Dr. Kevin DeYoung | Where is Christ Now?

Sunday Evening, May 3, 2026

Given by Dr. Kevin DeYoung | Senior Pastor, Christ Covenant Church

Where is Christ Now? 

Heidelberg Catechism—Lord’s Day 18
Matthew 28:20

YouTube Video

Download our mobile app

Transcript

Let me pray for us one more time. 

Father in heaven, we give thanks for this day set aside for rest, worship, deeds of mercy and charity. And we thank you for your Word, and your Word has summarized in faithful documents from ages past. And now tune our hearts to sing your praise, and tune our minds to think carefully, that we may understand what it means that you are ascended, glorified, coming again, reigning king. Jesus, we pray. Amen. 

I don't know if you've noticed as we've been going through the Heidelberg Catechism – hopefully you recognize that we're moving through, as the catechism does, line by line from the Apostles’ Creed – but perhaps you haven't noticed, I'm going to point out about tonight, how many questions are given to each line in the creed. It's almost always just one or two. So, for example, he was conceived by the Holy Spirit, born of the Virgin Mary. There's two questions there. Suffered, one; under Pontius Pilate, one; crucified, one question. Died, one; buried, one; and then there's two wrap-up questions about what his death and sacrifice mean. Descended into hell, one. The resurrection last week, one. And when we move to Lord's Day 19, his session, sits at the right hand of God, one; his exaltation, his glory, one; his coming again, one. Almost always one – each phrase of the creed, which is why it is so striking that Lord's Day 18 – on that line, “he ascended into heaven,” we have four questions and answers, which tells us something from the beginning. Hmm. There must have been something going on that the authors of the Heidelberg Catechism felt it necessary to explain in some greater detail, because surely they don't mean to communicate that the ascension is four times as important as the resurrection. But one question on the resurrection to talk about how it comforts us and helps us, and now four questions on the ascension, so already alerting us that there is something happening behind the scenes here, and that's what we're going to explain. 

But I start with a simple question. I wonder how you would answer this question. It's a question that you've maybe had a child or grandchild ask you before, and if they haven't asked you, you've probably thought it. And one of the things that kids are good at is they don't know better, and they don't have the embarrassment that we have in asking a question that we think, well, doesn't everybody already know this? And here's the question: where is Jesus? How would you answer that? Someone says, "Where is Jesus?" Seems like it should be a pretty easy question to answer, until you stop and think about it. I did a little survey of my family. Didn't really mean for it to be a sermon illustration, but here it is. And some of them said, "He is seated" (they said it correctly) – “He is sitting at the right hand of God the Father. He's in heaven.” Someone else said, "He is everywhere." And then one smart child, maybe slightly rolling his or her eyes, said, "I bet you're going to tell us tonight that both of those answers are correct." Yes, but there's quite a long ways to go before we can land there. 

Where is Jesus? Two texts from the Scriptures to begin with. Matthew chapter 28, the Great Commission. The 11 disciples went to Galilee to the mountain to which Jesus had directed them, and when they saw him, they worshiped him, but some doubted. Jesus came and said to them, "All authority in heaven and on earth has been given to me. Go therefore and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, teaching them to observe all that I have commanded you." And then here's the important part for tonight, “And behold, I am with you always to the end of the age.” There's the answer. Jesus gives us the answer to the question, where is Jesus? He's with us. He is with us always. However, our second text, Acts chapter 1, verse 6, “When they had come together, they asked him, ‘Lord, will you at this time restore the kingdom to Israel?’ He said to them, ‘It is not for you to know times or seasons that the Father has fixed by his own authority, but you will receive power when the Holy Spirit has come upon you, and you will be my witnesses in Jerusalem and in all Judea and Samaria, and to the end of the earth.’ And when he had said these things, as they were looking on, he was lifted up, and a cloud took him out of their sight. And while they were gazing into heaven, as he went, behold, two men stood by them in white robes and said, ‘Men of Galilee, why do you stand looking into heaven? This Jesus, who was taken up from you into heaven, will come in the same way as you saw him go into heaven.’” So, he went from one place (earth) to another place (heaven), and the announcement is given that as you saw him visibly ascend there you will see him at the end come down from there, which means he's there and not here. 

