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And we know that the Son of God has come and has given us an understanding, that we may know Him who is true; and we are in Him who is true, in His Son Jesus Christ. This is the true God and eternal life. 1 John 5:20

#faith #jesus #Messiah #salvation #SonOfGod #SonOfMan

https://lightforthelastdays.co.uk/articles/christians-issues/what-does-the-son-of-mean/

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00:00So nobody does use this use of the phrases Son of God and Son of Man.
00:04If you look through the Gospels, you'll find actually that Jesus' preferred definition of himself is Son of Man.
00:10He actually uses that phrase of himself much more often than the phrase Son of God.
00:19Others, the disciples and the Sanhedrin, more often refer to him as the Son of God.
00:25So what do we understand by this phrase?
00:27First of all, when you use the phrase Son of in the Bible, it often means have the nature of.
00:33So Son of God means he has the nature of God.
00:36Son of Man, he has the nature of man.
00:40And you can understand this.
00:41You can see elsewhere in Scripture.
00:43In fact, in John chapter 17, Judas is described as the Son of Perdition.
00:47It doesn't mean he had a father called Perdition.
00:50Perdition is taken from a Latin word which means lost or lose.
00:54So Judas was the epitome of what it was to be lost.
00:58Showed that he was lost by betraying the Lord.
01:01And he went to his place, it says, which meant he went to the place of being lost eternally.
01:06So Judas becomes the epitome of perdition, of being lost.
01:10Other passages in the Bible would speak about those who are enlightened or believers as being sons of light.
01:15John chapter 12, 1 Thessalonians 5 speaks about believers as sons of light.
01:22It doesn't mean we had a father or a mother called light.
01:24It means that we are enlightened.
01:26We have the nature of light.
01:27We have that nature as opposed to being in the darkness.
01:30So Son of God, Son of Man, actually, on one level means having the nature of God, also having the nature of man.
01:38We have lots of wrong ideas about it.
01:40The Muslims have a particularly wrong idea of what Christians believe about Son of God.
01:44They believe that God had relations with a woman and brought forth Jesus.
01:47In other words, that God had a wife and that was how Jesus came into being.
01:51Totally wrong idea.
01:52Muslims are wrong about almost everything to do with Jesus.
01:56But that's what they believe.
01:58It's completely wrong.
01:59A lot of people also have a wrong idea about Son of Man.
02:03They think it just means he's a human, a prophet.
02:07And again, Islam believes that Jesus was a prophet.
02:11A lot of liberal theology says that Jesus was a great man, a unique man.
02:17And that Son of Man simply means that Jesus is human.
02:21But it actually means more than this.
02:23And we'll see this when we look at the title of Son of Man.
02:25Son of Man is used to point also to Jesus' divinity and his uniqueness.
02:31It doesn't mean he was a normal man with special powers.
02:35It means he was the unique man, the perfect man, in whom divinity was invested in fulfillment and prophecy.
02:41He was about to bring to pass the redemption of lost sinners like you and me so that we could become sons and daughters of God.
02:49Also, it means he's going to return in the form of Son of Man, but with divine power to bring an end to the reign of evil on the earth and set up the government of God and the kingdom of God.
03:01So, Son of Man is more than just he's a special man.
03:06He's a unique man.
03:08And it implies, in fact, in the word which Jesus quoted in the trial from Daniel, where he says,
03:14you'll see the Son of Man coming in power and great glory.
03:17And they interpreted that as saying, you're equal with God.
03:20So, the Sanhedrin actually understood when Jesus quoted that from Daniel, the book of Daniel, that he was actually ascribing to himself some kind of a divine status.
03:31And they said he's guilty of blasphemy.
03:33We'll come on and we'll say a bit more about that next week when we look at the subject of Son of Man.
03:37It means more than just he was human.
03:39It means he was a unique human in whom divinity was invested in the person of Jesus Christ.
03:44So, he has the Son of Man and he is the Son of God.
03:51He has the nature of God and the nature of man fully.
03:56Now, there's an implication of that which is actually very hard for us to understand.
04:01And the devil makes a lot of this because he uses this implication to attack Christianity and say it can't be true.
