The good news about Jesus the Messiah.
One of the most common ways that Jesus is referred to in the New Testament is with the title “Christ.” This word means “anointed one” or “messiah,” and it refers to the Jewish hope of a royal savior who comes to save the world from death and evil. The four Gospel accounts are full of moments where people acknowledge Jesus as “the Christ,” and the Gospel of Mark even includes the word in the book’s first sentence: “The good news about Jesus the Messiah, the son of God” (Mark 1:1) It makes sense that Jesus would be called by this title, but it does leave one surprising and essential fact unexplained. Jesus almost never uses this title to describe himself. Instead, he regularly uses another title, “the Son of Man.”
The beast within...
Animal imagery is one of the most common metaphors to describe human violence and evil in the Psalms and Prophets. But all is not lost. God made a promise (Genesis 3:15) that a human would come one day, a son of the woman who would crush the serpent on its head, while also being struck by the serpent. This theme develops throughout the biblical story as God continues to raise up unlikely deliverers like Abraham, Joseph, Moses, Deborah, Samuel, and David. Each one of these characters is both heroic and compromised. Each one can become a glorious human representative of God or a deceptive and selfish agent of evil and violence. And so the patient reader of the Old Testament must wait for the next generation to produce the promised human.
Daniel turns up the volume on this imagery.
When we come to the book of Daniel, we’re introduced to the key metaphor of human kingdoms as senseless beasts. In Daniel chapter 4, the king of Babylon refuses to acknowledge God as his authority, and he is reduced to the status of a mindless animal. It’s a reversal of Genesis 1, as a human ruler is brought low to the level of the beast. And we know what beasts do. They fight to survive; they kill when necessary with no regard to humanity. And so in Daniel chapter 7, Daniel has a dream about wild and terrible beasts that symbolize the mighty empires that ravage God’s good world. But then Daniel sees a human figure called the Son of Man whom God exalts above the beasts to rule beside him on a divine throne. This Son of Man is raised to glorious rule and is worshiped alongside God as the divine King of creation. This dream summarizes the entire biblical story up to this point: God desires that humanity be unified with him to rule creation as his wise, image-bearing partners. But humanity has turned out to be a beast, so all we can hope is that a human will come and do for us all that we cannot do for ourselves.
If you can’t see the outline of Jesus’ life and mission in Daniel 7, take some time to re-read the four Gospels! Daniel 7 is one of the most important Old Testament stories for understanding what Jesus is all about, and it makes perfect sense why Jesus adopted the Son of Man title to describe himself. He is the divine-human partner that we all need to overcome the animal inside our nature and raise humanity back to the glorious destiny that God created us to experience. Jesus’ death was God’s condemnation of our animal-violence and the resurrection was his loving victory over the powers of death and evil. In and through Jesus, God has become what we are, so that we can become what he is and share in his divine life and love. This is the story of the Son of Man, and it’s the story of all of us as well.
Continue Your Learning Journey
Learn More
