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Commentary Index | Return to PrayerRequest.comVincent Word Studies - Luke 6:22 - 6:22
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Compare Mat 5:11.
Son of Man
The phrase is employed in the Old Testament as a circumlocution for man, with special reference to his frailty as contrasted with God (Num 23:19; Psa 8:4; Job 25:6; Job 35:8; and eighty-nine times in Ezekiel). It had also a Messianic meaning (Dan 7:13 sq.), to which our Lord referred in Mat 24:30; Mat 26:64. It was the title which Christ most frequently applied to himself; and there are but two instances in which it is applied to him by another, viz., by Stephen (Act 7:56) and by John (Rev 1:13; Rev 14:14 :); and when acquiescing in the title “Son of God,” addressed to himself, he sometimes immediately after substitutes “Son of Man” (Joh 1:50, Joh 1:51; Mat 26:63, Mat 26:64).
The title asserts Christ's humanity - his absolute identification with our race: “his having a genuine humanity which could deem nothing human strange, and could be touched with a feeling of the infirmities of the race which he was to judge” (Liddon, “Our Lord's Divinity”). It also exalts him as the representative ideal man. “All human history tends to him and radiates from him; he is the point in which humanity finds its unity; as St. Irenaeus says, ' He recapitulates it.' He closes the earlier history of our race; he inaugurates its future. Nothing local, transient, individualizing, national, sectarian dwarfs the proportions of his world-embracing character. He rises above the parentage, the blood, the narrow horizon which bounded, as it seemed, his human life. He is the archetypal man, in whose presence distinction of race, intervals of ages, types of civilization, degrees of mental culture are as nothing” (Liddon).
But the title means more. As Son of Man he asserts the authority of judgment over all flesh. By virtue of what he is as Son of Man, he must be more. “The absolute relation to the world which he attributes to himself demands an absolute relation to God....He is the Son of Man, the Lord of the world, the Judge, only because he is the Son of God” (Luthardt). Christ's humanity can be explained only by his divinity. A humanity so unique demands a solution. Divested of all that is popularly called miraculous, viewed simply as a man, under the historical conditions of his life, he is a greater miracle than all his miracles combined. The solution is expressed in Heb 1:1-14.