
The Primary Importance of the Ascension: Why Do Evangelicals Ignore It?
That’s a good question. I was reminded of it when I was in Jacksonville, Florida, for my father-in-law’s 90th birthday. He goes to a Lutheran church, and we decided to go with him that Sunday. It so happened that was Ascension Sunday, June 1. What is Ascension Sunday, you ask? You are likely an Evangelical if you ask that question. The reason is that as Evangelicals we seem to all but ignore the ascension of Jesus Christ to the right hand of God. I didn’t realize how blind most of us were to one of the most important events of redemptive history until one day on a walk I heard someone say on my little trusty MP3 player, “Evangelicals basically ignore the ascension.” I remember stopping the player and thinking, “He’s right!” I wondered why we do that, and I had no ready answer, only that having been a churchgoer for over 40 years by that point, I don’t ever remember a sermon on the ascension. If there was one, it wasn’t memorable. I aimed to rectify that in my life.
Christ ascending to heaven is revealed to us in Act 1, which might give us a clue as to its importance. Before the church could be established and grow to advance God’s kingdom on earth, King Jesus needed to be enthroned at the right hand of the Almighty where he reigns to make that happen through his church. The ascension was his coronation. If you saw King Charles’ coronation on May 6, 2023, multiply that by infinity and you’ll have some sense of the momentousness of that day. Yet we all but ignore it. First, let’s look at that passage in Acts:
6 Then they gathered around him and asked him, “Lord, are you at this time going to restore the kingdom to Israel?” 7 He said to them: “It is not for you to know the times or dates the Father has set by his own authority. 8 But you will receive power when the Holy Spirit comes on you; and you will be my witnesses in Jerusalem, and in all Judea and Samaria, and to the ends of the earth.” 9 After he said this, he was taken up before their very eyes, and a cloud hid him from their sight.
That’s it. What did it mean? What did those who witnessed it think it meant? Where did Jesus go? And why? We use the word ascension to describe it, which simply means to go up. We’ll take a look at what it means and why we shouldn’t ignore it like we have.
Biblical Clues to What the Ascension Means
There are many, but two passages stand out. One is from the Old Testament in Daniel 7. Written over 500 years before the ascension, the Prophet is given a dream of four beasts, and one of the angels told him the meaning of his dream:
17 ‘The four great beasts are four kings that will rise from the earth. 18 But the holy people of the Most High will receive the kingdom and will possess it forever—yes, for ever and ever.’
The last beast is the most terrifying and terrible, and we know that represents the Roman Empire, the greatest most fearful empire the world had ever known. It’s during that empire when God’s people will receive this forever kingdom, and we’re told in this chapter how that will happen. The Ancient of Days takes his seat on His thrown, the court is seated, and Daniel says, “the books were open.” Judgment upon the nations is about to begin, and then we’re given a picture of the Ascension:
13 “In my vision at night I looked, and there before me was one like a son of man, coming with the clouds of heaven. He approached the Ancient of Days and was led into his presence. 14 He was given authority, glory and sovereign power; all nations and peoples of every language worshiped him. His dominion is an everlasting dominion that will not pass away, and his kingdom is one that will never be destroyed.
Given my eschatological assumptions for most of my Christian life, I assumed this referred to Christ’s second coming when all things would be consummated in him. But we need to note carefully what happened at this coming. This son of man was specifically given “authority, glory and sovereign power.” I assumed that the “all” referring to nations and peoples meant each and every single human being, and clearly there are quite a few people in the world who currently do not worship Jesus. But we do see that people in all nations from among all peoples do worship him, which prior to Christ, the gospel, and the Holy Spirit coming could not have happened. But what clinches this understanding of the passage is Paul’s description of Christ’s ascension in Ephesians 1. Speaking of God’s “incomparably great power for us who believe,” Paul says:
That power is the same as the mighty strength 20 he exerted when he raised Christ from the dead and seated him at his right hand in the heavenly realms, 21 far above all rule and authority, power and dominion, and every name that is invoked, not only in the present age but also in the one to come. 22 And God placed all things under his feet and appointed him to be head over everything for the church, 23 which is his body, the fullness of him who fills everything in every way.
We see that Christ’s resurrection is directly connected to his being seated at God’s right hand and receiving the authority and power Daniel saw being given the son of man in his dream. These two passages are describing the same event, and this happened at Christ’s first coming. The implications of this are profound and all encompassing.
