PERSONAL fellowship with our Savior is a mystery, even as among us there is mystery in all fellowship with those who are no more on earth, or with those who on earth live far apart from us. So in our fellowship with our Savior there lacks that “seeing and hearing and handling of the Word of life” in which, at the beginning of his first epistle, St. John so greatly rejoices. It is now, as Paul says, a knowing of Christ “no longer after the flesh”. It is indeed sacred intercourse with the Mediator, but in hidden fellowship. A life with Him in the representation; in deepest apperception of soul; in the consciousness of our self-perception, which is not understood.
That experience of Jesus’ nearness, or of your soul’s approach to Him, is quickened in very different ways, mostly so that you can give no account of it.
At one time reading and meditating on the Word will make you feel, you know not how, as though your Savior were close by you. So in prayer this sacred hiddenness will take hold of you. At another time it will be to you in the gathering of the faithful as though the love of Christ were consuming your soul. At still another time it will be to you in the fellowship with saints as though you came close by your Savior. There are those who experience the richness of this enjoyment in solitude rather than elsewhere. Yea, even in a dream that sacred presence can stand before us, and His word be overheard by us.
Even this does not exhaust the manysided form of this holy fellowship. For while all these experiences of soul tend more or less to enjoy such blessed fellowship in the representation, there is also a spiritual fellowship with the Mediator when He comes and makes His abode with us, or as the Vine causes His vital power to operate in the branches, or as it becomes with the child of God: “No longer I live, but Christ lives in me.”
For then there is no fellowship through representation, but fellowship with your Savior in the root of the higher life.
The becoming aware that you are one planting with Him. Feeling the drawing of the conjunctions that bind you as member to the body of Christ. Feeling the throb within you of the life-blood that courses through the whole body of the Lord.
But, however broad and many-sided that fellowship-life with the Savior may be, His ascension into heaven intends still something else.
When He ascends into heaven, He goes away from you.
Thus His ascension by itself is no granting, but breaking of fellowship. No approach toward you; but separation from you.
That ascension into heaven, not in fantasy, but in reality, actually puts between Jesus and us an immeasurable distance; it is a robbing of His personal fellowship; a separation which gives rise to the feeling of sadness, and which already for centuries finds its naive echo in the childlike moan: “O, if Jesus were yet on earth!”
True, God’s child does not say this. They who have become spiritually-minded know that this separation had to come. That it could not be obviated. That it has abundantly been made good to us. And that, when the drama of this dispensation shall be ended, it shall bear still so much richer fruit. Even so, the sad side of that separation must needs be considered.
The angels truly comforted the apostles, saying: “Why stand ye gazing up into heaven? This same Jesus, which is taken up into heaven, shall so come in like manner as ye have seen him go into heaven” (Acts 1:11). But for all that the apostles have felt it, have lived through it, have given an account of it, that from now on they would miss what had been allowed them thus far, be it that they received in exchange, O, so much, of what thus far they had been deprived.
And it must still be confessed: “If the choice were ours, to have Jesus back, as the apostles had Him with them in their boat on Genesareth’s sea, and lack what we now possess; or to keep what we now have, while missing fellowship with Him after the flesh”, the naïve child might wish that Jesus were still on earth, but he who knows Him spiritually would not accept the exchange.
But herein lurked a danger. The danger that we would so represent the matter to ourselves, as though from the nature of the case it had to be either the one or the other, and that we do not perceive in ourselves that mighty working of the faith, which says: “No, what my soul desires and my deepest longing for delight calls for is, no exchange, no choice, but the possession of both.”
Not Jesus only as at Sichar He met the Samaritan woman, and not merely a fellowship with my Mediator which, as at present, remains mystical only, but some time, in the hour appointed of God, that full, that all-sufficing, that perfect fellowship, which then renders that mystic communion yet more abundant, and at the same time permits us to see His glory face to face.
So God’s angels desired it, and so the apostles of the Lord set us the pace.
