November 9 Daily Devotional

Bible Reading:

Isaiah 64:1:

¹Oh that thou wouldest rend the heavens, that thou wouldest come down, that the mountains might flow down at thy presence....

Devotional:

The day of Ascension is a Divine memorial day!

So glorious because of our Saviour.

The work of Redemption that had to be accomplished on this earth was now finished. Not only His bearing the form of the servant. Not only the course of the Man of Sorrows. Not only the entering into eternal death. But also that sojourn of forty long days on this earth, in order to consecrate His Apostles to the holy, gigantic task which now awaited them.

These forty days were once again an offering of love on the part of Jesus.

The glory of heaven beckoned to Him. He was called and drawn toward the place at God's right hand in the heavens. There the crown awaited Him.

But yet He lingered. Yet He remained for days together in the sphere of this world. Not because the world attracted Him. On the contrary, between the risen Saviour and that world still submerged in misery, every tie of fellowship was severed. With respect to that world He had ceased to dwell in its midst. He had died unto it, and His Resurrection had restored Him not to that world but only to the circle of His saints.

This lingering on the earth for forty more days was rather something unnatural for Him. He belonged to it no more. He had become estranged from it, and it from Him. Even though He still tarried in it, that world would see Him no more. He would still be Himself, but outside of it. Belonging no more to it, but to a higher sphere, into which He had actually entered by His Resurrection.

But Jesus loved His disciples. The tragic parting from them in Gethsemane, the parting from Peter in the Court room, the parting from John on Golgotha, could not be the farewell. Not the world but they must see Him after His Resurrection. They must be initiated into their new relation to their Lord. Regenerated in His Resurrection itself, they must receive the apostolic anointing. They must be prepared for the transition into the new relation, when they would be alone on earth and their Master in heaven.

And to this end Jesus had also brought this last sacrifice of not ascending into heaven immediately after His Resurrection, but only weeks afterwards, and of foregoing during all these days the glory that awaited Him on God's Throne.

But this could not continue. It had to come to an end. It was a holy pause in His glorification, entered upon from love, but which had to be as short as possible.

It could not be, and could not be allowed to be, a continuous intercourse with His own during all those days. Then it would not have answered His purpose, then it would not have accustomed them to the parting that must follow. And so there was nothing but an appearance now and then, in order presently to withdraw Himself again. At first, more frequently; after that, more rarely; and, finally, the entire break—though again at Damascus and on Patmos He showed Himself for a fleeting moment.

And in between these, lies the final parting. The last meeting on the Mount of Olives, with Gethsemane at its foot, Jerusalem broadly spreading itself behind it, and, back of Jerusalem, Golgotha and the cave from whence He rose.

His last orders Jesus had given them. The moment of parting was now at hand. And then from the top of the Mount of Olives He lifted Himself from their midst, and ascended, so that they saw Him rise higher and higher until a cloud of light received Him out of their sight, and angels from the midst of it became manifest, who brought His disciples the parting word of comfort: "He is gone from you, but one day to return. One day the whole world shall be His."

Where those heavens are whither Jesus went, remains a mystery to us. We seek them above, and all Scripture tells us, and our own heart returns an echo to it, that the heavens of glory arch themselves above us.

It is to us an inborn necessity of soul to seek the Throne of God not around and with us, nor yet underneath us, but above. The heavens are God's Throne and the earth is His footstool. To those heavens we look up, from whence comes the light to us, where God's stars sparkle in the firmament, from whence the rain descends and waters the earth and spreads blessing all around us. But dimensions here do not count. The heavens of God are not of our materiality. They are not to be reckoned by our distances. They are not comprised in the measure of the finite.

One day they will disclose themselves to us where we did not surmise them to be. They will not be where we imagined them. But in unknown glory they will open their gates to us. And it is into this glory that when He ascended Jesus entered.

"Oh, that Thou wouldest rend the heavens!" exclaimed Isaiah (64:1) in great distress of soul, for taken in its deepest sense this was our misery, that by its sinful degeneracy our world was closed off from the heaven of God. The holy above; the unholy, round about us and in our own heart.

And then ever and anon a looking up above, to heaven, which seemed like brass, and whose closed windows and gates scarcely let our prayers pass through.

To that heaven we were disposed, for that heaven we were intended; only a life in communion with that heaven could add to our existence here on earth the luster which God intended.

