Far From Heaven

“Even when we were dead in trespasses, [God] made us alive together with Christ (by grace you have been saved), and raised us up together, and made us sit together in the heavenly places in Christ Jesus.�?(Ephesians 2:5-6)

In the 2002 movie Far From Heaven, Julianne Moore plays a Connecticut housewife who is facing a marital crisis at home and racial tensions with the outside world in the 1950s. Hollywood may want us to think that we are far from heaven, but the truth from the Word of God is that God has made us alive with Christ and raised us up to sit together in heavenly places in Christ Jesus. That’s right, we’re all sitting pretty and we don’t even know it. We’ve praised and uplifted Jesus, we’ve worshipped and exalted Him, but at the same time, we’ve unknowingly belittled what He did by not allowing Him to bring us alongside with Him in heaven.

That was God’s divine purpose all along, to bring us alongside Jesus, to make us what He already was, to give us the free gift of salvation, to restore what Adam forfeited. We are the reason Jesus came to earth, died on the cross, lived again on the third day and ascended. Jesus didn’t do it for Himself because He didn’t need it. He did it so He could bring us alongside, so we could use His powerful Name that is above every name and wield His immense authority on earth. He did it so that we could stand before God and be everything to Him that Jesus is, a Church full of glory and without spot or wrinkle (Ephesians 5:27).

Jesus was exalted before He ever came down to earth because He was already One with God in the Holy Trinity of God the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit. He didn’t need authority over the devil because He’d never lost it like Adam did. Jesus put on an earth suit, a physical body, so that He could come to earth as a man and regain authority over sin, oppression, sickness, disease, demons, fear, poverty and all the other curses that came when Adam committed high treason in the garden of Eden, and He succeeded. Jesus mastered Temptation Island and everything in the world of the soulish realm, the spiritual and the physical world.