So, where's Jesus? He's with you always. He's in heaven, and he's not on earth. How do we answer that question? It appears to be a simple question, and the simplest questions are often the most difficult to answer. Kids aren't afraid to ask them, because they think in very concrete terms, and it's hard to explain to kids new terms. They don't usually want Latin terms. They should. They actually probably could learn Latin better than many of us. And they're not afraid to ask the questions that we feel like we should know already. Perhaps this is one of those. And what we'll find is the more we look into this apparently-simple question, the more complicated it's going to get. If you ever have gone to untangle a knot, say in your extension cord or your garden hose – I like to get all the cords wrapped up and wrap it up on your arm and put it there (that's a little dad secret trick, how to wrap up the ext[ension cord]) – and you go, and there's a knot in it. And you go, and you think this is just one unloop, and then you realize that that knot somehow has an infinite number of knots it seems wrapped up within. And what you hoped was a 10-minute exercise turns into a frustrating 15-minute event. Well, some doctrinal points are like that, and as we work through these four questions from Lord's Day 18, they're going to take us from Theology 101 to 201 to 301, and then we're going to come back down to earth – pun intended – come back down to earth and the last question and answer and have some application. That's where the catechism is taking us. 

So, let's start and just get our brains warmed up, and we'll look at question 46. What do you mean by saying he ascended to heaven? Here's the answer: that Christ, while his disciples watched, was taken up from earth into heaven and remains there on our behalf until he comes again to judge the living and the dead. So, there it answers, very plainly, his ascension means that he has gone up – notice the phrase “while his disciples watched,” which is also emphasized in Acts chapter 1, because it's telling us that the ascension was visible and local. This was not a spiritual metaphor of Christ being lifted up in your hearts. This was from one location to another location. They saw it with their own eyes. He went from here on earth to there in heaven. Now, where exactly is “there in heaven”? You can't get a rocket ship and go there. We understand that. But in some mysterious spatial terms, this is Earth; looking up is heaven. We often don't pay attention to the ascension. We focus on the incarnation, of course, death, resurrection, but not often much about the ascension. If anything, we think of the ascension as simply a mode of transportation. Jesus had to get from earth to heaven, and the way that he got from earth to heaven we call the ascension. The ascension is not the element of Christ's work that we tend to meditate on when we're having a difficult moment, or we're there holding someone's hand in the hospital room. We don't tend to gravitate to the ascension for comfort, and yet, by the end, I hope you'll see why this is such a rich doctrine. It's more than just the mechanism by which Jesus went from earth to heaven. 

Hughes Oliphant Old, who has written a number of great works on Reformed worship, explains in his book that Martin Bucer and John Calvin, though they greatly stripped down the church calendar from the medieval Catholic Church, which become populated with just almost endless saints’ days – they retain five evangelical feasts. He calls them Christmas, Good Friday, Easter, Ascension Day, and Pentecost, and we do something similar. Five evangelical feasts. Not that they are prescribed according to Scripture, but I think it is wise and prudent that one would think about these things each year, and Ascension Day was one of them. Now, there are lots of things that we can say about the ascension, but these next two questions will focus on what the ascension teaches us about the person of Christ, and they will start to answer that question, where is Jesus? So, look at 47. Okay, so 46, these follow naturally on each other. It's a logical progression. What do we mean by the ascension? We mean he's not on earth. He's in heaven. He stays in heaven until he comes back, which leads to 47: but isn't Christ with us until the end of the world as he has promised us? It's like question 46 is Acts 1; question 47 is Matthew 28. Here's the answer: Christ is true man and true God. In his human nature, Christ is not now on earth, but in his divinity, majesty, grace, and spirit, he is never absent from us. So, he's not now with us. This is surprisingly important in Jesus’ teaching. “Do not cling to me. I've yet to ascend to the Father” (John 20:17). “You will not always have me with you” (Matthew 26:11). John 16, several places he explains he was going to the Father. He often told his disciples that I am going away. I'm going to a different place. So how, then, is he with us until the end of the world? Question 47 gives us that answer. But you need to know, in order to understand what the catechism is teaching, to know what's behind this question and why there's so much about the ascension. And this is where if you have your bulletin and you're looking at the catechism, I gave you some nice terms. Somebody said, "Am I going to have to look these up in my phone?” No, I'm going to explain them to you. Put your phone away. 