Now suffer the loss of Jesus’ bodily presence, but at once fix the eye upon the fact that once He shall return bodily.
Thus the angels.
And as a yea and amen to the apostolic supplication: “Come, Lord Jesus, yea come quickly,” and the apostolic note of jubilation: “We shall see him as he is.”
Between these lies the dying.
When God’s child has the longing to depart and to be with Christ. This, of course, indicates that in the middle state on which, after dying, we enter, and which shall only end with the resurrection of the flesh, a closer, a more intimate, another fellowship with Jesus shall be our portion than was possible here on earth.
But even this fellowship may not be the limit of our desires.
Not just after dying, but only after Jesus’ return upon the clouds, does our hope find its consummation.
Then as it shall be: “A fellowship with the Mediator not after the spirit only, but also after the flesh; a fellowship with Him as face to face in the degree and state of glorification.
“Not with the Man of sorrows, but with the King of glory.”
Therefore meditation on Jesus’ ascension into heaven is so needful.
For so long as the soul is satisfied with less, than God has declared unto her in His promises, she puts her ideal too low, takes merely a part of God’s promises pro memorie, and separates what God hath joined together.
One then satisfies himself with the spiritual, estimates that spiritual as the all in all; and has no deeper longing in his heart, that goes out beyond that spiritual.
And of course, then there comes something of a pining away in our faith.
For, when that spiritual is the all in all, and our ideal reaches no further, why then the incarnation? Did not a David and an Isaiah have spiritual fellowship?
Why then that going up and down the land, those three long years? Why then the resurrection? Why all that appearing in the flesh?
Then all this becomes merely a going onward, without an entering into the heavens.
And so it comes, that so many a child of God with the sponge of his spiritual onesidedness wipes out half of his world of faith.
Then he imagines Jesus to himself as a spirit. He does not count with the fact, that our Savior has borne into heaven, through the veil, our human nature, after soul and body both. And for himself he desires nothing more and nothing higher, than once to depart, and be with Jesus.
It is, as though correcting God in His counsel, he muses within himself: “O, if God but grant me the spiritual, He may keep that glory for Himself. The longing of my soul does not stretch out to this. Of all this I have no need.”
And therefore the Scripture admonishes you every time again and so clearly, that you outline to yourself that ascension of Jesus into heaven as an actual departure from this earth, a real going upward, a passing through the heavens, and a going back of the veil, into the sanctuary.
Not as a representation, but because it so is.
That in lifting up your thoughts on high, you shall as it were see and know, that there your Savior now lives in our nature, and glorifies that nature.
That thus in heaven, seated at the right hand of God, He awaits and abides the hour, known only to the Father, when the fulness shall begin, and once more bodily He shall come back to this earth.
And that He is there, not for His own sake, but for ours, as our forerunner. He the firstling, that presently we should follow Him. Till we rise from our graves, and for us glory begins.
All that is man and partaker of human nature, calls in behalf of his existence, according to God’s ordinance for three things: for a soul that is pure, for a body that is glorious, and for a world that is free from curse.
For Adam there was first that world; then from that world God created his body; and in that body He created the pure soul.
But with Jesus it is the other way.
He is conceived of the Holy Ghost, and so there is first the pure, spotless soul, while after the body He is to be the Man of sorrows, subject to the weaknesses of our fallen nature.
Then in the resurrection the dust separates itself from that body, and the pure soul obtains her glorious body.
And now it tarries, and waits for the third, that that glorious body shall also obtain back again its glorified world, and that comes with Jesus’ return upon the clouds.
And this is to us the wondrousness, that now there is a Mediator, Who has fellowship with our nature in a pure soul and in a glorified body, the whiles the world is not yet renewed, and the glory has not yet broken through in it.
It is Jesus’ body, wherein at present that glorious world rests as in embryo. Our life is hid with Christ in God.
But once that mystery also discloses itself.
And then shall be the consummation.
When the ascension shall have received its complement in the regeneration of the whole universe (Matt. 19:28).
Blessed is he, who shall enter into this glory!
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