How many sermons have you heard in your life that focused on the ascension of Christ? Yet, we must know why it is so important for every day life in the church.
Michael Horton (People and Place, the chapter, “Real Presence, Real Absence”):
. . . one problem in the history of interpretation has been to treat the ascension as little more than a dazzling exclamation point for the resurrection rather than as a new event in its own right. The conflation of resurrection and ascension “puts in jeopardy the continuity between our present world and the higher places of the new order established by God in Christ,” says Farrow.
The ascension is an event in its own right. It is when Christ ascended to the right hand of the Father, that the Spirit was gifted by the Father to the Son, and the Spirit was bestowed by the Son to the Church.
. . . The fulfillment of the Great Commission takes place in the power of the Spirit. The hidden reality revealed publicly by Pentecost is that the ascended Christ has now asked the Father to fulfill his promise, had received the Spirit for his people, and had now poured him out on the church so that the messianic age begun in the resurrection of Christ might catch up in its flow those who are united to him by participation in the one Spirit (Sinclair Ferguson, The Holy Spirit, 59-60).
