other Christians and left them, as He apparently had been doing for these six weeks, some of them would undoubtedly have entertained hopes that He was maybe just testing them to see whether they wanted Him to keep coming back, and when He saw they did, He’d have come back again. And so, our Lord left the Apostles and the young church in a very decisive way in an event that, in its own way, was like His incarnation, His crucifixion, His resurrection—a once for all event.

But I think there’s another reason the ascension took the shape it did, because the ascension event marked a new era in our Lord Jesus’ ministry. Just as His incarnation and His ministry and death and resurrection fulfilled specific Scriptures, so too did His ascension. It is the event that some of the so-called “royal psalms” point to: the King coming to His coronation.

You probably know that the most frequently cited or alluded to words in the Psalms are not the opening verse of Psalm 23, but the first words of Psalm 110 where David says, “The Lord says to my Lord: ‘Sit at my right hand, until I make your enemies your footstool.’” That’s what’s happening in the ascension. Jesus is not just leaving the world; He’s going to heaven. Indeed it’s even more than that: Jesus is going to His coronation.

Remember how He made that point when, just before the ascension, He said, “All authority in heaven and earth has been given to me” (Matt. 28:18). The majesty of the way He leaves the disciples is an outward expression of that very thing. He’s no ordinary king exalted on a throne; He is being raised to the throne of heaven and earth.

Notice something here. First, we can pretty easily miss the deep significance of that word “authority.” And second, we can also easily miss the significance of the verb “given.” After all, isn’t Jesus the Son of God? Doesn’t He already have all dominion as God? He doesn’t need to be given it, does He? Well, yes, but there seems to be more to what Jesus is saying here than meets the eye.

What if we substituted the word dominion for “authority”? All dominion in heaven and earth has been given to Me. I wonder, does that begin to switch on a light in your mind? Does it remind you of Genesis 1:26–28 where God made Adam and Eve as His image and gave them dominion over the earth? But of course, they forfeited it, and Satan gained it. And you’ll remember how he actually offered it back to Jesus in the wilderness temptations if Jesus would just bow down and worship him.

Well, the reason that was a real temptation is that that’s exactly what the Son of God came into the world to regain—what Adam had lost. But He came to regain it by His death and resurrection, not by aligning Himself with Satan. But now that sin has been atoned for and that death has been overcome and Satan has been conquered. Jesus, the second Man, the last Adam, has now regained the dominion that was lost. That’s why, in His ascension, the coronation takes place. That’s why He ascends to the throne in this dramatic way.

No wonder Luke tells us the disciples had a threefold response: they worshiped him, they experienced great joy, and then they went back to the temple to praise God (Luke 24:52–53). I think when we are really gripped by the reality of Jesus’ ascension, we begin to echo that response. Yes, Jesus has ascended—glory to our King. And yes, joy to us as well and worship to God.