SEATED WITH CHRIST

Eph.2:6 – raised us up with Him, and seated us with Him in the heavenly places in Christ Jesus…

This passage about being seated with Christ in heaven can easily become something that the everyday Christian can’t relate to. After all, how can I be here and seated in heaven at the same time? A lot of this has to do with our perception of the kingdom of God and heaven, Jesus said that the kingdom was here with us. If that is true then the problem is with our perception, God is all around us and many times we are totally unaware of His nearness. The reality of being seated with Christ can only be comprehended by faith. We grasped the cross by faith, the resurrection by faith, and see ourselves seated with Christ in heaven by faith. Here is a great explanation from the Pillar Commentary, pay close attention.

“But how can believers now be seated in the heavens while clearly existing here on earth? …Paul’s insistence on believers’ union with Christ speaks to something real, even if that reality can only be perceived in a spiritual sense. If believers are truly “made alive with Christ”, then they are also truly raised up and seated with him in the heavens. Part of the difficulty in understanding this is related to how we perceive “the heavens.” If the heavens are “up there,” while we are “down here,” the tension is obvious. But it may be more helpful to understand the heavens as an alternate dimension that coexists alongside our own. This “spiritual” domain is that from which the Holy Spirit comes and dwells among us. Likewise, the ruler of the power of the air—clearly an evil spiritual being—is able to interact among the disobedient. In similar fashion, people who are joined to Christ have crossed over into that alternate spiritual dimension. We have not left our current natural dimension but, like the Spirit, we have mysteriously become cross-dimensional beings through our union with Christ. He is seated in the heavens, and so we are there with him spiritually—while maintaining our physical presence here.”

So apparently we live in two worlds at the same time. The problem is that most Christians are totally unaware of the kingdom of God that is all around us at every moment. This is where revelation comes to play, it is only by the Holy Spirit can these spiritual realities become real to us. When that happens our whole perspective changes, instead of being distraught by the day to day disasters we all face we have our affections caught up in the other world. We see the world differently and our longing to be with Jesus and our passion for souls to come in begins to take preeminence in our lives. We are seated with Christ in the heavenly places, this changes everything.