The Hope of the Ages

Psalm of David, Psalm 24. The earth is the Lord's and the fullness thereof, the world and those who dwell therein. For He has founded it upon the seas and established it upon the rivers. Who shall ascend the hill of the Lord, and who shall stand in His holy place? He who has clean hands and a pure heart, who does not lift up his soul to that which is false and does not swear deceitfully, he will receive blessing from the Lord and righteousness from the God of his salvation.

Such is the generation of those who seek Him, who seek the face of God of Jacob. Lift up your heads, O gates, and be lifted up, O ancient doors, that the King of glory may come in. Who is the King of glory? The Lord, strong and mighty, the Lord, mighty in battle. Lift up your heads, O gates, and lift them up, O ancient doors, that the King of glory may come in.

Who is the King of glory? The Lord of hosts. He is the King of glory. Thank you for that reading. Those of you who have been in church previous times when I've led worship services will be aware that I have been working through the Book of Acts with you.

But today, I want to backpedal a little bit. I think we're about up to Acts chapter 10 or 11, but I wanna go back. And the reason for that is that there was something special about last Thursday. Anyone know what that was? Last Thursday?

Sorry? Ascension Day. I think it probably passed by here at Open House without any notice. You didn't have a church service Thursday night. When I was a kid, Thursday, Ascension Day, we went to church in the evening.

In some countries, it's a public holiday. So I wanna go back to Acts chapter one, if you would, please, in your Bible. Back to Acts chapter one and we'll focus this morning on the Ascension. Let me read to you from verse one of Acts chapter one through to verse 11. In the first book, O Theophilus, and he's talking about the Gospel of Luke here.

In the first book, O Theophilus, I have dealt with all that Jesus began to do and teach until the day when He was taken up after He had given command through the Holy Spirit to the apostles whom He had chosen. To them He presented Himself alive after His suffering by many proofs appearing to them during forty days and speaking about the kingdom of God. And while staying with them, He ordered them not to depart from Jerusalem, but to wait for the promise of the Father, which he said you heard from me, for John baptised with water, but you will be baptised with the Holy Spirit not many days from now. So when they had come together, they asked Him, Lord, will you at this time restore the kingdom to Israel? He said to them, it's 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 up 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. Over time, congregation of our Lord Jesus Christ, words sometimes get devalued, don't they? I'm thinking, for example, of the word awesome.

Now I don't know what it is you find awesome. For me, a lovely sunset, and I think God is awesome. An awesome sunset reflecting an awesome Creator. Maybe it's something else. I remember when that tsunami was in Japan and we saw the news clips, I thought that was awesome. This past week, I was watching some video clips on the news of the floods in Tari and that was pretty awesome.

You know, a while back, I gave someone directions to a street he was looking for. And when he had got the picture and he set off, he thanked me by saying awesome. And I thought, were my instructions that amazing that it struck him with awe? You've got to be kidding. Another word that's often devalued, congregation, is the word hope, isn't it?

To hope for something to happen these days is often little more than wishing that it might happen. So while we in New South Wales have had floods, for example, in Victoria, there are parts of the countryside that are very dry, almost drought conditions. So if you're a Victorian and someone says to you, do you think it'll rain? And you say, I hope so. Isn't that just really expressing a wish that there might be rain?

But there's no confidence in it that you will actually get rain. It's little more than a wish. It seems to me, congregation, that in our day and age, there is a crisis of hope that robs people of confidence about the future. Why are we seeing so many suicides? Why are so many people despairing of life?

Most counsellors realise that hope is crucial to life and it's when you lose hope that despair sets in. We see that on a personal level, don't we, on the level of individual lives. I've seen hopelessness in the eyes of a man who was dying and that man believed that when death comes, there's nothing, absolutely nothing afterwards. He believed that death is the end. And when people like that die, they lose all hope.

There's only hopelessness as they no longer see any future for themselves. We see hopelessness in society at large around us, underneath all the shallow frivolity of our day and age. We see it for example in health and medicine. We get a solution for some cancers and we did well finding some answers for age and then coronavirus came along and we've sort of come to terms with that. But before long there'll be something else.

