JOHN086 - Son of Man. Wink.

John 1:50-51

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Music by Jeff Foote

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:14

Hello, my name is Matt Whitman. This is the 10-minute Bible hour podcast, and we are at the end of John chapter one and our season that is dedicated to the Gospel of John. Some of you have been here for a long time and you're like, I know the drill. We pick a book of the Bible and then we just chip away at that book of the Bible a little bit each day, as long as it takes. Doesn't matter. We're just working on it. And sometimes there are rabbit trails that we need to go and chase down. And there's not time for that at church, but we have time here because what else are we doing, right? Dishes, working out, doing stuff in the lawn, riding a bike, going for a walk, drinking coffee, just sitting there. I don't know. I don't know what you do when you listen to this, but it's meant to kind of you know fit into the rhythm of your day to make the Bible a part of your daily rhythm. And those of you who've been around it for a long time, you know that you know sometimes it just takes us a little longer than other times to get through a given chapter. And I would say John 1 is one such chapter. We're uh pushing 90 episodes here, and we're still not done with John 1, but that's because there's so much going on. And everything in this chapter has got so many levels of meaning to it. John is almost surely the last of the four Gospels to be written. John is almost surely a very old man at the time that he's writing this gospel. John almost surely is well aware that pretty much all of his buddies who he went on these adventures with Jesus with when he was just a very young man, they all died for it. And they all died ugly for it. And just John is probably the only one left at the time that he writes this. And clearly he's looking at the way the early church is shaping up. He's looking at the impact that the gospel accounts written by Matthew, Mark, and Luke are having on the Roman world, on these new fledgling churches. And John, old man John, writing from probably somewhere near Ephesus, modern-day Turkey, Asia Minor, he's like, All right, I want to put pen to paper here. I let it sit for a while. I want to do this. And Christians believe that happened under the precise influence of the Holy Spirit so that God would communicate through the human author exactly what he wanted to communicate. And so, all the way back to what I was saying at the beginning of this little conversation we're having right now, uh, John 1's a lot. It's intense. There are two big movements in John 1, and it's taken us a long time to work through them because none of these turns of phrases are lazy. John never gives us a break. Everything has got like 10 layers of meaning. It's been a lot of fun, but you know, a lot of material. The two big distinct movements of John chapter 1 are first a prologue through the first 18 verses. And here John uses monumental language to talk about Jesus, who he is, and that he is the maker of all things, that he's light and life, that there's life in him, and also that he's God. Not like made God, not like God created him and then elevated him to God. No, no, no. He's always been God. He is fully God, he is fully man, and he makes his dwelling among us. The word became flesh. So it's just this huge, gigantic set of claims. I mean, reality-redefining set of claims here at the beginning of John chapter one in the prologue, and that sets up the whole rest of the book. So we get done with movement number one, the prologue, and then we flip from verse 18 to 19. And in verse 19, we go back to the very beginning. So we got this great big thing, you know, think Lord of the Rings, the great big story at the beginning about there were this many rings crafted for these people, and this many for these people, and then this thing happened. And then you get done with the big prologue in Lord of the Rings, and you go to something very quaint, pastoral, rural, and you start from the very beginning of the story with you know, simple little people doing simple little things in a simple environment. In this case, John the Baptist isn't so simple, but movement number two is just out in the countryside with a maybe seemingly innocuous religious movement, one of many, maybe, that occurred over the years, with a guy named John the Baptist. Then the rest of John chapter one accounts for basically a week of time where we meet John the Baptist, we learn who he's not, which is he's not the Messiah, he's not Elijah reincarnated, he's not the prophet, he's a voice of one calling out in the wilderness. He doesn't even actually give us his own name. He says rather that he's the fulfillment of a prophecy, one that's going to make straight the way for the Lord. And then we meet Jesus himself for the first time on screen. Here he is, and he's a face in the crowd. He's a guy walking around the scene of these baptisms. But when he is baptized, there's miraculous confirmation from God the Father and God the Holy Spirit that that right there, that's the Son of God. That is God the Son, God in the flesh. And there's a lot of very loaded language in here. There's a lot that we've broken down thinking about that. But then Jesus starts to call his first disciples from among those who are at this baptism scene, and he is basically giving them the same invitation. It's come and see. And then they start giving other people the same invitation. This is the guy, come and see. This is the Messiah, the Christ. And one really skeptical observer, a guy named Nathaniel, who we've been talking about for the last week, he gets kind of, you know, dragged reluctantly over to Jesus. But then Jesus says something to him that stuns him. That I guess only Jesus could know. We don't really get to know as readers what it is exactly, but it's something about a state that Nathaniel was in sitting under a fig tree, and Nathaniel's like, well, what? And he