So, here's the first one. There's a debate behind this about the ubiquity of Christ's body. It's a good word. It's a theological word, but even more than that, you can use it. If something is ubiquitous, it's everywhere. Like Snoop Dogg and Martha Stewart during the Olympics. Ubiquitous. Just everywhere. The ubiquity of Christ body is the issue. We're used to – most of these Reformed confessions are trying to draw some distinctions with Roman Catholics. Here's one point where the argument on the other side is with the Lutherans. To remind you of some of the history of the catechism, there were a number of different groups and the elector in this region of the Holy Roman Empire is trying to bring them together, so it's an irenic, it's a peaceful catechism. It's not trying to throw a lot of punches, but there were some Lutherans, and they are called by historians now Gnesio Lutherans. G N E S I O. It's a confusing term. It just means genuine Lutherans, because there were some Lutherans who were followers of Philip Melanchthon, who was the theologian – Luther’s, one of his right-hand men. Philip Melanchthon and Calvin were friends, and they were much closer on some things. So, there were those kinds of Lutherans, and then there were these others – the genuine, the more Lutheran of the Lutherans – and they insisted on something called the ubiquity of Christ's body. That means that even after his ascension, Christ in his humanity, his human nature and therefore his body, is omnipresent and immense – that the human nature of Christ possesses these attributes of omnipresence (so, the body of Christ is everywhere) and immensity (that is, that the human nature fills everything in every way). Lutherans believe that the true body and blood of Christ are present in the table. You say, "Well, why is this issue about the ubiquity of Christ's body? Why did anybody ever think to argue about this?" Well, it comes from a debate about the Lord's Supper. You may know that Catholics teach transubstantiation, which is not an ancient doctrine. It's only codified in the Middle Ages. But transubstantiation, that the bread and the wine are transubstantiated – they become something different in their substance. Now, in their substance, the physical body and blood of Christ. Well, that's not exactly what Luther taught. Lutheran theology does not believe that the substance of the bread and wine is being transformed, but neither do they like the Reformed view of remembrance, or as I explained this morning, the real presence of Christ, a real spiritual presence, as we are joined together with the Holy Spirit, lifted into the heavenly places. Lutheran theology says no, Christ is in with and under the sacraments. By the fact that the body of Christ is everywhere, the body of Christ is especially present in the sacrament. That's Lutheran theology. So, they don't rely on transubstantiation, so there is a difference between the Catholic view, but it's different than the Reformed view. The ubiquity of Christ's body allows Lutheran theology to say Christ's body is there in the sacrament, because Christ's body is ubiquitous. He is present with his body and blood in the bread and the wine. So, from a Lutheran perspective, they would see Catholics as teaching, well, what's there? The body and blood alone. And the Reformed teaching, well, it's just bread and wine alone. Or they would say, we teach that they're both there. There is bread and wine, and the body of Christ is ubiquitous. I would say I don't think that's a fair representation of the Reformed position, because we believe in a real presence by the Spirit, but it's true – not a real bodily presence. So, the Lutherans have this idea that the body of Christ can be everywhere and is ubiquitous. Therefore, the body of Christ – you feast upon him. And if you were to ask, well how exactly does that work? They would be very happy to say, “We don't know exactly how it works, and Reformed theologians are too concerned with reason and rationality and explaining things.” And I'll come to that at the end, because this finer point of doctrine does actually set some traditions in some different directions. 

