The stages of that departure are not distinguished. They are threefold
in fact--the death, the resurrection, the ascension, and in all three
we have the majestic, spontaneous energy of Christ as their cause.
There was a voluntary death, I have so often had occasion to insist
upon that, in the course of these sermons, that I do not need to dwell
upon it now. Let me remind you only how distinctly and in what various
forms that thought is presented to us in the Scriptures. We have our
Lord's own words about His having 'power to lay down His life.' We have
in the story of the Passion hints that seem to suggest that His
relation to death, to which He is about to bow His head, was altogether
different from that of ours. For instance, we read: 'Into Thy hands I
_commend_ My Spirit'; and 'He _gave up_ the Spirit.' We have hints of a
similar nature in the very swiftness of His death and unexpected
brevity of His suffering, to be accounted for by no natural result of
the physical process of crucifixion. The fact is that Jesus Christ is
the Lord of death, and was so even when He seemed to be its Servant,
and that He never showed Himself more completely the Prince of Life and
the Conqueror of Death than when He gave up His life and died, not
because He must, but because He would. There is a scene in a modern
book of fiction of a man sitting on a rock and the ocean stretching
round him. It reaches high upon his breast, but it threatens not his
life, till he, sitting there in his calm, bows his head beneath the
wave and lets it roll over him. So Christ willed to die, and died
because He willed.
There was also a voluntary resurrection by His own power; for although
Scripture sometimes represents His rising again from the dead as being
the Father's attestation of the Son's finished work, it also represents
it as being, in accordance with His own claim of 'power to lay down My
life, and to take it again,' the Son's triumphant egress from the
prison into which, for the moment, He willed to pass. Jesus 'was raised
from the dead by the glory of the Father,' but also Jesus rose from the
dead by His own power.
There was also a voluntary ascension to the heavens. There was no need
for Elijah's chariot of fire. There was no need for a whirlwind to
sweep a mortal to the sky. There was no need for any external vehicle
or agency whatsoever. No angels bore Him up upon their wings. But, the
cords of duty which bound Him to earth being cut, He rose to His own
native sphere; and, if one might so say, the natural forces of His
supernatural life bore Him, by inverted gravitation, upward to the
place which was His own. He ascended by His own inherent power.
Thus, by a voluntary death, He became the Sacrifice for our sins; by
the might of His self-effected resurrection He proclaimed Himself the
Lord of death and the resurrection for all that trust Him; and by
ascending up on high He draws our hearts' desires after Him, so that
we, too, as we see Him lost from our sight, behind the bright Shekinah
cloud that stooped to conceal the last stages of His ascension from our
view, may return to our lowly work 'with great joy,' and 'set our
affection on things above, where Christ is, sitting at the right hand
of God.'