Or there's the problem of the environment that causes despair for so many people these days. A fear of flooding of coastal cities as polar ice caps melt. Or think of the ongoing conflicts in some parts of the world. We've been praying for the war in The Ukraine for ages, for the situation in Gaza, and it all just seems utterly hopeless. And so we despair.

We need hope. We need to be able to see light at the end of the tunnel, particularly when we're afflicted, when we're in a situation where we're struggling to make sense of things. But friends, the hope that sustains us, it's got to be more than wishful thinking. It's got to be more than saying it's like sort of when we're hoping for rain. This morning, I want to point you to a powerful hope in our text that flows out of the Ascension of Jesus.

When you think about it as we're going to do in the next little while, our text is full of hope. It's full of hope for individuals. It was full of offers of hope for our society, for the human race. In fact, let me put it even more strongly. The words that the angel spoke to the disciples and that summed up all the hope we will ever need.

It's the hope of the church. It's the hope of the ages, and that hope is yours this morning to grasp hold of and to take with you into this new week. But I want you to imagine for a moment that you're in putting yourself in the shoes of those men that are on the mountain with Jesus. Can you imagine that right at that moment, there's not much hope? I mean, Jesus has just been taken from them.

And I can understand that at the moment, there would be a sense of despair almost. They watched Jesus intently ascending before their very eyes and that threatened their hopes. It must have hit them like a ton of bricks. Jesus is gone. They'd had that sense of hopelessness earlier, hadn't they, at His death and burial.

Remember the men on the way to Emmaus struggling with the fact that Jesus had gone. There'd been rumours of resurrection. They said, we had hoped that He was the Messiah, that Jesus was dead. Hope was gone. And then they met the resurrected Jesus, and they were filled with renewed hope.

But now as they're here on that mountaintop, they're separated from Him yet once again. And I can imagine them asking themselves about the future. What now? They're standing there staring at the clouds thinking about the fact that Jesus is gone. This is it.

And that's why those men in white robes, those angels came with that message. And that message, friends, is a message of hope. It's a message to do with a future that is meaningful, rich with meaning. Why do you stand here looking into the sky? This same Jesus who has been taken from you into heaven will come back in the same way in which you've seen Him go into heaven.

So they're talking about Jesus, but did you notice the emphasis? Put your Bible open. Have a look at it again. They're saying this same Jesus, and they're saying He's gonna come back in the same way visibly and with the clouds. And the Bible ends with that in the Book of Revelation chapter one verse seven.

Look, He's coming with the clouds and every eye will see Him. In other words, hey, folks, it's not the end. It's not over yet, not by a long shot. This same Jesus will come back in the same way, and that's the hope filled message that I wanna share with you this morning.

Can you see, friends, that this is such a strong, powerful hope? It's not a pious wish. The biblical hope of the future stands in total contrast to so much hope in the world today. I mean, you can talk about health and medicine and ask, will they find a cure for cancer? Well, I hope so.

You can talk about the environment and ask the question, will they be able to deal with climate change? Well, we hope so. You can talk about world conflict. Will there be peace in The Middle East? Well, we hope so.

We want those things to happen, but it's just a wish. At the end, you've got no guarantees. No one knows. And then in contrast this morning, our text holds out to us this total certainty about the future. Jesus ascended.

His departure from this world is temporary. He's coming back. In other words, this is a reminder to us as Christians that we're living in the in between times. We live between the first coming of Jesus and the second coming of Jesus. And that not only gives us some good insights into the life and the work of Jesus, but that also gives us a wonderfully reassuring insight into our history.

This hope, congregation, that this same Jesus will return in the same way is something that over the years I've found so wonderfully helpful. It means that my life is not meaningless. It's not meaningless when I have to deal with a crisis. It means your life is not meaningless, and the things that happen maybe again this week are not meaningless. All the events in the world around us, those events are not meaningless and filling us with despair.

It's just not true as some people teach that history is just an endless continuation of cycles. We're not just doomed to go round and round in circles. History is moving on, and it's moving on to that great moment when Jesus is gonna return on the clouds. It's striking, congregation, how that message of the angels coloured the thinking of the early church. The hope of Christ's return is something that is very, very strong throughout the writings of the New Testament.

