1
APPENDIX B
JESUS’ USAGE OF THE TERMS “SON OF GOD” AND “SON OF MAN”
In Chapter Two we learned
that there were two parallel streams of OT revelation—one stream speaking of
God’s future place on earth among men and the other stream, of a godly Davidic
king in this future age. We also learned that Jesus brought together in Himself
these two streams, following the converging tendency observed in OT passages
such as Psalm 2; Proverbs 30:4; Isaiah 7:14; 9:6-7; Jeremiah 23:5-6; Micah 5:2;
and Psalm 110. To show how Jesus accomplished this new revelation by merely
extending trends already present in the OT is the object of this appendix. We
will now study Jesus’ usage of the OT terms “Son of God” and “Son of Man.”
The title Son of God
apparently originated in the antediluvian era when the primary function of
civil government (capital punishment) was reserved for angels. In this previous
world, men could be executed by angels for trying to violate God’s boundaries
around the Garden of Eden (Gen. 3:24). These angelic rulers, however,
apparently corrupted their way with mankind and were judged in the great flood
of Noah’s day (Gen. 6:2).
After the present Noahic
civilization began and capital punishment was transferred to mankind, God
refers to civil rulers as “gods” (Ps. 82), a point Jesus refers to in His
defense of the title “Son of God” (John 10:34-36). Eventually, in the days
following the making of the Davidic Covenant, the Scripture looks forward to a
special king who would rule the Kingdom of God (note the ruling authority
expressed in Pss. 2, 72, 89). As history continued, it became evident that only
a very special person, a sinless perfect king, could rule God’s Kingdom
successfully. Gradually by Jesus’ day, an ideal Son-of-God/Messiah figure had
come to exist in popular imagination. Jesus revealed the truth of the
incarnation by enlarging this term to refer to a human king who was not only
perfect but who literally was the essence of God. The term “Son of God” now was
no longer a metaphor.
Of this advance in meaning,
Professor Karl Adam has written: “At the time of Jesus the Messias was also
called the Son of God. . . .Jesus took it over in those circles where it was familiar
to his listeners. But he gave it a new, profound sense. He transformed it into
a metaphysical expression. . . .We repeat: It is Jesus’ original act, out of
his consciousness of his divine nature, that he should have called himself
‘Son’ in a metaphysical sense.”[1].
Jesus, then, originated the
NT sense of the term, Son of God, but He did so in line with the potential
sense already existing in the OT. The two streams of revelation mentioned above
had already tended to converge as we learned in Chapter Two. In fact, the OT
passage in Proverbs 30:4 already spoke of a literal son of God. What Jesus did
was to make such a convergence actual instead of potential. Students of the
Word of God in Jesus’ day were expected to be ready for this new revelation,
based as it was upon the very passages they had studied. Had they studied with
the intent of meeting the Lord, they would have been prepared to meet His Son.
Conceptually, the term, Son
of God, emphasizes Jesus’ deity but not in the way most people seem to think
when they make this statement. The term looks at the human king sitting on
David’s throne and pierces into the king’s inner nature which is found to be
divine. Schematically, one has a picture like this:
Human Nature
Mind’s
Eye
)------------------à--------à--------à----------à Divine Nature
Divine
Nature.4
The end point of the arrow
rests on the divine nature rather than on the human nature, emphasizing deity.
The viewing of this divine nature, however, is through the human nature of a
reigning authority with the power of judgment over all. The Son-of-God term,
therefore, is a means of revelation concerning who Jesus really is.
The second title Jesus used
to reveal the incarnation, the Son of Man, had a different development. It
apparently originated in Daniel 7 where the spiritual-ethical character of the
five successive kingdoms in history was pictured. Each kingdom was pictured by
a living creature. Only the fifth kingdom, the Kingdom of God, was pictured by
a human. It alone is revealed as a kingdom that truly fits the created function
of humanity. The previous four kingdoms listed in Daniel 7 were all to be
sub-human or animal in their spiritual-ethical character. Although the son of
man symbol in Daniel 7 pictured the people of this fifth kingdom, it also
pictured the founder of the kingdom. Each of the previous four kingdoms had a
founder (cf. Dan. 2:37ff), and it was to be the same with the fifth one, too.
Thus the son of man picture had a
potential sense of a coming historical founder. Eventually, according to
Professor Adam:
“[Late Jewish apocalyptic
writings] regarded the one like the son of man not simply as the symbol of the
people of the saints, but also as their original representative, and they
ascribed to him a personal pre-existence in the Ancient of Days.”[2]
The founder of the future
fifth kingdom, the Kingdom of God on earth, therefore, was seen to have existed
from eternity in heaven.
Jesus, then, had the
Son-of-Man term available to Him to indicate His pre-existence and descent from
heaven to earth to establish His kingdom. His kingdom, unlike all those of
previous history, would alone be fit for man to live the way God had created
him to live. To this concept Jesus added the “suffering servant” motif from
Isaiah 53 because the fifth kingdom would be set up on earth only after sin had
been dealt with righteously (see Matt. 16:21; 17:9,12,22; 20:18; 26:45). The Son
of Man, according to Jesus’ new view, had come to earth from above to suffer
for sins and later to found His kingdom. Again Adam writes: “This [concept of
the Son of Man] is his original creation. . .going beyond all the prophets, and
concentrating their scattered illumination into one consciousness that he is
the judge and lord of mankind. . . .
If Jesus had called himself
God from the very beginning of his activities, he would have been stoned on the
first day. If he called himself the Son of God, he would have turned the
thoughts of his contemporaries not towards heaven and the right hand of the
Ancient of Days, but to the earth and to man. . . .”[3]
Jesus, therefore, picked up
another term from the OT, pregnant with prophetic meaning, and enlarged it to
include the new revelation of the incarnation. Conceptually, the Son-of-Man
term emphasizes Jesus’ humanity but again not in the way people often think it
does. The term looks at the eternal, pre-existing God who undertakes to
establish a kingdom headed by a man created in His image. This kingdom fulfills
the creation mandate that man will subdue the world for God. Paul picks up on
this fulfillment theme when he refers to Jesus as the Second Adam in Romans
5:12-21 and I Corinthians 15:20ff. The picture looks like this:
Human
Nature
|
/ / / |
/
/
/
Mind’s Eye )
The end point of the arrow
rests upon humanity rather than upon the clouds of God’s Majesty, but it
reaches that point only by first entering into God’s designs and intents. That
Jesus’ contemporaries realized the stupendous claims implicit in the Son-of-Man
term note the reaction of the high priest in Matthew 23:65.
Jesus revealed His
divine-human nature, the truth of the incarnation, by pulling out of the
Son-of-God and Son-of-Man terms the truths implicit in them. As the Son of God,
Jesus fulfills the stream of revelation concerning God’s place with man in the
universe. As the Son of Man, Jesus fulfills the stream of revelation that says
man will one day reach the goal set for him at creation. Both streams of
revelation converge in Christ, the God-man.