Hey, this is John at the Bible Project. We're on episode five of a conversation about a character in the Bible called the Son of Man.

It's an important character that Jesus himself identifies with. And while the apostles call Jesus by the title the Christ.

An odd fact in the Gospel of God says Jesus almost never uses that title to describe himself. Instead, he very often uses the phrase the Son of Man.

This is a phrase that he got from Daniel chapter seven. And it's clear that Jesus saw Daniel seven as a symbolic portrait in miniature of his entire destiny calling and vocation his identity.

In Daniel seven, there's a dream. In the dream, we meet this character, the Son of Man. He rides up on a cloud, sits at God's right hand and is worshiped alongside of him.

This is the human we've been waiting for since page three of the Bible when God promised that a seed of the woman would crush the head of the serpent.

But the Son of Man is in Daniel seven, which is the culmination of Daniel one through six. And so we need to take in Daniel one through six.

So that's what we're going to talk about today. Sixth century BC, Nebuchadnezzar, the king of Babylon took over Jerusalem,

lutes their temple, and recruits men to serve him in Babylon. One of these men is Daniel. We'll look at how he is connected to the Son of Man, all that and more in this episode. Thanks for joining us. Here we go.

Okay, this is the part you've been waiting for. Yes, in the Son of Man conversations, everything's been setting up for this. This is where the good stuff is.

Really? I felt like the conversation has been good. Oh, it's been awesome. But it's all been preparatory to come back to where we started. And to read Daniel seven, I think with fresh set of lenses.

And then to let that help us reread the gospel accounts of Jesus. Yeah, we've never done it this way. Start in the middle of the story. Go to Jesus.

Correct. Go back to the beginning of the story. Yeah. And then come back. Yeah. Okay. So here's the recap. We've said this preparatory conversations for the Son of Man video we're going to make.

We started with a fact, Jesus, the most common title in the New Testament is Messiah Christ people using it to describe him. However, an odd fact in the gospel accounts is Jesus almost never uses that title to describe himself. Instead, he very often uses the phrase Son of Man.

Yeah. This is a phrase that he got from Daniel chapter seven. And it's clear that Jesus saw Daniel seven as a symbolic portrait in miniature of his entire destiny calling vocation. His identity. His identity. Yeah. Yeah. And so then what we did was go back to because Daniel set Daniel seven is itself the whole story that he revival.

He was seven didn't just pop up out of nowhere. No, it wasn't just some random dream. Yeah. It was a culminating vision. Correct. Of an idea that's been generating since the first two pages of the Bible. Literally. Yeah, since the very beginning. So yeah, Daniel seven is the whole Hebrew Bible told in one chapter of dense symbolism and dream imagery.

Yes. And almost every key character, every key mediator or deliverer figure human contributes to the portrait. Actually think of this figure. We're going to see in Daniel seven, the son of man as this like photo mosaics, you know, big pictures that are made of thousands of little tiny pictures.

And Daniel seven's like that. The son of man figure rising up above the defeated beast and being enthroned beside God that figure is if you zoom in, you'll see a million little pictures of Adam and Joseph and Moses and Joshua and the high priest and we're going to see Daniel himself.

And you realize all of their stories have been miniature versions of this story. There's just one storyline at work and in all these different. There's one meta story.

Being told over and over and over again through the mini stories of all the different episodes and characters of the Hebrew Bible. And it's the story from the early chapters of Genesis.

So the character, the son of man in Daniel seven is like an amalgamation. Correct. Yeah. Of all of these other stories. Yes. And what you realize when you get there is that we haven't been telling all these separate stories of all these separate individuals. Yeah. It's all been one story, one meta story. Yeah.

By the time you get to this, you probably already kind of picked that up. You're supposed to have been trained already to know that's what's going on.

...