For most of my Christian life, specifically from the fall of 1978 until August of 2022 when I embraced postmillennialism in one day, I believed Christ’s rule and authority was primarily over the church and Christians. Most of the world was a Wild, Wild West where outlaws ruled because the fallen world belonged to the devil. As a Calvinist who strongly believes in God’s sovereign reign over all things, I knew God’s rule over all things was absolute, but thought the devil had some legitimate authority over everything outside of the church. The Ephesians passage can seem to say that because Christ is given that authority and power “for the church,” but that doesn’t mean it’s only inside the church, or inside the heart of Christians, and the devil gets to have his way everywhere else. I would have said at the time that God allows this to happen, as I still believe he does, but now I know the world no longer belongs to the devil.
This dynamic completely changed when Jesus was confronted by the devil in the desert with three temptations, the third of which was the turning point in redemptive history:
8 Again, the devil took him to a very high mountain and showed him all the kingdoms of the world and their splendor. 9 “All this I will give you,” he said, “if you will bow down and worship me.” 10 Jesus said to him, “Away from me, Satan! For it is written: ‘Worship the Lord your God, and serve him only.’”
Prior to Christ accomplishing his mission, the devil owned “all the kingdoms of the world.” They were his to dispose of as he pleased. God promised, however, that the woman’s seed would strike the serpent’s head, and his defeat was fully realized at Christ’s ascension to the right hand of God. The world now belongs to Christ! I’m not even sure how this is debatable, but people read a few verses, use their sight, not faith, see how horrible the world can be, and conclude the devil is “the god of this world” (2 Cor. 4:4). The Greek often translated world is not cosmos, but aión or age. So Paul’s reference isn’t to the earth or God’s created order, but to the fallen world, the age when he reigned on earth. Now the devil is only the god of lost sinners, and God’s kingdom and Christ’s reign have been slowly taking over territory for the last two thousand years. That’s what the ascension means, the extension of Christ’s reign on earth. This is why Jesus’ reference to the gates of hell in Matthew 16 tells us the devil and his minions are on the defensive, and the church on the offensive. Gates in the ancient world were meant to keep invaders out, and Christians are the invaders in this fallen world. The devil doesn’t stand a chance.
Christus Victor and Christ’s Reign
Prior to the reformation, the concept of Christ’s substitutionary atonement, Christ suffering the punishment for humanity’s sins, and satisfying God’s wrath, was not a central doctrine of the church. From the Apostle Paul on it was always there in varying degrees, but not in the way it would become as a legal theological formulation in and after the Reformation. Two other models of the atonement were prominent prior, moral formation, Christ’s death as example, and Christus Victor, or Christ’s victory over sin, death, and the devil. With the three together we get a fuller picture of what Christ accomplished in his mission to earth. Christus Victor, however, got a bit lost in the Reformation shuffle, coming back into prominence with the publication of a book in 1931 by Swedish Lutheran theologian Gustaf Aulén called, you guessed it, Christus Victor. Reviewing the three main ideas of the atonement, he argued that the idea of a divine act of liberation was its primary meaning. As a good Protestant in the Reformed tradition I would disagree with him, but divine liberation is a significant consequence of the atonement. The primary passage used to justify this is Colossians 2:15:
13 When you were dead in your sins and in the uncircumcision of your flesh, God made you alive with Christ. He forgave us all our sins, 14 having canceled the record of debt which stood against us and condemned us; he has taken it away, nailing it to the cross. 15 And having disarmed the powers and authorities, he made a public spectacle of them, triumphing over them by the cross.
The record of debt literally means a written legal document, and this was cancelled by Christ’s death, our sins washed away, but Aulén focused on verse 15 and Christ’s victory over these “powers and authorities.” Another passage is from Hebrews 2:
14 Since the children have flesh and blood, he too shared in their humanity so that by his death he might break the power of him who holds the power of death—that is, the devil— 15 and free those who all their lives were held in slavery by their fear of death.
Christ’s death and resurrection broke the power the devil had over God’s people. Another verse is in I John 3:
8 The one who does what is sinful is of the devil, because the devil has been sinning from the beginning. The reason the Son of God appeared was to destroy the devil’s work.
Christus Victor is directly tied to the ascension because Christ is at the right hand of God. The big argument in modern Christianity is the extent and scope of Christ’s disarming and destroying of the devil’s work. I use the word modern because prior to the 19th century, Christians believed all of reality, every square inch of it, and every person and thing in it, was the domain of Christ’s rule. Evil was only allowed because it advanced God’s kingdom in some way.
