Sermons, Articles, and Other Things

We may imagine that the short account of the ascension of Jesus here at the end of Luke’s Gospel suggests it was not very important. True, he gives another description of it at the beginning of his second work, the Book of Acts, but again his words about it are few. Yet the ascension of Jesus is a crucial biblical event: it was prophesied in the Old Testament, for example in Psalm 68:18 and Psalm 110, it was predicted by Jesus in John 6:62, and it was prayed for by Jesus in John 17 when he asked the Father to give to him the glory he had with the Father before the creation of the world. When gathered with them in the upper room on the same evening as his arrest Jesus had told the disciples that it would be better for them if he went away because then the Holy Spirit would come to live in them as the Comforter. The Saviour had mentioned that he was leaving them, a departure that involved him going to the Father’s house, which clearly indicated his ascension to glory. We can also see tha...

John the Baptist, the forerunner sent by God to announce the coming of Jesus as the Messiah, is standing with Andrew and probably with John, two of his disciples. They had become John’s followers as he served God in the important way of making spiritual preparation, through the means of the preaching of personal repentance, for the arrival of the Messiah, which meant that these disciples were expecting the Messiah to appear in the near future, and no doubt they were excited about what would happen then. On the previous day, John had also pointed to Jesus with a similar but longer description of Jesus as the Lamb of God who was taking away the sin of the world, which is a picture suggesting that Jesus was focussed on a specific task as the Saviour. What ideas would have gone through the mind of the Baptist’s disciples when they heard this title of Jesus? That will be the first detail that we will think about, the description of Jesus as the Lamb of God. Then we will consider the discove...