00:00Okay, we looked at that last week, so now we're going to look at the title of Son of Man.
00:06If you read through the Gospels, you'll find that Jesus preferred to use this title for himself.
00:1185 times it's used of Jesus in the New Testament.
00:15And specifically it says the Son of Man.
00:17Not just Son of Man, the Son of Man. That's important, we're going to tell you why in a moment.
00:22And there are certain implications of the title Son of Man.
00:26One, Jesus is fully human, means he is a real human being.
00:31He can experience the things which you and I experience.
00:34He is able to experience tiredness, hunger, all of those things, pain.
00:40He can experience those things because he is a real human being.
00:45It's also a title of humility because it means that he humbled himself, he took upon human flesh in order
00:51to redeem us.
00:52He left the glories of heaven to become man amongst us.
00:56It is also the title of deity.
00:58And we're going to show that when Jesus uses the phrase the Son of Man,
01:02he is actually using it to affirm the fact that he is also Son of God, that he is God
01:09himself.
01:11And in one particular prophecy, which is very important, which we'll look at in the book of Daniel,
01:17the coming of the Son of Man is a fulfillment of prophecy,
01:20which is going to be fulfilled at the second coming of Jesus, and which also points to his deity.
01:26Okay, so let's look at the Son of Man title.
01:29So on the basic level, it is a focus on his humanity.
01:34It's a phrase which is used in the Old Testament as well, particularly in the book of Ezekiel.
01:39Son of Man, then Adam.
01:42Adam means man in the sense of human being, so that obviously includes women as well.
01:48So when you hear the word Adam, meaning man in the Bible, we're not being discriminated against the ladies.
01:54We're just saying that that is a title used in the Bible for humanity.
02:00Adam as the first man, then Adam.
02:03Interesting, we look in the book of Ezekiel.
02:05Ezekiel in the first chapter has a vision of God, and he sees this amazing vision.
02:13He sees also a man above the firmament, and it includes in verse 28 of Ezekiel 1.
02:28So in that sense, Son of Man is in contrast to what he's just seen, which is the glory of
02:42God.
02:43So he's seen the glory of God, he's seen the power of God, he's seen, actually has seen a man
02:48raised up in this vision of glory.
02:51It doesn't define who that man is, but he sees him in some kind of human form, and then the
02:56voice speaks to him as Son of Man.
02:58So he's speaking to him as a human being, he's in contrast to the great God, which you've just seen.
03:05So on the most basic level, you could say that Son of Man is a title speaking to a human
03:11being, someone in human form.
03:13Now people in error, and there are many of them, say, well that means that Jesus was just a man.
03:18I remember before I became a Christian, actually, there was a film which came on the telly which had the
03:23title Son of Man.
03:25And I watched it, and it showed this person who was supposed to be Jesus, and he was kind of
03:28a conflicted man who had all sorts of doubts and fears,
03:31and he was kind of not the Jesus which you'd read in the Bible, it really was just a man.
03:38And although I wasn't a Christian, I said, this film is wrong, there's something wrong with this film, I don't.
03:42I think this is the right Jesus.
03:45I was a bit perplexed when the vicar who my parents went to the church went to, and he said
03:49he thought it was a good film.
03:50I thought, hang on.
03:52That vicar was later when I became a real Christian, was to actually sort of try and put me down
03:56and say I was in the wrong position.
03:58So he was a right modernist, if you like, liberal.
04:01And you get a lot of that in the Christian church today, just putting Jesus down as a man.
04:06Now that's what we've got in Islam.
04:07They just say that Jesus was a prophet, but not son of God.
04:11It's totally wrong.
04:12And the fact that he was son of man doesn't mean he was not all those other things.
04:17But it does mean he was literally a man.
04:20And as we read in John chapter 1, verse 4, 14,
04:25The Word became flesh and dwelt amongst us.
04:27We beheld his glory, the glory as of the only begotten of the Father, full of grace and truth.
04:32So John has already defined who the Word is.
04:34He said the Word was with God, the Word was God, all things were made through him.
04:38When he speaks about the Word, he's speaking about God who was there in creation.
04:41He's saying here that the Word became flesh, the Word became a man,
04:44and we saw him, he beheld his glory, and he dwelt amongst us.
04:49So when we saw Jesus, we saw a man, but we also saw a man who embodied the glory of
04:55God.
04:57And as in 1 John, verse 4, it says,
05:01Every spirit that confesses that Jesus Christ has come in the flesh is of God.
05:05Every spirit that does not confess that Jesus Christ has come in the flesh is not of God.
05:09This is the spirit of the Antichrist, which you heard is coming and is now already in the world.
05:16So a sign of the spirit of God is it's going to confess that Jesus has come in the flesh,
05:20that he is literally a man, but he is also Son of God with us.
05:25If you don't confess that, you're not of God.
05:28And he says that this spirit of Antichrist is already in the world,
05:32and it's been manifested in many ways in the times to come.
05:36If you know anything about history, you know that there was a group of people
05:39who emerged in the first century after the beginning of Christianity called the Gnostics.
05:45They wrote various Gospels, which were discovered not so long ago,
05:49and they gave their philosophy.
05:51When you looked into their philosophy, it was heretical.
05:53It wasn't true.
05:54It was the kind of thing one John was actually warning you against.
05:57One of the things they said was that when Jesus appeared as a man,
06:00one, sometimes you could touch him and you felt him really there,
06:04other times your hand went straight through him as though he was not really there.
06:08One of the other Gospels says that Jesus didn't die on the cross, literally,
06:13but somebody who was like him was put on the cross,
06:15and the real Jesus was in the spirit laughing at the one dying on the cross.
06:20Totally heretical, totally wrong teaching.
06:22And what it's denying is that Jesus Christ came in the flesh.
06:26Do you have any other group of people who took on that idea?
06:29The Muslims.
06:30It goes straight into the Koran, which tells me one of the origins of Islam
06:34actually is not from Muhammad going into a cave and getting a message from God.
06:38It's actually a combination of all kinds of false teachings
06:41which were put together much later than Muhammad
06:44and is basically of the spirit of Antichrist.
06:48We also have it in New Age ideas.
06:50The New Age idea is that the spirit of Jesus, the spirit of Christ,
06:54the Christ spirit came upon a man called Jesus at his baptism,
06:59anointed him for his ministry,
07:01and then when he died on the cross it left him.
07:04And it could come on other people at other times.
07:06So you have the Hindu idea of avatars,
07:08which is that you can have a Messiah for your time,
07:11a Messiah for other times.
07:13And some of the New Ages are looking for a Messiah to come to our time,
07:16that the spirit of Christ will come upon him,
07:17and he'll be the Christ who will be the one who will bring the world to rights.
07:23Again, that's false teaching.
07:24It's false Christ, false prophets, which Jesus warned about.
07:28The spirit of Christ, the spirit of Messiah,
07:30was upon Jesus from the moment of his conception,
07:33right through to his death on the cross,
07:35when he surrendered his spirit to the Father,
07:38and then the spirit came back into the body on the third day
07:42and he rose again from the dead.
07:45It's false teaching to say that things which I've just told you from the New Age.
07:51So we have to understand, first of all, that Jesus was fully man
07:54and God came, he was God from the beginning,
07:58but he was literally a man,
08:00a man who appeared in that form and who lived amongst us.
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