So, before we try to explain why the catechism thinks the ubiquity of Christ's body is not the right position, let's remember what an orthodox doctrine of the two natures teaches, to put this in very simple terms. You say, “Too late” to try to put it into simple terms. You can think about four different errors, and roughly each of the first four ecumenical councils are dealing with these Christological errors. So, you have Arianism, which denies the full deity of Christ, and then you have, we'll call it, Docetism, although there's no one named Docet. It means “to appear.” It's associated with someone named Apollinaris, and this view says that Christ only appeared to be human. So the first, Arianism, is a denial of his total divinity. The second, a denial of his full humanity. You say, well, what other errors could there be? Well, a third one, and here you can see the term on your sheet: Nestorianism. There was a man named Nestorius, and now scholars aren't so sure if he actually taught this, but this is the teaching attributed to him and then condemned at the third ecumenical council. Nestorius was concerned that some people were calling Mary the theotokos – that is, the bearer of God. And you can imagine right away, you might be concerned, as Nestorius was, that he thought it's a pretty short step to say Mary, the bearer of God, to say Mary, the mother of God, to say Mary, somehow another mediator or somehow in the same pantheon with God. Mary, the divine mother of God. He was concerned about that, and yet in his concern he overshot his critique. He objected to this title that Mary was the bearer of God. The way he reasoned it was, well, she can't give birth to God, because God can't be born, so Mary must have given birth to Jesus, and along with Jesus in his humanity was the divine nature. So, his solution was to argue for something like a dividing wall between the two natures, so that Jesus is born a man. She brought forth a man who is accompanied by the logos, by the divine Word. The two natures of Christ are there – so he doesn't deny the deity or the humanity of Christ, but in Nestorius's view, there's not a union of the two natures. It's more like a partnership, an alignment. Well, the problem is once you have a mere alignment, you no longer have truly a God-man. You have Jesus Christ, a man, who has God with him. So, God is in Christ, and if God is merely in Christ, then he might be in Christ in the same way that he's in us, only a matter of degree. So, Nestorianism ends up making too little of Christ and too much of us. His problem was not with the two natures – divine, human – but with the one person. So, as the church wrestles with these things, they condemn Nestorianism at the third ecumenical council and they say, "No, there is one person – two natures, one person, fully divine, fully human, no dividing wall. It's not simply a moral union. It's not simply a partnership or a sympathy, but it is a real union of two natures and one person.” 

Well, as so often happens, once you have that error sort of cleaned up, another error emerges. This is the next term, Eutychianism. So, Arianism, not fully God. Docetism, not fully human. Nestorianism, there's a dividing wall. You say, "What's left?" Eutychianism blurs and confuses those two natures. This is what often happens with heresy. This man named Eutyches, not the one who fell out of the window in the Bible, thinks to himself, "Nestorian bad. We don't want that. We don't want some kind of separation or dividing wall between his humanity and divinity.” So, instead of a division, which was the problem of Nestorianism, Eutychianism ends up teaching a confusion, a mixture. So now there's only one nature in Christ. The union is such that his divinity and his humanity are mixed up, sort of like you have blue and yellow make green. You have colors coming together, and you end up with a tertium quid. That's Latin for “a third thing.” You end up with something else. Christ's humanity so united to his divinity that his humanity is no longer the same as our humanity. That was the problem with Eutychianism. You have the absorption of the human into the divine. So, you can think of Nestorianism removes the unity – this bridge. If you think of, you know, you're familiar with the bridge diagram with salvation – well, you can think of a bridge diagram with the two natures, divinity and humanity. You have Arianism that the bridge doesn't go all the way over to the God side. Docetism, it doesn't go all the way over to the humanity side. Nestorianism is sort of a gap in the middle. They don't quite meet. And Eutychianism is like they don't quite touch either side. 

The four errors are dealt with in four ecumenical councils, culminating in the Chalcedonian definition in 451. So just listen to this. I know it's dense to listen to it. It's dense enough to read it, but just listen to it, because this is the conclusion after all of this important theological wrangling. It describes Christ as one substance with the Father, as regards his Godhead, and at the same time of one substance with us, as regards his manhood. There's that term you may have heard before, homoousia – in both directions – one substance with the Father and one substance with us. Two natures. Like us in all respects, apart from sin, as regards his Godhead. Begotten of the Father before the ages, but as yet regards his manhood, begotten for us men and for our salvation. Of Mary, the virgin, the God-bearer. So, Chalcedon comes and affirms the theotokos. One and same Christ, Son, Lord, only begotten, recognized in two natures, and then listen to these four terms. This is critical: two natures without confusion, without change, without division, without separation. The distinction of the natures being in no way annulled by the union, but rather the characteristics of each nature preserved and coming together to form one person and subsistence, not as parted or separated into two persons, but one and the same, Son and only begotten, God, the Word, Lord Jesus Christ. That was the hard-fought conclusion in the early church. And none of these Reformers want to deny any of that. They're working within those parameters, but they understand some things in some different ways and see different dangers on each side. So, the Lutherans would see that the Calvinist view, they think, is too much Nestorian. I don't think it is. It's not a surprise. And the Reformed view would see some dangers of Eutychianism in the Lutheran view. 

