“No one has ascended into heaven except he who has descended from heaven, the Son of Man.”
Have you ever heard a sermon on the “Son of Man?” Perhaps, but I don’t recall a study or a talk on the “Son of Man.” Not in my Christian upbringing, a Christian High School, a 4 year Bible College and many expository churches, do I recall an importance stressed on this unique element of God’s gift to us. My memory, of course, may be limited and lacking!
Why do you suppose John speaks to it so much and Jesus Himself gives it focus?
In the above passage, Jesus is the Son of Man in heaven before He descended into human flesh. The “Son of Man descended from heaven!” Its an apt subject for this Christmas season and it fits well into what scripture unfolds.
The celebration of Christmas has its roots in the magnificence of God’s salvation gift. Our season gifts to each other actually distract from the divine transaction taking place; this we all acknowledge! The death of Jesus paid the price for our possession of God’s righteousness. We can only see darkness when we are in Christ Jesus. Absolute Truth and righteousness are only available in Christ. When we grow into His grace we acquire the gift of His grace to discern light and darkness. What an extraordinary gift!
God is making available to us, and for all peoples, God’s eternal Life in exchange for a short personal but temporal experience. This defies reason or even hope! But more than this, the resurrection Life from Jesus’ 2000 year old crucifixion enables God’s righteous power to extend into us by His Holy Spirit. It is today’s practical solution for corporeal living as well as a long term solution for our problem of crass pride. But equally important, Jesus’ death and resurrection removes our separation from agape love our Father God wants us all to enjoy!
Agape Love is the primary theme of the Bible. God’s righteous Love is in contrast with man’s desire to do it man’s own way. From Genesis through Revelation portraits of love are painted for us of God’s uncanny faithfulness to man and man’s determination to snub God doing it man’s own way. And then, in Revelation, we see God’s awful, terrible wrath and righteous judgment for our refusal to accept His agape Love.
Creation itself was given to a created man including dominion over earth’s creations both plants and animals. Man was originally visited by God in the Garden which was man’s home. God then provided man’s own companion for the love and enjoyment of personal fellowship. Created in God’s own image, man and woman enjoyed the personal, intimate fellowship of God Himself. God’s intent is not changed because of Adam’s sin!
The Bible is God’s story of how God stoops down into His own creation to restore His personal fellowship with you and me. Adam’s failure is our opportunity. The Son of Man is God’s provision for restoring our personal fellowship with His sovereign glory and His amazing creation, and so much more; God created a pause of grace inviting mankind into a union with His divine family, “children of God” and “joint Heirs of Jesus Christ!” This is more than created Adam ever had!
We are now an eternal Light to a temporal world; God created it in us! The Light of Jesus in us comes from our new creation birthed within our soul when we accept, by faith, Jesus Christ to be our Lord and Savior. What could we ask that could even match this divine gift! Enter Jesus, the Son of Man!
The Son of Man Himself, He is the open door into God’s eternal grace by which we become vessels for divine use. It is a done deal! The Son of Man is the Light of the world living in us. We are charged to let our light so shine among men that we might thereby glorify God in heaven. How can we not embrace this heavenly miracle with all our energy while at the same time being so thankful!
The reason Jesus made the trip into our flesh is because Adam sinned. He, Adam, lost for us the unique position of being a son of God, as Adam himself was created. We are now physically born children from Adam and inherit his seed which is cursed with sin. The Son of Man came not only to restore our union of fellowship with God the Father, much more than this, He also came to call out a bride from within our humanity to be in union with Himself and share His glory!
The whole picture of God and man is a divine Love story! Our perspective becomes limited because we are living right now in the heart of the story. We are the players passing through the story-line during this current pause of grace.
Our righteous holy God came Himself into flesh as the Son of Man, so that, He could put sin to death by paying our price for Adam’s sin. Jesus became the second Adam by coming into flesh making possible God’s righteousness in us even more than He originally created in Adam. Jesus became sin for us as the Son of Man, so that, we may become the righteousness of God. We are born as a son of Adam but when we are created new in Jesus, we are restored as a son of God just as Adam was originally created a son of God but in Jesus, our second Adam, we are so much more.