It became, as it were, the driving force that motivated Christians in their daily life and their work. Jesus is coming again as He went and that produced a sense of urgency for them. An example of that, you might like to have a look at that when you get home, read through Thessalonians, Paul's first letter to them. Because the Christians there were afraid they'd missed out on the return of Jesus. They thought, what if Jesus has secretly returned and we don't know about it?

And what about those of our loved ones who have already died? They're missing out on the return of Jesus. And so Paul instructs those Thessalonians about this hope, and he tells them they will see it happen. And those who died, they're not gonna miss out. In fact, they're gonna be the first ones to see Jesus return.

And then how does Paul wind all of that up in Thessalonians? He says, therefore, comfort one another with these words, with this hope. Surely, congregation, this is a key reason for hopelessness and despair in the lives of so many, many people today. Return of Jesus is not on their agenda. Your neighbours are ignorant of it.

If Christ Jesus is not coming again, then ultimately, I've got nothing to live for. Death will be the end. I've got nothing to die for either. Nothing but the fleeting passing treasures, moments of enjoyment that this world gives us. The early Christians had hope, a strong hope, not just wishful thinking.

They had hope because they lived with one eye on the clouds. And that's the way in which you and I ought to live as we go into another week to serve our God, not with a feeble kind of wishful thinking, an iffy kind of thing, but instead to hang on to this hope that is like an anchor for our souls in life's storms and in the turmoils that so often beset us. I can imagine, friends, this morning that maybe some of you are thinking, John, you're putting that all a little bit too strongly. How dare you say this morning that life is ultimately meaningless apart from the Ascension of Jesus. Is it really so that everything is hopeless if this message of the angels is not true?

Well, if you'll bear with me this morning, let me say two things. First of all, there are certainly many non Christians who are not exactly wallowing in despair. If you speak to the average Aussie in the street, they'll tell you that they live in hope. Big question is though, what's the content of their hope? Because you see the problem is there are many false hopes.

Many people have false hopes that drugs will bring them happiness or maybe money. I remember a man many years ago who lived for years with the false hope of quick riches dragged on and on. He'd been involved in a process of litigation and he was certain he was going to win. His lawyers had told him that he had a watertight case for a huge payout. And so he lived his life making his plans in the light of that hope.

The trouble is the case went against him and he had to pay costs and he went bankrupt. False hope. And there can be false religious hope too. The hope that you can make it with God by your own efforts. The hope, congregation, that a benevolent God will just smile and grin and let everybody into His new creation anyway.

The hope that was given to the disciples is not a false hope. It's a sure and certain hope. There's a second thing that we need to realise this morning if we wanna see how strong this hope is. To get a handle on that, we need to understand this morning what really happened here on the mountain in Acts chapter one. What happened in the Ascension?

Because this wasn't just a matter of Jesus saying, well, I finished my work and I'm going home again to heaven. Now there's a couple of important things that stand out about the Ascension. The first is one that we're inclined to overlook and even to get wrong as Christians. I've met many Christians, friends, who have this tendency to think of Jesus here in Acts one ascending as God. And so Ascension Day is about the Son of God, the second person of the Trinity returning to heaven.

He came from heaven that first Christmas. He laid aside His glory. He became human and then He died, but now He returns as the glorious Son of God. Okay, that's fine up to a point, but please don't overlook this: that on that mountaintop, Jesus also stands there as the Son of Man.

His humanity is still intact, and many Christians forget that. He ascended as someone who in his humanity is totally like us. After His death, Jesus didn't somehow cease to be human. His bodily resurrection proves it. And so there so He's there as the human being.

As a human being, He ascends into heaven. Of course, we know that Jesus in His humanity after the resurrection was also different. I mean, He could suddenly appear in a room, and I can't do that. Be at one place and then suddenly somewhere else. I wouldn't even try.

But the point is, congregation, that we can be encouraged by the fact that our humanity has ascended into heaven, that you'll fill us with hope. Humanity has gone into the presence of God. It's as if heaven and earth are a little closer together again. It's not as if heaven is now so remote and formidable. Heaven is now the place where my older Brother, your older Brother already is.

