Luke 24:51

Luke 24:51. While he blessed them. Not after, but during this benediction with uplifted hands.

He parted from them. This may mean only: He went a little distance from them, but it is better to understand it of the first separation made by His Ascension.

And was carried up into heaven. The tense of the original is picturesque and indicates a continued process, a gradual going up out of their sight. Comp. the more detailed account, Acts 1:9-11. The body of our Lord was actually lifted up towards the visible heavens. Yet in view of the repeated allusions to His position in glory, it is doubtful whether this exhausts the meaning. Without asserting that heaven is a place, ‘nothing hinders us, on the position of Scripture, from supposing a locality of the creation where God permits His glory to be seen more immediately than anywhere else, and to conceive our Lord as repairing directly thither' (Van Oosterzee). Laws of gravitation, from the nature of the case, have nothing to do with this fact. Equally useless are the various theories suggested to support the dogma of the ubiquity of Christ's body. Christ's presence in heaven implies corporeal absence from earth. Yet the withdrawal of His circumscribed local presence was the condition of His spiritual real or dynamic omnipresence in His Church (Matthew 28:20, ‘lo, I am with you always'). His ascension is not His separation from His people, but the ascension of His throne and the beginning of His reign as the head of the Church which ‘is His body, the fulness of Him that filleth all in all' (Ephesians 1:23).