04:08There are two major things which you understand once you get to grasp this point.
04:12One is that Jesus is pre-existent.
04:15What do I mean by pre-existent?
04:17It means that he has existed from eternity to eternity.
04:19He's not created.
04:21He has always been there.
04:22Therefore, he is God manifested in the flesh.
04:25But he has always been God.
04:27He didn't begin his existence when he was born in Bethlehem or when he was conceived nine months earlier.
04:32He has always existed.
04:34He always existed from eternity to eternity.
04:36He always will exist.
04:37He exists now.
04:38He existed in eternity past, if there is such a thing.
04:41And he will exist to eternity future.
04:43He is always there.
04:46If that's the case, that means he is God.
04:48He is equal with God, which creates another problem.
04:51So how can he be God and appear on the earth?
04:55This is the one which the Muslims make a big deal of.
04:57The Jews make a big deal of it as well.
04:59They can't say it's not possible for God, who is one, who is uniquely one, to become man and dwell amongst us.
05:05Now, according to the Bible, according to the New Testament, clearly, God is a triunity.
05:11He's three in one.
05:14He's the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit.
05:17Okay, and this is something which is hard for us to understand.
05:20And one of the things you also have to understand about God is that none of us can think our way to understanding God.
05:25Because God is bigger than we are.
05:28We are in a finite body.
05:29We are finite.
05:30We are humans.
05:30We don't have all the understanding of God.
05:33We can actually only understand about God what God chooses to reveal to us.
05:38That's why we have to go on this book, because this book is what God has revealed to us through his word.
05:44Or we have to go to Jesus, because Jesus is the full revelation of God.
05:48And we can't understand it.
05:50We can't think our way to it.
05:51We have to receive it by faith.
05:52There are certain things you have to receive by faith.
05:54You may not fully understand it.
05:56I don't fully understand it.
05:58But we believe it because God says it's so.
06:00And when we get to heaven, we'll fully understand it.
06:03But at the present time, we have to realize that we live in bodies which are limited by time and space.
06:09And we have understanding which is limited by our human understanding.
06:13And we also live in a fallen world, and we're also subject to the fall.
06:16So we therefore have influences upon us which are going to prevent us from understanding God's will.
06:22And the devil does everything he can to confuse people, especially on these two points.
06:28Jesus being equal with God, being pre-existent, and God being a triunity.
06:34Whole religion called Islam is based upon it, which has 1.5 billion people believing in it.
06:40Based upon a revelation so-called which was given to Mohammed, apparently, though I dispute that.
06:46But it was invented, really, some 600 to 800 years after Jesus came, and is based upon falsehood.
06:54We have Judaism, which is based upon the truth, which is the Bible, the Tanakh, plus the writings of the rabbis in the Talmud, which is not true.
07:03And we have an argument with both Jews and Muslims over those two points.
07:07We also have a discussion with Jews over the bit which we agree on, which is the Old Testament or the Tanakh.
07:16And again, it's a question which I haven't time to go into, but I will go into sometime in the future, which is a fascinating discussion,
07:22in which you can see from the Hebrew Scriptures that God is a plural unity.
07:26The first verse in the Bible says,
07:28The word Elohim is a plural word, masculine plural word.
07:35It goes on to say, let us make man in our image.
07:38And you can go through the Old Testament and see that there are many instances which show God as a plural unity.
07:43So it's not impossible for God to appear in some human form, as he does in certain places in the Hebrew Scriptures, in the Old Testament.
07:51Therefore, it's not impossible for Jesus to be God and to appear in human form upon the earth.
07:58So once you get that into your mind and you understand that these two things are possible,
08:01that Jesus is God, who is pre-existent, who's always existed, who always will exist,
08:07who became man and dwelt amongst us,
08:09and that God is part of a tri-unity of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit,
08:12then you can understand the rest of it.
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