So, let's try to understand where this is going. We've had question 47. Behind this question is about the ubiquity of Christ's body, which is why the answer says Christ is true man and true God in his human nature. So, this is saying we disagree with the Lutheran doctrine of ubiquity. In his human nature, he is not now on earth, but his divinity, majesty, grace, and spirit, he is never absent from us. Now, if you're just reading through that, you think, okay, yeah, that's good. Human nature not here. Divine nature is here. But then, with all that we just heard from Chalcedon, you might think, now wait a minute, how is that not the error of Nestorianism? How is that not separating the two natures? Did the Heidelberg Catechism answer the problem of the Lutheran ubiquity by saying, well, of course he's not here in his human nature, but in his divine nature. Is that the way to answer the question? Matthew 28, “I'm with you to the end of the age”; Acts 1, “I'm not here; I'm going up to heaven.” We just say, well, divine nature here, human nature not here. Sounds like that's what the catechism is saying, and how can they say that without pulling apart the two natures? Glad you asked. 

Question 48. If his humanity is not present wherever his divinity is, then aren't the two natures of Christ separated from each other? That was the objection that the Lutherans were making. Your theology is Nestorian. The two natures – aren't they separated if your answer to the question is to say his human nature is in heaven, and his divine nature is everywhere? So, in order to answer this question and understand what's behind this, to give you another term – you can see we only have two terms left – the communication of properties. What is a property? A property is what is proper to a nature. The Latin is “communication of idioms,” but that sounds like they're going to be puns or jokes or something. So, properties or attributes. What is proper to the human nature and to the divine nature? Because what is proper to the nature is proper to the person, but not necessarily proper across the natures, which is why we can sing a song that says, "God died for us,” which is not the same as saying the divine nature died. God, because the logos is the Son of God, divine Word, and so we're right to call Jesus Christ God, and therefore we can say God died for us. So, that is what is proper to the divine nature being predicated of the one person. God died for us. But that doesn't mean that the divine nature died, just like you can say Jesus took a nap in the boat. You would not say that the divine nature got sleepy or took a nap. One is a property of the human nature. Another is the property of the divine nature. But Lutherans and Reformed have a different way of understanding this communication of properties – what is proper to the divine nature and to the human nature – because right away you should be thinking, well ubiquity. Ubiquity is not proper to a human nature. You are not ubiquitous. Not even your mom is ubiquitous. You cannot be in more than one place, physically, at one time. Omnipresence and immensity is a property of divinity, not humanity. So, how do the Lutherans explain that then the human nature and the body of Christ can be ubiquitous? Well, they teach something called the magestic genus. Sounds like the best Trivial Pursuit edition. I don't know what genus they're on – “genus” here meaning “class” or type or category. So, they argue for this majesty of genus. What that means is they argue that when the human nature is joined to the divine nature, the human nature is made so majestic that some of the properties essential to the divine nature now become properties of the human nature. I’ll quote one leading Lutheran theologian from the 19th century. He said, "Though the human nature in the person of Christ remains truly human, yet all the divine properties and perfections and the honor and the glory thereto pertaining are truly communicated to his human nature, so that perfections which the divine nature has as essential, the human nature has as communicated attributes” – and here's the key – “such as omnipresence, omniscience, omnipotence.” So, this Lutheran theologian argues that when joined together, now the human nature possesses these attributes of omnipresence, omniscience, omnipotence. Therefore, it has been given a majestic classification unlike any other human body. Now Christ's body can be ubiquitous. Reformed theologians argued, by contrast, that the communication of properties cannot work like that – that for one thing to be proper to one means it is proper to that nature and cannot automatically be made proper of the other nature, that there are no essential properties of divinity that can be communicated to the divine [edit: human] nature. So, for example, the divine nature is uncreated. That is an essential part of being divine. The divine nature is uncreated. You can't make the human nature uncreated. And if they share them, then they're no longer a property, and you cannot communicate some and not the others. And they argued, Reformed theologians, that if the communication goes in one direction, why does it not go in the other direction, so that then the divine nature is taking upon itself the properties of flesh? And we end up with the errors of Eutychianism, where neither nature really retains its whole and distinct properties. Is it truly a human nature if it is immense and can be everywhere? Instead, all the properties of each nature remain distinct. Think about after Jesus’ resurrection – they go to the tomb, and the angel says what? He is not here. He's physically not in this location. So, according to his human nature, Christ did not know everything, because the human nature does not possess omniscience. Christ suffered in his human nature, because the human nature is passible – is able to suffer – where God as God cannot suffer. So, we can say, then, that Christ is in heaven according to his divine nature, which fills all in all, and according to his human nature, he is here on earth. And you say, "Well, that helps ever so slightly." 

