If you're happy and you know it clap your hands!

Happy Ascension Day! You may not be familiar with this feast day. To be honest, it seems a little bit under appreciated and under utilized. This is the day that we celebrate Jesus' Ascension up into Heaven! Pretty important. It historically takes place 39 days after Easter Sunday. (SIDE NOTE: Is there perhaps some significance in that number 39? We see the number 40 so often in the Bible that SURELY there is some reason for this being just one day shy of that holy number.) Now before I get ahead of myself, let me explain the title of this blog post. One of the Psalms appointed for Ascension Day is Psalm 47, and the first line of that Psalm says this:

Clap your hands, all you peoples;
shout to God with a cry of joy.

Which is basically the same thing as "If you're happy and you know it clap your hands". Just thought that was a funny coincidence. 

If you ask me, this may as well be another one of Jesus' miracles. Ascending in to heaven in front of your peers? That must have been an incredible sight. To me, that seems just as jaw-dropping as raising someone from the dead or forcing a demon out of the throat of a young boy or even turning water into wine. It had to have been an absolute spectacle. Acts 1 says that "he was lifted up, and a cloud took him out of their sight.". And after that happened two men robed in white (hmm... I wonder who they could be?) showed up and said that Jesus would return to them in the same way that he left. That statement could be interpreted in several ways. Do they mean that he's going to return to Earth in a cloud? Or do they mean that he'll just return as a human? Regardless of what they meant, Jesus hasn't physically returned to Earth yet. At least as far as I know.