Do you see how that helps us to understand why these words of the angel offer so much hope? Sure, they tell us that Jesus is gonna return as He went, but why is He gonna do that? Why is He coming back? It's in order to bring us to be with Him in that wonderful place where He already is. Paul says, we who are still alive will be caught up in the clouds to meet the Lord in the air, and we will be with the Lord for ever.

Jesus has gone to prepare a place for you. It's a wonderful hope, congregation. Jesus' bodily Ascension is a preparation for your ascension one day. We live in a world, congregation, where life is tough. Some of us here this morning have experienced that toughness of life, health issues, disappointments in family relationships.

If you haven't struggled with those sort of issues, stay tuned. You will one day sooner or later. But in and through all of that, we have this message of hope for the future that the same Jesus will return in the same way, and that's a message about your future. What happened to Jesus is gonna happen to you. You will ascend to be with Him.

Jesus has guaranteed that here in Acts chapter one. That's why I said that if you don't have the hope of Jesus in your life, then ultimately, life is meaningless. So sad, too bad. When all is said and done, you then have nothing to comfort you, and life becomes a comfortless question mark.

You and I may and we must live with one eye on the clouds of heaven. For Christians, that's the only way to live. Looking for Jesus's return is the only way to die. There's a second aspect to the Ascension that we need to keep in mind too this morning if we want to understand this hope. The Ascension of Jesus, brothers and sisters in Christ, was not just a homecoming for Jesus.

It's not just to mark the end of His work and that He's now resting in heaven. Quite to the contrary, Jesus ascended into heaven to do some work, to begin the next phase of His great work. And that's why in the Bible, the Ascension is sometimes pictured as a kind of a coronation. Jesus rises from the earth to ascend where? Not just to heaven, but to the throne room of heaven.

It's why we read Psalm 24 this morning. That's not just a song that was sung when Israel's kings were crowned. It's a prophetic psalm about the Christ seated on His throne. Who is the King of glory? Not Israel's kings, the Lord strong and mighty.

Let me remind you of a verse from Hebrews chapter one verse three. After He had provided purification for sins, He sat down at the right hand of the majesty in heaven. That, friends, is the throne of the universe. That makes the image of Jesus ascending very meaningful. He didn't just disappear.

He didn't just go home. He went there to take up the most exalted position in the cosmos. Think of what that does for our understanding of our Christian hope. Imagine that you're going on a cruise ship and some of you have done that. But imagine that the cruise ship you were on doesn't have anybody at the steering wheel.

Nobody at the helm of the ship, it just drifts aimlessly. Or maybe there's someone at the helm of the ship who is totally incompetent. If you knew there was no one at the helm of the ship or somebody who was incompetent, who didn't have a captain's licence, would you be hopeful that the ocean liner would go where it was supposed to go? Well, if that doesn't inspire you, neither does it inspire us with hope if we know that there is no one at the controls of the universe. And isn't that the way many of our neighbours live these days?

Life is just chance. People talk about karma, fate, totally impersonal. Brothers and sisters, life is not just blind chance. Then our hope is just reduced to a pious wish. I hope there's meaning in life.

Now we know this morning Jesus ascended to heaven to reign as Lord of lords and King of kings, as the one who said all authority in heaven and on earth has been given to me. And so His Ascension means that He so guides history so that it will climax in that great event of His return. So friends, when I have trouble fitting together the bits of the jigsaw puzzle that make up my life, it's so comforting for me to know that Jesus is in control and He's putting the pieces of the puzzle of my life together. Leads us to one other important concept this morning that we need to think about and that is this hope is not for us an escape from reality. I think there are many forms of hope this morning that are escapist.

The hope of happiness from drugs, hope with a big win in the lottery. Those hopes can leave people living in an unreal world with unreal expectations. But those kinds of hopes, they're escapist forms of hope. In the light of what we've been saying, congregation, it is so obvious that Jesus has not deserted the world. He didn't leave that Ascension Mountain in because He'd given up.