But notice what question 48 says: divinity is not limited and is present everywhere. It is evident that Christ's divinity – here's the key language – is surely beyond the bounds of the humanity that he has taken on, but at the same time his divinity is in and remains personally united to his humanity. So, question 48 is trying to answer that Nestorian objection. If his humanity is not present where his divinity is, then aren't the two natures separated from each other? And the catechism says no, because they're not separated, but the divinity is not limited to the human nature. Now this is a category that you perhaps have not thought of before, but it is the teaching throughout the history of the church. This language there in the middle of 48 – his divinity is surely beyond the bounds – in the Latin version of the catechism, it's the word extra. Extra meaning “outside” or beyond the bounds of his humanity. This is what Calvin taught. Listen to this: “In this way, he was also the Son of Man in heaven, for the very same Christ, who according to the flesh dwelt as Son of Man on earth, was God in heaven. In this manner, he is said to have descended to that place according to his divinity, not because divinity left heaven to hide itself in the prison house of the body, but because even though it filled all things, still, in Christ’s very humanity, it dwelt bodily.” That it is, by nature, and in a certain way ineffable. Yeah, it is a little bit ineffable. 

Here's the point. You may remember a couple of years ago I referenced this when it comes to Christmas. Should we sing that hymn about “thou didst leave thy throne and thy kingly crown when thou camest to earth for me”? And I had little palpitations, but I looked in the Trinity Hymnal, and they changed it. Whew. They knew something about their theology. Yes, Christ came down. That is language common throughout the New Testament, but we ought not to say he left. If you say that, then you're saying, well, how is the whole universe being held together? How can the divine logos leave one place and come to another? So, the answer that the catechism gives is that the divinity exists beyond – it is not fully circumscribed within the humanity. So, this is a way of saying yes, the union is real. There is not a dividing wall. They are not existing in separate orbits, and yet the divinity has a life, you might say, that is outside or extra or beyond. Lutherans gave this a name, because they didn't like it. They called it the extracalvinisticum. They say this is just that doctrine that John Calvin taught. Well, other theologians recently have argued that it ought to be called the extracatholicum – that is, a Catholic doctrine. That is, the universal church has taught this, and scholars have shown that this doctrine was taught by Origen, Augustine, Cyril, Athanasius, Thomas Aquinas, John of Damascus, Gregory of Nyssa, Peter Lombard. For most of church history, it was an essential part of explaining how these two natures come together, how the logos takes on a human nature, and yet the divinity does not – God is not divested of divine attributes. To put it like this, in the incarnation, the Son of God did not cease to be what he had always been. He became what he was not, a man, without ceasing to be what he was. He continued to sustain the universe, to exercise his divine attributes with the Father and the Spirit. When Mary conceived a child by the power of the Holy Spirit, the divine nature did not undergo any essential change. And in fact, it's better to say the Son became incarnate than to say the divine nature took on human flesh, because it wasn't as if there was a divine nature in some heavenly closet that God took out, and then he got a human nature and put them together. It was the Son of God took on a human nature in coming to earth. 

So, the Son of God came down – we can use that language – but he did not leave heaven. This debate here with the Lutheran, as I alluded to, has led to some different conceptions of faith and reason, where Lutheran theology is more apt to say there's a mystery there, and yep, a human body that is ubiquitous seems like a contradiction, but there are contradictions. Reformed theologians have said we ought to see the alignment of faith and reason. There are certainly mysteries. This is one of those mysteries we cannot fully explain, but there's a difference between something that's suprarational and something that's irrational. And the Bible doesn't ask us to believe things that are contradictions – things beyond our full explanation, for sure, but not in themselves contradictions, and a human body that can be everywhere is not any longer a human body. It is a contradiction in terms. So, the answer to the question “where is Jesus?” – he is in heaven, and he is with you, because in his human nature he has ascended, and that body is in one place in heaven, and by his divinity, which exists beyond the bounds of his humanity, he can be with us always, to the end of the age. 

