The Son of Man is Above All

Ephesians 4:6b

Sermon Transcript by Rev. Ernest O’Neill

Will you turn to Ephesians 4, and that’ll mean we can all start together. Ephesians 4:6 is the
verse that we’re studying today. Ephesians 4:6, “One God and Father of us all, who is above all and
through all and in all.” Somewhat of an epiphany started for me some years ago when I remembered
again, that first verse of the lesson that we read, “When the Son of man comes in his glory and all
his holy angels with him.” It’s the well-known prophecy of the judgment day when Jesus will
separate the nations one from another. In normal theology, we were all very clear that Jesus was
often referred to by different names. One of the names that was well-known was “Son of man”. Son
of man was the name that emphasized, in the view of the theologians down through the centuries, the
humanity of Jesus, that he was a human being. I was well aware of that when the New Testament used
the term, “The Son of man,” it was emphasizing the humanity of Jesus — except that this says, “When
the Son of man comes in his glory.”

In ordinary theological terms, that was a contradiction to me, and a contradiction to all of us who
were brought up in the study of theology, because it meant that Jesus, the human being, was coming
in his glory when he was supposedly elevated to the right hand of God and he only had his divinity.
Because for us, he was known as the Son of man in his human life on earth, but then when he was
elevated to the right hand of God, he was known as the Son of God and his divinity is what we always
thought of being uppermost. Suddenly, I was faced with this apparent contradiction and paradox that
Jesus was going to exercise his authority on the Day of Judgment as a human being, as the Son of
man. It was then that I began to find other references in theology that suggested that: the moment
when the lion’s den is talked about, or the fiery furnace is talked about. It was in Daniel and it
talks about Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego and then a fourth one “like unto the Son of man”. I
started to look back to the references in theology that suggested that the appearances of God in the
Old Testament were often the appearances of the Son of God, of Jesus himself, and that he existed in
Old Testament times and came to earth in Old Testament times as himself.

Then I found other references in theology that suggested that Jesus would be a human being forever.
It was just startling to me because I was very sure that I understood the gospel — and the gospel
was that God made us in his image, and then he sent Jesus down who lived here for a short time, 33,
35 years, and after that visit went up to be with his Father again — and that was it. He came to
human life to show us how we should live and to bear the things that we bore for a short time, and
then to go back to heaven. I never thought that he was a human being now and forever. Of course,
you know some of the verses that stated it very clearly. If you glance at Colossians 1:15, it
stands out most plainly, “He,” Jesus, “is the image of the invisible God.” That I knew — that he
was divine. He was the divine Son of God. But the next clause had never made sense to me — and
now it began to make sense, “He is the image of the invisible God, the first-born of all creation.”
I started to try to think through it. I think that means that when God started creation, which might
have been when he made the planet, but probably was long before that because there were other things
in existence before that that were different from him himself, because creation means that God
created something outside himself. It’s different from emanation.

So many of the Middle Eastern religions believe there’s an emanation of the Spirit of God — he kind
of comes forth. So there’s no distinction between the object and it. That’s why [the theologian]

Francis Schaeffer said, Protestant and Catholic Christianity open the way for scientists to operate
because scientists at last grasp that the earth and the physical life was something separate from
themselves, and they could study it and analyze it, whereas under the Middle Eastern religions or
the Eastern religions, it was just an emanation of the Spirit of God and of course, could not be
separated from God himself.

I realized that God, at some point, created something outside himself — maybe that was stars or
constellations, maybe it was matter itself — but certainly at that point Jesus was the first-born
of all creation. I began to see that God had created outside himself, the person who was part of
himself, his own Son, and that person was humanity — and that was the human race that God created
in his own image. He made it part of himself by making it part of his own Son, Christ. Christ was
the first-born of all creation. The next verse [Colossians 1:16] is just as deep, “For in him all
things were created, in heaven and on earth, visible and invisible, whether thrones or dominions or
principalities or authorities—all things were created though him and for him. He is before all
things, and in him all things hold together.”

It was a whole new view of reality that I had never had before — that God made everything inside
his own dear Son so that it would share his Son’s life and share his Son’s eternity and actually and
share his own power. Everything was made inside Jesus. The verses made sense to me as I saw John
1, “in him all things were made. All things were made through him and by him and without him was
not anything made that was made.” You may remember me once pointing out that the Greek in those
first few verses of John means that actually everything that is was life in him. And that’s
actually the right translation of it, everything that was made was life in him, was life in Jesus.

In other words, everything came out of Jesus and everything is in him. And of course, it wasn’t
long before I came across the other verses where Jesus says, “I in you, and you in me.” [John 14:20]
And then the verse that probably was the first one that I shared with you, Ephesians 2:10, “For we
are God’s workmanship created in Christ Jesus for good works which he has prepared beforehand that
we should walk in them.” It dawned upon me that this is God’s workmanship created in Christ himself
for good works and that we were each made inside Jesus and were part of him. Colossians says, “we
hold together inside him”. Christ holds us together inside him. And then, it made sense of the
whole bearing of sin.