We could not clinb up to those heavens in order to unlock their gates; all we could do was to look up to that heaven, gaze at it, and call to it and supplicate that God, Who alone could do it, would rend it, and disclose to us again the access to it.

And this prayer has been answered in Christ. First in that He descended from that heaven, and then, in that He ascended to that heaven.

By the latter even far more than by the former. For very surely, when Jesus was on earth, there was above Him always an opened heaven, and the angels of God ascended and descended above the Son of Man. But through Jesus' Ascension, the communion between heaven and earth has been established on a broad scale, durably and permanently.

He ascended not as He descended, but in Himself He took up our human nature. As the Son of God He came to us, as the Son of Man He entered heaven.

His Ascension is no break in the fellowship with His own, but rather a fastening forever of the tie that binds Him to His saints on earth.

Wonderfully mutual is this fellowship. He, our Head, and in Him our life hidden with God; and also He, our Saviour, taking up His abode in the hearts of His own and forever abiding near them with His Majesty, His Grace and His Spirit.

There is now no moment more of breaking off, far less of dissolution of the tie that binds earth to heaven, but in the holy mystery it is an ever continuing, living, holy outpouring of light and splendor, of power and mightiness from the High and Holy One toward us. And over against this, in an equally holy mystery, a ceaseless ascent of our faith, our love and our hope to the Throne of Glory.

By ascending up to heaven, Jesus has not become farther distant, but has come closer to us.

What now vibrates and lives and works is a fellowship between the King of Glory and His saints on earth, no more bound to the upper room, no more limited to a mountain in Galilee, but extending throughout this whole world as far as there are souls whom He has redeemed and saved, and who in supplication go out to Him.

It is now an invisible, unobservable, but nevertheless a powerful and systematic Divine regime which Christ as our Head makes operative in all the earth.

In the wilderness Satan showed Jesus the kingdoms of this world and showed Him in a dazzling light a diabolic rule over these kingdoms. This, Jesus refused, and for what He then refused, He now received, as the crown upon His Redemption-work, the spiritual and Divine government over all peoples and nations. Thus wondrously and majestically He brings to perfection in all parts of this world, that gradual preparation of spiritual conditions which will one day bring about the consummation, in order then to establish His eternal kingdom completely in this selfsame world from whence He ascended.

So have the heavens been rent, so have the windows and gates of heaven been opened, never to be closed again, nor even to be veiled.

He who now with his prayers still stands before a heaven of brass has nothing to attribute this to save his own unbelief and his own unspirituality.

But for him, for her, who believes, the heavens are opened, and from this opened heaven shines out into the darkness of this world and into the darkness of our own heart a soft, blessed glow of light, love and life. And the soul that is cherished by it already now "walks above" among God's saints, and with a joyful smile watches the hour approach, when having finished his earthly course, he, too, shall enter into that full glory.

The early Christians realized this, and, therefore, amid glad songs of jubilation, clothed in white garments, they carried to the grave their dead who had fallen asleep in Jesus.

We, at a farther distance from the Mount of Olives, follow other usages, only be it never with a less firm hope in the heart in behalf of our beloved departed.

* * * * * * *

This devotional classic offers 110 meditations on a single thought from Psalm 73: "As for me, it is good to be near to God." The author states, "The fellowship of being near unto God must become reality ... it must permeate and give color to our feeling, our perceptions, our sensations, our thinking, our imagining, our willing, our acting, our speaking. It must not stand as a foreign factor in our life, but it must be the passion that breathes throughout our whole existence."

The meditations reflect the blending of spiritual vigor with doctrinal loyalty so consistently expressed in the life of Abraham Kuyper. These are devotions with true substance, avoiding the extremes about which Kuyper adds a word of caution: "Stress in creedal confession, without drinking from the Living Fountain, runs dry in barren orthodoxy, just as truly as spiritual emotion, without clearness in confessional standards, makes one sink in the bog of sickly mysticism."

Abraham Kuyper (1837-1920) was a Dutch political leader and Calvinist theologian. Elected to parliament in 1874, he became Prime Minister in 1901 and served in that capacity until 1905. As a theologian, he revived a systematic, orthodox Calvinism. He founded the Free Reformed Church and the Free University of Amsterdam. His other works include Principles of Sacred Theology, Lectures on Calvinism, and The Work of the Holy Spirit

Further information about Abraham Kuyper's life can be seen in the translator's "Biographical Note"; further information about To Be Near Unto God can be Abraham Kuyper's "Preface" to that book.