Let us finish, then – whew, glad there's not a 401 – with answer 49, which brings this to a point of comfort. How does this benefit us? In three ways. First, Christ's ascension benefits us because we have an advocate with the Father, Jesus Christ the righteous. Jesus in his sacrifice was once for all. The work of his sacrifice is complete, but don't think that his priestly work is complete, because as a priest – and we sang this in our hymns already – he continues to intercede for us. He continues to plead for us. He continues to bear his wounds for our sakes. So, his priestly work continues, that we have an advocate with the Father. Where is Jesus Christ, the righteous? He is at the Father's right hand, and he pleads for us. That's a great comfort. 

Second, the ascension benefits us, because it means that we now have our own flesh in heaven. The incarnation is perpetual. Jesus, at the right hand of God, is still a man – glorified body, but a body, a real human body like you and I have. And this is a guarantee that we will be there, too – that our heavenly bodies will one day be resurrected, that eternal life is not as disembodied souls, but as resurrected, material human bodies in God's presence forever. Christ's body is the first one there, but not the last. 

And third, Christ's ascension benefits us, because it means we are given the gift of the Holy Spirit. Jesus explained to his disciples, “It is to your advantage that I go away, for if I do not go away, the helper will not come to you. But if I go, I will send him to you.” This is not like getting the understudy. I think I had that years ago when I was visiting Trisha in England. We went to see Les Mis, and they announced that it was, I think, it was the understudy for Fantine, and you went wa wa wa. Turns out that the understudy in London is still pretty good. So, the Holy Spirit is not “I wish we had Jesus, but we get the Spirit, the understudy of Christ.” No, we have Christ himself. The Spirit is another helper, another paraclete, as Christ is a paraclete. And so, the Spirit is told to be the Spirit of Christ. And it means that when we are joined to Christ, we, too, are seated in the heavenly places. This is one of the benefits of understanding that Christ is seated at the right hand of God the Father. When we are joined by the Spirit to Christ, we are genuinely not citizens, ultimately, of this world. You have an address which is somewhere else with Jesus, and that will be in the next age when heaven comes to earth, but already now, joined to Christ, we dwell with him in glory above. So, if you ask Jesus into your heart, to use a non-biblical phrase that we can interpret in a biblical way, you are not just asking a good comforter, a good therapist, a good friend into your heart. You are desiring to be one with the very king of the universe, who sits on the throne in heaven. Christ in you – here's the seeming paradox – Christ in you is such good news, because Christ is not here, and everything that I just said. He's in heaven. So, “Christ in you” means you are lifted into the heavenly places with Christ. When we gaze into heaven, we know that there is a man there who is Lord of all. It's a wonder of the ascension, the perpetuity of the two natures in the one person. Sometimes we can just sort of – we don't really contemplate it and just think, well, yeah, he needed to be man so he could save us and do all of that, and now he sort of takes off that, and he’s back to being God as he always was. The incarnation continues. There is a literal man on the throne. God has granted all rule and power and authority and dominion to one who has the same nature as you and I have. That's staggering. You've heard me make this point, perhaps, before. I've wondered if there's some resonance here with Tolkien in Lord of the Rings, emphasizing that there would be a man to sit on Gondor's throne, when Elrond says, “The race of men is weak; there's no hope in men once more.” Well, Jesus Christ, the God-man, is exercising dominion. That king to sit on Gondor's throne, to have dominion and exercise, which was his from the very beginning, and being qualified through suffering, then all authority and in heaven on earth granted unto him. So, because of Christ's ascension, we know that the incarnation continues. Christ's humanity lives on in heaven. The Spirit lives in our hearts, and a fleshy, divine human being rules the universe. That's good news. Let's pray. 

Father in heaven, thank you for the many who have come before to help us think with carefulness and precision and categories. And may it be an exercise not in inflating us, let alone confusing us, but to expand us and give us new thoughts and new categories and new ways of marveling at all that you have done for us in Jesus, our once and coming king. We give thanks in his name. Amen.