Pleasing Meditations

For Adoration of Christ April 2024, I want to think about four major things the Apostles’ Creed confesses to be true about the Lord Jesus Christ. This ancient Creed, common to all Christian denominations, gives us glorious doctrine intended to fuel our worship. May Christ be exalted!

Our Jesus was humble and humiliated in life and in death. But He is no longer dead and no longer humiliated.

His God and Father raised him up, He loosed the pains of death from Him, because it was not possible that He should be held by the grave (Acts 2:24).

It was not possible.

Remember Paul’s logic in Ephesians 4:7-10? He quotes from Psalm 68, and he says that the only way for Jesus Christ to be the one who has ascended on high is if He is first the one who descended to the lowest place in humiliation. And that He did!

He who was humiliated is now He who is exalted.

He was exalted, He is exalted, He will be forevermore exalted (WLC 51-56, WSC 28).

His exaltation begins on the “third day,” on resurrection Sunday. Jesus Christ rose again from the dead. It is a miracle as yet without compare. Dead men do not regularly rise from the grave. But even when the gospels tell us of Jesus performing a mighty work to raise Lazarus or the widow of Nain’s son, those who are returned to life are still possessors of ordinary human life. They will one day die. Eventually, Lazarus returned to the grave.

But Jesus rose in resurrection life. He rose as the “firstfruits of those who have fallen asleep” in the sleep of death (1 Corinthians 15:20). He rose in a New Creation body, in a body like the one we too will one day have in Him (1 Corinthians 15:49).

The body of Jesus is humanity as it is intended to be. He still has the human body He was born in, but that body has been transformed in the resurrection. And we should marvel at this reality. His holy body still bears the blessed scars of His crucifixion (John 20:27). His pierced hands and riven side are exalted realities we Christians will one day see, not by faith, but by sight. His followers will know Him and recognize Him.

Jesus defeated death by death. The grave had no power over Him. It was impossible for Him to be bound in the cords of Sheol. Hades could not hold Him. He rose in exalted resurrection.

This is good news. Because if Jesus did not rise from the grave, if He was just a great teacher who stayed dead, then we are a people without hope. There is no justification for sinners, no forgiveness, no atonement, no final sacrifice. If Jesus remained dead, it would not be finished. Grace would not be ours (1 Corinthians 15:17).

Thank the Lord that in Christ raised we have justification, forgiveness, and atoning sacrifice. As He cried on the cross, so the resurrection proclaims: “It is finished” (John 19:30).

With Christ resurrected, we have a propitiation for all our sins. And more, we have an Advocate with the Father (1 John 2:1-2).

Because He “ascended into heaven.”

The Eternal Son, inseparably united in the hypostatic union to a human body, ascended into heaven. This is our Jesus. He was resurrected in glory, glory unlike our bodies have now. But there is a human being ascended in heaven, right now. I don’t just mean a a human soul, or even the likes of Enoch or Elijah. Jesus, our faithful elder brother (Hebrews 2:11), bears humanity just like our still and He bears it made perfect in heaven. Where Jesus has now gone, we have a claim in Him. He is most truly the forerunner of our faith (Hebrews 6:27) and the sure and steadfast anchor for our soul (Hebrews 6:19).

It is a good thing that He ascended. It is to our great benefit that He went. His glorious exaltation is of such blessed benefit to you and to me.

He went to prepare a place for us (John 14:3). He went so that he might send the Helper, whom He poured out on the Day of Pentecost (John 16:7, Acts 2:33). He went to intercede for us (Romans 8:34). He went to take a seat at His Father’s right hand, seated in power in the high heavenly places “far above all rule and authority and power and dominion, and above every name that is named, not only in this age but also in the one to come” (Ephesians 1:20-21). Even now, God has put all things under Jesus’ feet, just as He has given Jesus to be the head of the Church (Ephesians 1:22).

Not only was He exalted in history, when He rose victorious over the grave. He remains exalted now. He is exalted right now, and He will be exalted still more in days to come. As we will contemplate next time, He went, ascending, leaving the same way He will return (Acts 1:11).

The Lord Jesus Christ is all-glorious, worthy “to receive power and riches and wisdom, and strength and honor and glory and blessing!” (Revelation 5:12). There is none like Him.

That is why Paul soars to singing theology in Philippians 2. The Son was humble, but the Humiliated Christ offered up a pleasing sacrifice to His Father. “Therefore God has highly exalted him and bestowed on him the name that is above every name, so that at the name of Jesus every knee should bow, in heaven and on earth and under the earth, and every tongue confess that Jesus Christ is Lord, to the glory of God the Father” (Philippians 2:9-11).

He who descended to the deepest depths, is now eternally exalted to the highest heavens!

The name of Jesus is exalted above every name.

Let us then adore Christ!

A Psalm for the Adoration of the Exalted Christ: