In these days the Lord is teaching us about the centrality of the Son of Man in Father’s redemptive purpose—making those who are dead in self-love alive to Him. We continue to glorify God as His one Spirit unearths these kingdom treasures through Bob and Eric with remarkable synergy, even as they study on different continents! You may recall Bob opening George MacDonald’s poem from A Diary of an Old Soul: “I am a beast until I love as God doth love…. Leave not Thy son half-made in beastly guise, less than a man, with more than human cries—an unshaped thing in which Thyself cries out! Finish me, Father….”
In Boardman’s book entitled The Kingdom, first published in 1899 but recently republished by Lifechangers, Boardman refers to: “‘The Son of Man,’ the promised Messiah, the archetypal, antitypal, consummate Man.” Jesus is archetypal because He is Father’s prototype Man. In His humanity, the Son is antitypical of us in our degenerate state; He is the Firstborn of a new creation made in Father’s likeness (Col 1:15).
Bob is gaining new insight into the loss of the image of God in humanity through Matthew 25; sheep are separated from goats on the basis of our natural response to the hungry, thirsty, the stranger, the naked, the sick and incarcerated. Jesus notes that those who responded in Agape generosity were surprised saying, “When did we see You hungry and feed You…?” They acted spontaneously from a regenerated human nature in the likeness of the Son of Man; through Him they had become human as God intended. Those who “did not do it unto Me” acted in self-referential indifference—evidencing an inhuman nature.
Bob is teaching us that Father’s purpose in the Son of Man was not to make us super-spiritual, but to make us human as He originally intended. Those who forsake self-focused super-spirituality in order to become human in the likeness of the Son of Man will effectively change Father’s reputation in the earth, naturally revealing His Agape.
Eric has just completed a Plumbline entitled Thorn-Crowned Son of Man outlining Father’s comprehensive work of redemption—resurrecting us out of our thorn-laden, fruitless condition in self-love and making us alive to Himself in the fruit-bearing Son of Man. Father is at work “until Christ is formed in us” (Gal 4:19). The “archetypal, antitypical, consummate Man” is being naturalized within us, capable of spontaneously bearing the fruit of Agape both Godward and manward.
We are grateful to Father for you and confident the glorious work Father has begun—renewing your humanity in the likeness of His Son—He will certainly complete in you!
