Romans 8:34

Romans 8:34

Mysteries in Religion The Ascension.

I. Christ's Ascension to the right hand of God is marvellous, because it is a sure token that heaven is a certain fixed place, and not a mere state. That bodily presence of the Saviour which the apostles handled is not here; it is elsewhere it is in heaven. This contradicts the notion of cultivated and speculative minds and humbles the reason. Philosophy considers it more rational to suppose that Almighty God, as a Spirit, is in every place, and in no one place more than another. What is meant by ascending? Philosophers will say there is no difference between down and up, as regards the sky; yet, whatever difficulties the word may occasion, we can hardly take upon us to decide that it is a mere popular expression, consistently with the reverence due to the Sacred Record. When we have deduced what we deduce by our reason from the study of visible nature, and then read what we read in God's inspired Word, and find the two apparently discordant, this is the feeling I think we ought to have in our minds: not an impatience to do what is beyond our powers, to weigh evidence, to sum up, balance, decide, and reconcile, to arbitrate between the two voices of God, but a sense of the utter nothingness of worms such as we are, of our plain and absolute incapacity to contemplate things as they really are, and perception of our emptiness before the great Vision of God.

II. Consider the doctrine which accompanies the fact of the Resurrection. Christ, we are told, has gone up on high "to present Himself before the face of God for us." Christ is within the veil. We must not search curiously what is His present office, what is meant by His pleading His sacrifice, and by His perpetual intercession for us. The Intercessor directs or stays the hand of the Unchangeable and Sovereign Governor of the world, being at once the meritorious cause and the earnest of the intercessory power of His brethren.

III. This departure of Christ and coming of the Holy Ghost leads our minds with great comfort to the thought of many lower dispensations of Providence towards us. He who according to His inscrutable will sent first His Co-equal Son, and then His Eternal Spirit, acts with deep counsel, which we may surely trust, when He sends from place to place those earthly instruments which carry on His purposes. This is a thought which is particularly soothing as regards the loss of friends; or of especially gifted men who seem in their day the earthly support of the Church. For what we know, their removal hence is as necessary for the furtherance of the very objects we have at heart as was the departure of our Saviour.

J. H. Newman, Parochial and Plain Sermons,vol. ii., p. 206.

References: Romans 8:34. R. Tuck, Christian World Pulpit,vol. xiii., p. 278; E. Johnson, Ibid.,vol. xxv., p. 282; A. D. Davidson, Lectures and Sermons,p. 55; Spurgeon, Evening by Evening,p. 112.Romans 8:35. Church of England Pulpit,vol. viii., p. 113; Parker, Christian World Pulpit,vol. xxix., p. 344; M. Rainsford, No Condemnation,pp. 205-26. Romans 8:36. Sermons for Boys and Girls,p. 44; Preacher's Monthly,vol. ii., p. 250.