16:13 Now when Jesus came into the district of Caesarea Philippi, he asked his disciples, "Who do people say that the Son of Man is?"
16:14 And they said, "Some say John the Baptist, but others Elijah, and still others Jeremiah or one of the prophets."
16:15 He said to them, "But who do you say that I am?"
16:16 Simon Peter answered, "You are the Messiah, the Son of the living God.”
In the older parts of the Old Testament the son of man term “ben Adam” eventually and simply means human being, technically the sons of the soil or the ground. The expression is used more than 100 times in the first five books in the Hebrew Scriptures, assumed of being written by Moses, and they are called collectively the Torah.
However it was never that simple. The same Torah says that the first human beings were created directly by God, after God’s own image. The power of life or the wind of life into the human nostrils was blown by the Spirit (Wind) of God.
Whatever Mr. Darwin happened to write about evolution, where this latter is eventually still a hypothetic theory only, a couple of its consisting elements were never scientifically proven and some major bombastic statements in his theory are not only questionable but mere speculations.
Also, his general message of the starker fish eats the weaker fish and the natural selection of the fittest and similar popularized sayings became dark toned in the mouth of some Nazi leaders in the XXth century, and they are echoed continuously by some professional racists making a living on ideological trench-fighting. "
According to some counter-balancing scientists today, the major Darwinian invention is that he thought that life as a biochemical event, started by a natural chance from very humble beginnings, from one cell organisms. He wrote that life as we know it today, slow step by slow step, through billions of years, gradually evolved into the top species which is the Homo Sapiens Sapiens. However this theory is not able to survive real scientific scrutiny.
Once
upon a time not only in the west or in the east, but seemingly
everywhere on
the Earth, there was a sudden change in the biosphere. This change is
called the Cambrian Explosion which is a science term to describe
that approximately 541 million years ago, which means it is
carbon-dated, suddenly almost out of the blue (sic)
practically
all major animal kinds
we have today,
began
appearing in the fossil records.
This
process lasted
for about 10
to
20
million
years and resulted in the divergence of most modern stratification
in
the flora and fauna. According to the wikipedia “before
the Cambrian explosion most organisms were simple, composed of
individual cells occasionally organized into colonies. As the rate of
diversification subsequently accelerated, the variety of life began
to resemble that of today.”
It
means that unbelievably almost
all present animal kinds
in their incredible complexity
appeared during this period. Albeit
we still talk about a period of circa 20 millions of years, in
a geological sense or even in evolution-wise it is an extraordinary
short duration to accomplish almost
all
biodiversity on Earth. Especially when the earliest claim is that
the history of life on earth goes back 3,850
million years. For
more than 3 billions of years,
till the Cambrian geological age, hardly any significant change
had happened
in the biomass.
However when it started,
a short 20 million years and all the abundance of the life, and
almost all the variety of all earthly lifeforms appeared,
like suddenly. Regarding
this issue Darwin himself confessed that “To
the question why we do not find rich fossiliferous deposits belonging
to these assumed earliest periods prior to the Cambrian system, I can
give no satisfactory answer.”
He also wrote about it in his book “On the origin of the Species” that for example the “sudden appearance of a solitary group of trilobites, with no apparent antecedents, and absence of other fossils, to be ‘undoubtedly of the gravest nature’ among the difficulties in his theory of natural selection.” And not only that, it looks like that once the species arrived like in a ready to go condition, and once they had appeared, after that practically they stayed utterly unchanged.
The Darwinian permanent but casual chain-mutation, as a driving tool of the evolution from the simple organism toward the always more complex entities not only does not exist, but mathematically and statistically it is impossible to successfully assemble together by mere chance anything so complex as an animal body, or by mere accidental or even environment-caused chain-mutations.
The scientific and statistical chance for it to happen by mere chance is in the realm of the 1 proportioned to 10 to the power of 83. After the one there are 83 zeros. This chance is almost an infinite NO. Since their building, the Apes and any other species did not change, they eventually stayed as they were through long millions of years. According to the data we have today the Homo Sapiens appeared on Earth around 250K years ago. Since then we did not change genetically as a biological race. Profound questions of our existence are not and can not be answered by science. In the New Testament the very term of Son of Man is used 81 times and explicitly by Jesus only, referring himself as a Son of Man.
