The King Who Is Still Working

What is Jesus actually doing right now, in this present moment, seated wherever the ascended Christ is seated? The New Testament does not leave this vague. It describes specific, ongoing, present-tense activity — not a King on indefinite leave until His return, but a King actively reigning through the interval.

He is interceding. Paul tells the church in Rome that Christ Jesus, "who died (and more than that, was raised), who is at the right hand of God, and who also is interceding for us" (Romans 8:34, NET). The author of Hebrews says the same thing in different words: "he is able to save completely those who come to God through him because he always lives to intercede for them" (Hebrews 7:25, NET). This is not a historical fact about something Jesus did once, on the night before He died, when He prayed the prayer this book already showed you in John 17. It is a continuing reality. The prayer He prayed that night for His disciples' protection, unity, and sanctification did not end when He stopped speaking. It is still being prayed, on your behalf, by the same Son, from the same position of authority, right now, while you read this sentence.

He is preparing a place. On that same last night, in the same long conversation recorded in John's Gospel, Jesus told His frightened disciples: "I am going away to make ready a place for you. And if I go and make ready a place for you, I will come again and take you to be with me, so that where I am you may be too" (John 14:2–3, NET). This is future — a place not yet ready, a coming not yet arrived — but it is also, in its own way, present activity. The King who ascended did not stop working. He is building, right now, toward a homecoming He has already promised to complete.

He is reigning. All authority in heaven and on earth, Jesus told His disciples on the mountain in Galilee after the resurrection, has been given to Him (Matthew 28:18, NET). Not will be given, someday, once He returns to claim it. Has been given — already, at the resurrection, before the Ascension even happened. Paul describes this same reign in Ephesians as God having seated Christ "at his right hand in the heavenly realms far above every rule and authority and power and dominion and every name that is named, not only in this age but also in the one to come" (Ephesians 1:20–21, NET). This is the present tense of a King already on His throne, not a King in exile waiting for restoration.

And He is sending. The commission the angels reminded the disciples of on the hillside — go into your Jerusalem, your Judea, your Samaria, to the ends of the earth — did not end with the apostles. Every disciple since has received the same sending, under the authority of the same enthroned King, for the same purpose: to make His present reign visible in places it has not yet been seen, before He comes to make it visible everywhere at once.