I heard one Christian once who had that view of things: that Jesus tried to bring in the kingdom. But when they crucified Jesus, then He rose again and in desperation went to heaven and left the church to try things out where He hadn't succeeded. That's not the way it is. The last words that Jesus spoke before His departure show His concern for the world and that His victory over the world will be achieved. His final words before Ascension had world embracing implications.

Jesus says to His disciples, you shall be My witnesses. Where? Jerusalem, all of Judea, Samaria, and where else? To the ends of the earth. That's the scope in which Jesus now works as the ascended Lord.

He leaves, but His love doesn't leave. He who loved the world so much enough to die for it still makes that world the object of His care, but now He commissions His church, His disciples to work through them. God makes disciples of all nations. In other words, congregation, Jesus doesn't leave to give up on the world, but He shows His concern in a new way, and that's through you and through me, through His church gathered here this morning. Makes us realise this morning that there are either of two opposite mistakes we can make.

On the one hand, we can get so caught up with life here and now that we see nothing but our own narrow worldview of things and just this present moment. They don't see the hope that the Ascension brings to Jesus in a cosmic scale, gonna renew all things. When our focus is just on our own little bit of turf and our own life, then it's a little bit like a poem I came across. If your nose is close to the grindstone rough and you hold it down there long enough, in time you'll say there's no such thing as brooks that babble and birds that sing. These three will all your world comprise, just you, the stone, and your old nose.

That's the way many people live, congregation, today. Millions of our Aussies live that way, and we as Christians sometimes get sucked into it. But all we see is our own little world, and for some people, that's all they want to see. The problems of this world, well, we'll look no further than just our human solutions. United Nations will sort out the wars.

Scientists will solve the environmental issues. Doctors will keep us alive for as long as possible. And hey, Jesus comes and He gives us a different perspective. He tells His disciples not only to keep looking up, but also not to look at their own little lives, but to look at the world around them. One eye on the clouds, the other eye on winning the world for Jesus because He is the hope of the ages and the hope of this world.

On the other hand, congregation, we mustn't go to the other extreme either that we kind of just withdraw sitting around waiting for Jesus, and I think that should be obvious from what I've just said. Some of the Christians, you know, in Thessalonica did that. Just wanting to sit there and just wait for Jesus to return, and some of them even stopped working. And so Paul had to rebuke them and said, you don't work, you don't eat. It's so easy for us to treat our Christian hope as a way of escape, and people have fled into monasteries.

Hey, brothers and sisters, it's wrong for us to take that attitude. Again, I think of a Christian pastor who once said to me, John, we as Christians shouldn't be too worried about the world. Let the world rot. Jesus is coming to renew it all one day anyway. And so we kind of withdraw into our little holy huddles, our Christian ghettos.

Let the world perish. No. Jesus says, one eye on the clouds and the other eye on reaching the world around us. Jesus calls on us this morning, congregation, to hold on to that hope that He spelled out for us in His Ascension and return, but at the same time, He calls us to involve us, to be His witnesses in words and in deeds, to prepare others too for that great climax at the end of history. I want to say to you, brothers and sisters, this morning that as you go out of church here, out those doors, you're going back into a world in which there is a huge amount of hopelessness and despair.

But you're also going out the doors here into this world as people who have that sure and certain hope that Jesus is on the throne of the universe and He's returning. May the Lord give us this coming week opportunities to be beacons of hope in this lost world in which we find ourselves. Let me lead you in prayer. Father, we thank you for the wonderful hope we have and we think of the words of the Book of Hebrews that the hope we have is like an anchor for our souls. It keeps us steady and firm in the turmoils of life.

Father, thank you that that's been the hope of so many of us here this morning who've had to cope with difficult circumstances in life, with broken relationships, with shattered health, with dreams that are not going to come true for earthly things. And Father, we thank you that as we fix our eyes on Jesus, we see someone who is holding the controls of the universe in His nail scarred hands. And thank you, Father, that because of that, our future is absolutely sure and certain that in life and death, our only comfort is the Lord Jesus Christ, His doing, His dying and His victory. Thank you in His name. Amen.