Finding Jesus in the Bible…So We Can Follow Him in Life
Bible Reading Plans
- Plan One: New Testament Only
- Plan Two: New Testament + Psalms
- Plan Three: New Testament + History
- Plan Four: The Entire Bible – Year 1 of 3, Year 2 of 3, Year 3 of 3
Don’t know which plan? Go to A Christ-Centered Bible Reading Plan: Quick Start.
Extras
Verse of the Day, Audio Capsule, and Video Minute
***
Christ Is God
Chapter 7 – Christ at the Right Hand of God Before the Beginning
We have seen examples of messiah being presented in the Old Testament as a future hope. And we have seen examples of him presented in the New Testament as a present reality – on earth, and then in heaven. And if we peer more deeply into the New Testament we will see that Psalm 110:1 was just the tip of an iceberg. By this, I mean that within the New Testament we find evidence that christ being at the right hand of God was not the first time he’d ever been there. Let me explain.
Jesus gave all sorts of hints during his earthly ministry that he had an existence before becoming a human being. But those who heard these hints hardly knew what to make of them. His closest disciples had a hard enough time trying to understand what he meant when he was prophesying his own resurrection from the dead. For example:
Mark 9:9 As they were coming down from the mountain, He gave them orders not to relate to anyone what they had seen, until the Son of Man rose from the dead.
Mark 9:10 They seized upon that statement, discussing with one another what rising from the dead meant.
If Jesus’ followers struggled to understand His references to what He would do after His death, how were they to understand Him when he occasionally spoke of what He did before His birth?
But, as I’ve been saying, the resurrection of Christ from the dead to the right hand of God in heaven opened minds like nothing ever had before. Consider how they would have been confused by this statement, made during His earthly ministry:
John 6:62 “What then if you see the Son of Man ascending to where He was before?”
Now consider what it would have meant to them once Psalm 110:1 was fulfilled by Jesus sitting at God’s right hand. For Jesus’ question then became, “What then if you see the Son of Man ascending to the right hand of God, where He was before?” This rhetorical question would then imply that Jesus had been at the right hand of God before he ever became a human being!
And then, what about the following statement, which Jesus spoke the night before He died. When considered in the light of Jesus’ resurrection and Psalm 110:1, it implies that Jesus not only was at the right hand of God before he was conceived and born as a human – it implies he had been there even before heaven and earth were created!
John 17:5 “Now, Father, glorify Me together with Yourself, with the glory which I had with You before the world was.”
For these reasons, and others, the apostle John opens the fourth Gospel in this way.
John 1:1 In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.
John 1:2 He was in the beginning with God.
Hmm. Christ was with God even before the beginning of the world! This was not the kind of thing the apostles were saying before Jesus rose from the dead. Obviously, the fulfillment of Psalm 110:1 – and Jesus’ explanation of it during the 40 days between His resurrection and His ascension – opened their minds to understand things Jesus had been saying before that fulfillment of that Psalm.
The apostle Paul describes the process taking place in the following way:
1 Timothy 3:16 By common confession, great is the mystery of godliness:
He who was revealed in the flesh,
Was vindicated in the Spirit,
Seen by angels,
Proclaimed among the nations,
Believed on in the world,
Taken up in glory.
Thus did Christ being raised from the dead to the right hand of God open the door for even more hidden things to be revealed.
***
A Bible Reader's Website 