“For if, because of one man’s trespass, death reigned through that one man, much more will those who receive the abundance of grace and the free gift of righteousness reign in life through the one man Jesus Christ.”
God became the Son of Man, so that, we may become a child of God. God came into human experience, in the person of Jesus, so that we may come into His eternal sinless reality. It makes possible “the great exchange,” His Life for ours.
But for us to display this new life, Jesus Christ already being in us, we must grow in grace with a personal knowledge of our Lord Jesus. Our one obstacle is giving up what we have and humanly want. Man’s desire is man’s tragic downfall, and at the same time, humanity’s greatest hope! Many of us need to get our “want to” fixed, so that, we may become who Christ Jesus already has made us to be! Putting on the new man in the righteousness of Jesus is priority one!
The reason this message has not died after the passing of generations, after thousands of years is because people like you and I are experiencing God’s living Truth! It is a dynamic living testimony of Jesus. God is NOT dead! He is a living Spirit joined in us who have accepted the gift of the Son of Man/Son of God into our lives. Yes, but much more than even this! We are actually are made partakers of His divine nature.
Christmas itself plays a roll in deception and distortion. The Christmas emphasis is joy and peace without the sustaining power of Spiritual intimacy. The death of sin in us is a real issue.
“For the love of Christ controls us, because we have concluded this: that one has died for all, therefore all have died: and he died for all, that those who live might may no longer live for themselves but for him who for their sake died and was raised. From now on, therefore, we regard no one according to the flesh. Even though we once regarded Christ according to the flesh, we regard him thus no longer.”
Sin has been put to death in us but to live in this reality, we must consume God’s grace in resurrection power.
When resurrection power is in play, we not only know it, those in our circle know it as well. Being created new in Jesus puts resurrection power in play because we walk by faith in Him. It is then by repeated practice that we begin discerning His life from our natural human choices. Half-truths distort God’s righteous truth and shorts out God’s power of Light to those around us. We have to be all in!
Salvation is not an eternal escape from earth’s temporal pollution; we are adopted into an eternal family. We are talking about living within God’s gift of divine power even now while walking in earth’s sandals. In Christ, we are in possession of a sustaining power that will grow God’s eternal, holy Life within our corporeal fleshly bodies.
How is this possible? Our soul is joined to His Spirit. We are right now on earth living in Spiritual boot camp soon to be graduated by rapture or death. We are in Spiritual training if we are in Christ Jesus!
Our natural life in Adam #1 is physically centered emotionally and mentally. Our Spiritual life in Jesus, Adam #2, is Spiritual; God is a Spirit. Being born again moves our “center of being” out from a natural life to Spiritual Life. Our natural self is extremely self-focused, where as our Christ centered life is dependent upon faith in Jesus Christ. Our identity, in God’s eyes, has be taken out from a self-life and staked down into the eternal Kingdom of Jesus.
We have been redeemed! Jesus purchased us back to Himself. We are now His personal possession and He has set us free from our sin. But we must rest and walk in it!
We need to train our soul to live by faith and not by sight. We need to change our priorities to be in-line with the righteous calling Christ Jesus has upon our life. In the beginning we find a lot of new choices we have to make. But as time goes by, our choices seem less clear and we tend to fall into the habit of our old self-choices that are comfortable. We “naturally” slip into the habit of “self” choices when we do not disciple ourselves “Spiritually.” The gift of Jesus’ Life in us becomes defused when our physical choices of comfort take priority over God’s calling in us. We are not being who we now are in Christ Jesus.
Our first calling is to create Spiritual habits. We need to feed our spiritual life with Spiritual food provided in God’s own “Sword of the Spirit.” We need regular time alone in the privacy of our own spirit joined to God’s Spirit. We need to practice fellowship by honing into God’s voice. How many times did Jesus say this to His disciples and to us through the churches in Revelation, “He that has an ear let him hear”?