Albeit
this
term always contains a human part, even atheist people happen to know
or at least assume that we are not only molecules and grouped
cells,
but we are complex entities, having body, soul and spirit. However
there is even more to it. Albeit
it was important for the early church to maintain the humanity of
Jesus beside declaring
his divinity in the same time, still Jesus’
personal
referral contains an allusion to
the Prophecy Book of Daniel, widely read by the that
time contemporary
as it is written in chapter seven:
"As I watched in the
night visions, I saw one like a son of man coming with the clouds of
heaven. And he came to the Ancient One and was presented before him.
To him was given dominion and glory and kingship, that all peoples, nations, and languages should serve him. His dominion is an everlasting dominion that shall not pass away, and his kingship is one that shall never be destroyed."
It is a messianic referral, as it is held by many groups, thus it is like that Jesus stated that I am the Son of Man whom Daniel talks about. But there is even more in it.
From the fourth century the church held that Jesus is human and divine, thus in the same time he is the Son of Man and the Son of God. It is a bit a mechanistic notion, though they claimed that it is a mystery. Their real confusion was in their confusing statement that they stated that Jesus is the only and only begotten son (of God).
In
order to get something usable out of this, we should pay attention to
the Lord’s Prayer, which is actually a very Jewish Prayer by
nature and in its spirit.
It
says in
the first line that Avinu
Shebashamayim, aka, Our Father in Heaven. It is not My Father only,
it is Our Father. We
can ride on terms of being begotten or being adopted, ultimately it
hardly matters, because God is Our Father (Parent), the
Grandfather of all.
All
human beings have a Heavenly Parent. On an ultimate level, we are
spiritual and physical hybrids, which may mean that God, or the Great
Grandfather Spirit is our Father, but Mother Earth or Mother nature
is our Mother.
It
is just an extra flavor on
the top of divine parenting that
the Book of Genesis says
in
chapter six that “
It
happened, when men began to multiply on the surface of the ground,
and daughters were born to them, that God's sons saw that men's
daughters were beautiful, and they took for themselves wives of all
that they chose.
The
Lord
said, ‘My Spirit will not strive with man forever, because he also
is flesh; yet will his days be one hundred twenty years.’ The
Nephilim (Giants)
were in the earth in those days, and also after that, when God's sons
came in to men's daughters. They bore children to them. Those were
the mighty men who were of old, men of renown. ”
And
there is even more to it. The second Psalm says that “I
will tell of the decree. The
Lord
said to me, ‘You are my son. Today I have become your father.’ ”
Regarding this, in the Gospel of John, Jesus told Nicodemus that all people who were born on Earth must have a second, a spiritual birth in order to enter Heaven. He said to him that “That which is born of the flesh is flesh. That which is born of the Spirit is spirit. Don't marvel that I said to you, 'You must be born anew. ”
This
new birth is a spiritual baby of the human and of God. In every human
heart there is a fertile field to receive the seed of God, which is
the Word of God. If the word finds a fertile heart, a new spiritual
baby starts to grow in that heart, which must be born sooner or
later, but
latest when the soul leaves the body behind.
On
this allegorical way, in the mystical union Jesus is a
Son
of Man and a
Son
of God in the same time. However the ultimate mystery or even miracle
is that it does not apply to Jesus only but to all humans as it is
written in the Gospel of John, chapter one:
“He
came to His own, and those who were His own did not receive Him. But
as many as received Him, to them He gave the right to become children
of God, even
to those who believe in His name, who were born, not of blood nor of
the will of the flesh nor of the will of man, but of God.”
The
only begotten Son is assumed to mean that though the opportunity of
the mystical union is given by God to all, however
the Savior makes us ready, effective and receptive for the
fertilizing word of God. That is why we say that we are taken by
adoption of God because of the graceful
delivery by the Savior.
The
Gospel of Mark has the description of the very nature of the newborn
spiritual entity who was born in the union of the human heart and the
word of God as a new Creation, being the sons of Man and God, as it
is written in chapter 16:
“He
said to them, "Go into all the world, and preach the Good News
to the whole creation. He who believes and is baptized will be saved;
but he who disbelieves will be condemned. These signs will accompany
those who believe: in my name they will cast out demons; they will
speak with new languages; they will take up serpents; and if they
drink any deadly thing, it will in no way hurt them; they will lay
hands on the sick, and they will recover.”
The growth of the spiritual child in our hearts sometimes takes a
lifetime, but still, once the child was conceived, it must grow in
the heart, always showing the sings of a changed life by charity and
neighborly love, good deeds all over, by compassion to people and
multiplied understanding of the divine grace we are receiving. May
the Lord be praised always by
our thoughts, words and deeds,
AMEN.
