Bible Stories

From the day of Pentecost onwards, the resurrection became the focal point of the apostles’ teaching. ‘Then they put him to death by nailing him to a cross. But God raised him from death three days later . . . These are the fundamentals of the Christian faith.

It is worth noting the constant. reference to Old Testament prophecies in the New Testament. Jesus was crucified, buried, resurrected according to the Scriptures. What happened to Jesus of Nazareth happened according to a divine plan. It was not the Sanhedrin nor Pilate nor the demonic powers, but ultimately God himself who directed the drama at Golgotha. ‘God . . . did not even keep back his own Son, but offered him for us all!’ God is the one who acted, both in Jesus‘ crucifixion and in his resurrection from the dead.

At the beginning of the book of Acts, we read that ‘for forty days after his death he (Jesus) appeared to them (his disciples) . . . and he talked with them about the kingdom of God‘. Jesus was bodily, visibly present over a period of forty days. Then he was taken up to heaven as they watched him, and a cloud hid him from their sight’. Jesus had been ‘taken up’, a frequently- used phrase in the New Testament.

It would be a mistake to understand Jesus‘ ascension as a sort of ancient space trip, and heaven as a place beyond the sun, moon and galaxies.

The beauty, vastness and splendour of the heavens stretching over the earth point beyond themselves to God’s heaven, understood as God’s dwelling- place, the reality where God’s will is done unhindered and everything bears the stamp of his glory. With poetic pictures, symbols and metaphors, the Bible speaks about this reality. What separates us from heaven as God’s dwelling-place is not a distance of time or place but rather the fact that our sin and unbelief shuts us out of this sphere of reality. Jesus used this symbolic religious language when he spoke about the Son of man having ‘come down’ from heaven, and the Son of man ‘going up’ to heaven: ‘come down’ and ‘go up’ are not spatial movements but speak respectively of Jesus‘ birth and entry into human history, and of his return to a heavenly form of existence.

Luke also indicated that Jesus‘ ascension was not to be interpreted as some sort of space flight. Unlike the resurrection, it was not a return into the physical world, that could be described literally, in the words of space and time. And so Luke uses symbolic language; he writes that ‘a cloud hid him from their sight’. In biblical language, ’sky’ or ‘cloud‘ is often used to denote God’s presence among mankind, either in grace or judgement. God showed the Israelites the way through the desert by using a pillar of cloud. When Isaiah was called by God to be a prophet, the temple was filled with a cloud of smoke. A cloud overshadowed Jesus on the Mount of Transfiguration. In the description of the ascension, when Jesus passed from one form of existence to another, it happened by means of a cloud taking him away. When Jesus comes again in visible form, he will come ‘on the clouds of heaven‘.

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