says, You are the son of God, you're the king of Israel. And then we get this last line here that is so important and so loaded that it has prevented us from moving on to chapter two, and may prevent us from getting to chapter two all week long this week, because Jesus uses one little phrase here at the end that is maybe more loaded than any of the other very loaded, very important little phrases that we've seen all throughout the first chapter of the Gospel of John. And that phrase is a phrase that he uses on himself, that Jesus uses on himself. He refers to himself in the final three words of John chapter 1 as the son of man. Well, now what does that mean? It sounds like some kind of cryptic little thing, right? To an outsider, like a like a riddle or the sphinx's monkey paw kind of deal. But to the people who knew what it meant, both the people who didn't like Jesus very much and the people who really do like Jesus much, and to the people who have the luxury of 2,000 years of church history and a Bible in front of us and time to look at all of this, to those who know what it means, this is an incredibly powerful self-identification that Jesus gives us here at the very end of an incredibly powerful opening chapter of the Gospel of John. He calls himself the Son of Man. All right, we're all up to speed. Some of you are brand new here. And what do you know? Now you're caught up. All right, these are the closing verses of John chapter one that we've been talking about. And well, I'll tell you in a minute what I see going on here and why I think it's such a big deal. Jesus said, You, Nathaniel, believe because I told you I saw you under a fig tree. You shall see greater things than that. Jesus then added, I tell you, and that's you all, I tell all of you, the truth, you shall see heaven open and the angels of God ascending and descending on the Son of Man. Now there are two very powerful Old Testament images that are being invoked here by Jesus. One is the image of Jacob's ladder, which is from all the way back. I even marked it. We're gonna go look at it tomorrow, probably. It's in Genesis 28, is where we get that story. And then also by using this key phrase, Son of Man, Jesus is nodding to a very evocative, powerful, memorable, well-known, much-debated, even culture-transcending, multicultural prophecy from Daniel chapter seven, that anybody back in the day who'd ever read the Bible would have definitely remembered. And those two images, it's not an accident that Jesus is bringing them up here because those two images connect with what Jesus is promising his disciples. Think about what's going on here. He's called a small handful of disciples. Andrew, his brother Simon, Simon Peter, and then John, presumably is the unnamed disciple in the group, and then Philip and Nathaniel. That's who we've got so far. There are probably other people hanging around as well who are getting a sense of what Jesus is about. But in this scene, we focus on those four or five guys. Jesus has started to assemble this party, and they've quickly come to belief. It's very impressive. I think it's fair to say God opened their eyes. He gave them the ability to see Jesus quickly for who he is. And they're giving at least partial confessions of Christ right off the bat. You're the Messiah, you're the Son of God, you're the true King of Israel. Great. Okay, but how much can they really know that, as we discussed in the previous episode? They can they can know it a little, they've seen some stuff, but Jesus' remark here is you believe because of this one little thing. I told you about what was going on under the fig tree. And you other guys, you believe because of what? What you've heard in the last few hours? We've only been hanging out for a little bit. Oh, you guys are gonna see a lot more than that. If you believe real hard because of the fig tree thing and the little conversation we've had so far, yeah, you it it's gonna be pretty shocking how much you're gonna believe after what you're about to see. And as we've discussed, I think this is also a nod to you and me as the reader to say, just watch. This is going somewhere. And as we go through the rest of John, we kind of discover that like, hey, you know, some good people who want to believe also doubt, and you know, they want to see more. Okay, well, after Thomas goes through that, even he, with his doubting orientation in the end, is like, I have seen enough. I have seen greater things than the fig tree deal. It is enough for me, my Lord and my God. That's what Thomas exclaims about Jesus after the sum of seeing all the things that were promised that he was going to see. And then in the end, of course, John bounces it back to us, the reader, and says, Jesus did a ton more things than this. But what's written down in this book was written down so that you would see what Jesus is about, and that you would believe that he's the son of God, and that by believing you would have life in his name. So if that's the structure of the book, you would expect the second thing that Jesus would say to pique their interest would be to use the phrase the son of God. But instead, the final phrase of John 1 is son of man. And it is my assertion that that phrase, son of man, was meant to send their minds reeling. It was meant to send their minds scrambling back into everything they'd ever learned about the scriptures, the old testament. And it's meant to do the same for you and me as readers today, to send us scrambling, be like, wait a minute, son of man, son of man, what does that mean? That's a wink phrase. That's a that's a look knowingly at a person, say a thing, and have it mean a whole lot more than just those three words kind of phrase. And you and I have got to unpack that to get all of those implications before we have earned our way into chapter two, which is coming up soon. And we will begin that lots and lots of Bible process of unpacking that tomorrow. Okay, cool. I'm Matt. This is the Ten Minute Bible Hour Podcast. Let's do this again soon.