This is so important and so significant to us. What is the purpose of the ascension? The Lord Jesus Christ in the ascension is sealing upon the minds and hearts of the disciples that heaven is his home, and he will occupy it in a glorified body, wearing his humanity. If he had just dissolved into nothingness, disappeared before their eyes, perhaps there would be all kinds of supposition that heaven was a completely immaterial place, that the eternal dwelling place of the redeemed on a glorified earth was a totally immaterial, entirely spiritual kind of domain. But the bodily ascension of our Lord and Saviour indicates that he is going to a place. He had told and prepared the disciples this – ‘I go to prepare a place for you’ – and he seals that on their minds by ascending bodily. He is taking his humanity as well as his Godhead into a tangible place that is going to be fashioned and created, glorious, far higher than anything we know on earth. It is tangible and spiritual at the same time, but a real place. The ascension reinforces that in our minds. And then he has gone to prepare it. He is going to be absent from them now, but he is going to do something. What is he doing? He is preparing this future place for the people of God.
Just as the resurrection signals victory, so the ascension signals the final victory of the Lord and his success in a number of ways. In the ascension, you see the victory of the Lord to change the whole human race or the redeemed members of it in a remarkable way. When he came, at the time of the incarnation, he was not received. Apart from those few in whose hearts God had put light and understanding, generally speaking, the world was unsympathetic to the incarnation. ‘He came unto his own, and his own received him not.’ He came, and his family had to take their place in just a stable. He was born in poor and lowly circumstances. He was hounded and hunted, even as a babe. As he grows up, he is rejected and unknown and obscure.
Yet when it comes to the ascension, it is quite different. There he is with his dearest friends, with these disciples, the eleven and possibly other disciples also. But the people who witnessed the ascension are for him and with him, and they love him. They know who he is, and they worship him, and they are given to him. What a difference! Coming in obscurity, people, some godly people, hearing what this is all about, but puzzled, Mary pondering these things in her heart, people mystified and amazed. But when he goes, an enlightened, converted group standing with him. The very circumstances of the ascension provide a picture of his power over human hearts. When he came, the work of atonement was before him. When he ascends in bodily form, he is the forerunner of the new humanity, the redeemed of the Lord, the human race, for those elect members of it are saved and safe. It is possible for them to enter glory. Here is the glorified Lord rising, and so the victory is complete.
But even more, the ascension signals an entirely new relationship for this gospel age between Christ and his people. From now on, it will be by faith, not by sight. The disciples see him in his glorified body, and they see him most significantly rising to heaven. A cloud takes him out of their sight, and that is the end for the presence of an era of a visible Saviour. Now it is entirely by faith. The ascension isn't something which leads us just to gaze and contemplate. It's something which reminds us that this life is nothing to us. We are going to the next life. We are preparing for it here. We are bringing in the harvest of God for the Saviour. We are his people; we are obeying him. We are under his command, and he has risen both to prepare a place for us in that glorious future realm, and to direct operations and pour out his gifts upon us as we do so. We are an active people, and the ascension teaches us all that.