I was always very unsatisfied intellectually with all the theories of the atonement, but of course,
particularly the crude ones that said, “Oh yes, Christ paid his life by ransom to Satan, the devil,
so that we could get our lives back.” That seemed crazy, that God was at the mercy of the devil and
had to exchange Jesus — but that seemed to be the level on which many of the theories of the
atonement was built. They all seemed to me, “Why did he kill the wrong man? Why kill Jesus? Lord,
why kill your Son and then pretend it’s us?” I could not get my mind around that and yet, it’s the
accepted gospel. That’s the way it’s presented, the “substitutionary theory”. That’s the heart of
most of the theology that rules Christendom today, but I just could not see the justice of it or the
sense of it. Of course, this transformed it.

I saw clearly that our dear Father is a responsible person above everything else and that he does
not make a mass of little people and put them on a planet and let them murder each other and then
suddenly say, “You’re forgiven.” I saw that isn’t him. He doesn’t play games like that. What’s
forgiven if they all kill each other and you just sit up there and watch them? That runs through
the Old Testament. Again and again the Israelites rebelled against him — he forgave them. They
rebelled against him — he forgave them. “Though your sins be scarlet they shall be as white as

snow, though they be like crimson they shall be as wool.” [Isaiah 1:18] Yet it seemed to me, “What?
There’s nothing difficult in that.” Until I saw that everyone was in him, in Jesus. Everything
was done in Jesus. Our dear Father determined that he would pay the price of giving us free will
and that price was that we might be condemned to death — not just in Jesus on Calvary, that was
just the outward physical historical expression — but that we would beat him to death as long as we
wanted to.

In other words, that he would keep us alive in his Son, and he would hold us together from flying
apart, and he would keep the atoms together in our bodies even as we, inside him, created chaos, and
agony, and destruction, and he would hold onto that, and he would hold us inside himself even as we
tore each other apart and tore apart the things he had made and the people he had created, and the
people in whom he lived. So that when they got the rifle butts and slammed them into the wee girl’s
peak, they were his feet, they were his feet. He allowed nothing to happen that he himself did not
bear personally. He committed himself to bearing inside himself the worst that we would do to each
other.

Indeed, he bore the heart of it. The little girl, Raina, bore some pain as they smashed the rifle
butts into her feet last week, but the unbearable pain was borne by him and is part of the reason
everyone testifies to the fact that there is an unremarkable insensitivity to the agony that you’re
going through. There is a sense in which you’re lifted out of it and you see it as happening to
someone else, and somehow, the pain is bearable. Then, it made sense to me, all this bearing of
sin. It lifted it out of all the imagery of the Old Testament which does its best with the goat
going into the wilderness with the sins upon it. But then, I saw it’s God himself bearing it all
inside himself and he is a responsible God.

When God determined that he would give some dear children all the privilege that he had and a free
will, he determined also that he would endure whatever they thought fit to lay upon him. That’s why
Barth says, “God put himself at risk.” That’s what makes sense of this verse, that “God is the
Father of all and he is over all, and in all, and through all.” Most evangelicals have to twist it
to make it mean the Christians, but of course, there’s no way to twist the English. It’s so plain.
“God is the Father of all. He is over all, and in all and through all.” You can’t do anything
with “in” in Greek but make it “en”; or “dia” in Greek but make it “through” or “epi” in Greek but
make it “over”. God is the Father over all, and in all, and through all. That puts him not only in
Reina as her feet are smashed by the rifle butts, but it puts him in the people who are doing the
smashing, and it puts him inside all the dear hearts that Joe prayed for and the little Palestinians
with their stones. That’s what makes them dear to us and that’s what takes it out of the realm of,
“Well, they won’t be in heaven,” or, “They won’t be in hell or wherever.” It makes it all so
foolish.

You can hear the Savior saying, “Nobody knows. It isn’t even given to the Son of man to know when
that time comes. But, you have a responsibility now of living in the reality that is present around
you, and these are your brothers and sisters.” Okay, they don’t sing our hymns. They don’t pray
our prayers and they aspire to despise our Savior, but God is the Father of all and in all and
through all. He is, meanwhile, inside them and he is working in their hearts. You can see what a
dreadful travesty it is, for him to be in each one of them and us to be on the other side praying
for these poor heathen. He’s one in the heathen we’re praying for. You can see more clearly than
ever. There’s that verse — I can’t put my finger on it — but I know I spent a Sunday expounding it
back in Minneapolis one day. “These are days of life. These are not days of condemnation. These
are days of life in which we live.”

There will be a day when there will be a judgment and a condemnation but these are “days of life”.
These are days for looking at the present situation that our Savior is in each one of those dear
hearts and is trying to get out because his Father is the Father of us all, over all, and in all,
and through all. Let us pray.