The giving of the devil so much perceived power only developed in the church in Ireland with the Plymouth Brethren and J.N. Darby in the 1830s. They came up with a novel idea called at the time the new premillennialism, which in the 1920s started to be called dispensationalism because of the influence of C.I. Scofield’s Reference Bible which was published in 1909. The idea of various “dispensations” in which God dealt with His people differently in different ages or dispensations became popular because of Scofield’s Bible. In this version of Christianity, the devil had the upper hand down here in this fallen world, and things would inevitably get continually worse until Jesus came back to save the day. The goal of Christianity was to save as many sinners as possible because the ship was sinking fast. It’s an interesting quirk of history that dispensationalism and revivalism developed around the same time in the middle of the 19th century. Darby, in fact, came over to America in the 1860s and hung out with evangelist D.L. Moody. The messages were a perfect fit. In this take, Satan was on the offensive and the church was playing defense. This perspective is in fact so deeply rooted in the modern church that for over four decades I wasn’t aware that the gates of hell meant the devil was on the defensive! It took my unlikely conversion to postmillennialism for me to discover that.
Up until Darby and the last two hundred years, Christians understood it was Christ who was the ascended king over all of reality, and because of that Satan didn’t have a chance no matter what it might have looked like at the moment. Christians used to be long-term thinkers, builders of cathedrals they knew they wouldn’t worship in. While the expected immanent return of Jesus wasn’t unknown in church history, the dominant theme was that even though individual lives were extremely short, God was advancing his kingdom over the long course of history. Christians believed they were playing some small part in that cosmic drama. The goal was never to escape, but living faithfully in an uncertain world worshiping a certain God.
The Binding of the Strong Man
Almost all Christians believe Satan is a defeated foe, but they also believe his ultimate defeat has to wait until the end of time. Until then he’s pretty much given carte blanche on earth to wreak all kinds of havoc. But that isn’t quite the biblical take. When something especially heinous happened, a friend told me the world belongs to the devil, and I replied, “But he’s a puppet on a string.” Why God allows the devil any latitude at all, I have no idea, other than it’s for his glory and our ultimate good. Romans 8:28 says you can take that to the biblical bank. We know Satan is a puppet on a string, and to mix metaphors, on a very short leash because Jesus taught us so in his ministry of exorcism. Nothing like the extent of it had ever happened in Israel’s history. Jesus was bringing the kingdom of God into enemy territory; his eschatological mission was set into motion and would reach its final fulfillment in his ascension. He began taking back territory at Pentecost.
Which brings us to this parable of the binding of the strong man. We read the story in Matthew 12. Jesus had healed a demon-possessed man, and the people are astonished thinking he could be the Messiah, the Son of David. But the Pharisees don’t like it one bit, and are likely jealous. They accuse Jesus of driving out demons by the prince of demons. How in the world does that work? Jesus, being the creator of logic, obviously needed to teach them a lesson. He tells them a kingdom divided against itself will not endure. That’s politics 101. Then he gives them and us the punch line:
28 But if it is by the Spirit of God that I cast out demons, then the kingdom of God has come upon you. 29 Or how can someone enter a strong man’s house and plunder his goods, unless he first binds the strong man? Then indeed he may plunder his house.
The kingdom of God broke into the devil’s world at Christ’s first coming, and Jesus in binding the strong man, i.e., Satan, has opened up the entire fallen world to the advance of the kingdom. The spiritual dynamic of reality between BC and AD had completely changed. Revelation 20 gives us a fuller picture of what happened when Jesus bound the strong man:
Then I saw an angel coming down from heaven, holding in his hand the key to the bottomless pit and a great chain. 2 And he seized the dragon, that ancient serpent, who is the devil and Satan, and bound him for a thousand years, 3 and threw him into the pit, and shut it and sealed it over him, so that he might not deceive the nations any longer, until the thousand years were ended. After that he must be released for a little while.
Since dispensationalism came on the scene, many Christian interpret the thousand years literally, but given the symbolic nature of Revelation, we can be confident John meant the long period of time between Christ’s first and second coming. Prior to Satan being bound and thrown into the pit, God’s revelation was limited to Israel, a small point of light in a dark world. God had given the Hebrews the mission to be a blessing to the Gentiles, and they could barely be a blessing to themselves. The futility endured for 1,500 years because the devil did have full carte blanche over the entire world. Adam had given up ownership of it when he rebelled against God. After Christ accomplished his mission, that little point of light has permeated to the four corners of the earth!
Our confidence is not in us, nor our efforts, but in “one like a Son of Man,” sitting at God’s right hand with “all authority in heaven and on earth” to enable his church to fulfill its mission to disciple the nations. The ascension gives us the confidence and optimism that not only just some people within all nations will be saved, as many Christians believe, but that entire nations will embrace Christ. They will be able to experience true human flourishing because blessed is the nation whose God is the Lord.
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