+"Ye heard how I said to you, I go away and I come again unto you.
If ye loved me, ye would have rejoiced, because I go unto the Father:
for the Father is greater than I."+ If these words mean anything,
taken in the light of the events that were to follow on the next day
and the days following, they mean that Jesus was going away from the
place where He then was—earth—to another place where He was not
when He spoke, i.e., heaven—and that in going to heaven he was going
to where God was, from earth where God was not in the sense in which
He was in heaven. Again we read in Acts 11:9: +"A voice answered
the second time out of heaven, What God hath cleansed make not thou
common."+ Here again God is represented as speaking from heaven
where He was. Again our Lord Jesus Christ is recorded in John 20:17
as saying to Mary Magdalene after His resurrection: +"Touch me not;
for I am not yet ascended unto the Father: but go unto my brethren
and say to them, I ascend unto my father and to your father and my
God and your God,"+ from which it is unmistakably evident that in
the conception of our Lord Jesus after His resurrection there was a
place where God was and to which He was going, and that place was up
in heaven. There is no possibility of explaining this away by saying
it is a figure of speech, the whole passage loses its meaning by any
such interpretation, and to attempt to so explain it is a trick and
a subterfuge that will not bear close examination. Again the Apostle
Paul tells us regarding our Lord Jesus Christ that God the Father
+"raised Him from the dead, and made Him to sit at His right hand
in the heavenly places"+ (Eph. 1:20) which makes it as clear as
language can make anything that there is a place, heaven, where God
is in a sense that He is nowhere else, and where one can be placed at
His right hand. The same thing is evident from the verses that we have
already quoted in another connection, Acts 7:55, 56, where we are told
that Stephen +"being full of the Holy Ghost, looked up steadfastly
into heaven and saw the glory of God, and Jesus standing at the right
hand of God, and said, Behold, I see the heavens open, and the Son of
man standing on the right hand of God."+ The meaning of these words
to anybody who wishes to know what words are intended to convey and not
merely to distort them to fit his own conception, is that God is in
heaven locally present. There is no escaping this by any fair, honest
interpretation. Men who are skilful in the art of discrediting truth by
giving it bad names, and names that sound very scholarly, may call this
"anthropomorphism," and that sounds very learned. Nevertheless, be it
"anthropomorphism" or what not, this is the clear teaching of the Word
of God in spite of this or any other frightful terms used to scare
immature college boys and immature college girls. There is no mistaking
that this is the teaching of the Bible, and we have already proven
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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