The Son Of Man

July/August 2015 — Grace & Truth Magazine


The Son Of Man

Consider the Lord in His childhood – His becoming strong in spirit, growing in wisdom as in stature, in favor with God and man (Lk. 2:40,52). How perfectly He is man, really within human limits – a marvelous Child, yet a Child as He is plainly called. Who shall conform the divine to the human here, omniscience to growing knowledge? Shall we attempt it? Would heart or conscience find deeper rest or satisfaction in Him if we were able to comprehend this wonder?

But assuredly, it is the Son of Man here – a Person in all the truth of humanity. Who shall deny me the happiness of drinking in the grace that has here stooped down to the condition of a Child, that a child may realize His sympathy and adore Him for His love? Thank God that none can deny me. It is as open to one as to another; and the love is as unfathomable as is the Person.

After reading declarations of power and judgment regarding Israel in Isaiah 50:1-3, the voice becomes strangely altered. It drops into a softer key, appealingly human: “The Lord God hath given Me the tongue of the learned that I should know how to speak a word in season to him that is weary: He wakeneth morning by morning, He wakeneth Mine ear to hear as the learner” (v.4 KJV).

Here we have the contrast. It is the Almighty who is come in servant’s form. He is strangely taking the place of obedience and acquiring the tongue of the learned for the ministry of grace to individual need. For this He Himself becomes a learner and is wakened morning by morning to “hear” as that. Yet, He is at the same time the One who dries up the sea and makes the rivers a wilderness (v.2)!

Who shall put these things, God and man, together? For satisfaction to the intellect, no one can. The intellect is unable even to understand one’s own being – to know how “spirit and soul and body” make up one man (1 Th. 5:23). Is it so wonderful then that there should be attributes of the Infinite that baffle us altogether, or that “no man knoweth the Son but the Father”? (Mt. 11:27).

By Frederick W. Grant (adapted from The Crowned Christ)