We are not only partakers of His divine nature but we also are a kingdom of priests. We have direct access to God!
“As you come to him, a living stone rejected by men but in the sight of God chosen and precious, you yourselves like living stones are being built up as a spiritual house, to be a holy priesthood, to offer up spiritual sacrifices acceptable to God through Jesus Christ.”
“But you are a chosen race, a royal priesthood, a holy nation, a people for his own possession, that you may proclaim the excellencies of him who called you out of darkness into his marvelous light.”
Right now, during this pause of grace, God is focusing on men and not nations. After our rapture and the beginning of Daniel’s 70th week of tribulation, God will resume His relationship with people through Israel. He will set up his throne on earth for 1000 years as the Old Testament prophets saw and foretold. This will be God’s physical kingdom on earth where the Son of Man/son of God will rule nations with an iron hand. The age of grace will no longer be a pause in God’s dealing with the nations of earth.
We are being prepared to rule with Jesus as His bride. We take this for granted now because we live in God’s pause period of grace. What about those saved before Jesus came into flesh? What about the thousands who will be saved by the witness of the 144,000 in Revelation. They will be attending the marriage feast but they won’t be there as the bride! We are being made right now a kingdom priests to serve our Lord God. We are now in Spiritual training while still wearing flesh!
Jehovah God was working in our behalf even before the creation of things took place! God’s agape love is so deep only He would provision us to enter into the reality of eternal life even though we are merely a created body, soul and Spirit. Faith is the door we may enter into a reality so far beyond our capacity to see and know; it is mercy and grace drawing us into the marvels of God’s own generous, righteous agape Love. This deserves our attention like nothing else in our life!
Only in the contexts of God’s agape Love we can begin to dwell within His wisdom; probe into the mysteries of Godliness. How else can we possibly understand how the I AM God could humble Himself into human flesh participating in our created human culture. I AM only reveals Himself into the heart and soul of humanity in whom He actually dwells. How can we fathom agape Love this deep!
“He is the image of the invisible God, the first born of all creation. For by Him all things were created, in heaven and on earth, visible and invisible, whether thrones or dominions or rulers or authorities – all things were created through him and for him. And he is before all things, and in him all things hold together. And he is the head of the body, the church. He is the beginning, the first born from the dead, that in everything he might be preeminent. For in him all the fullness of God was pleased to dwell, and through him to reconcile to himself all things, whether on earth or in heaven, making peace by the blood of his cross.”
“He has delivered us from the domain of darkness and transferred us “into” the kingdom of his beloved Son.”
I wish I could do this subject justice!
We have to visualize God’s intent on completing the creation task He began with the creation of our known universes. It speaks to the whole of our salvation, our personal creation of two times, redemption and an eternal reign with Jesus as our Lord!
The book of Revelation supported by Old testament prophets paints the completion of the Kingdom “I AM” began before our clock of time was turned on. Just as He will complete His Kingdom on earth through the throne of David, so “I AM” will also complete what He has started within our personal creation in Christ Jesus.
“And you were dead in the trespasses and sins in which you once walked, following the course of this world, following the prince of the power of the air, the spirit that is now at work in the sons of disobedience - among whom we all once lived in the passions of our flesh, carrying out the desires of the body and mind, and were by nature children of wrath, like the rest of mankind. But God, being rich in mercy, because of the great love with which he loved us, even when we were dead in our trespasses, made us alive together with Christ – by grace you have been saved – and raised us up with him and seated us with him in the heavenly places in Christ Jesus, so that in the coming ages he might show the immeasurable riches of his grace in kindness towards us in Christ Jesus. For by grace you have been saved by faith. And this is not your own doing; it is the gift of God, not a result of works, so that no one may boast. For we are his workmanship, created in Christ Jesus for good works, which God prepared beforehand, that we should walk in them. ”