Finally, Jesus held that men’s attitudes toward Himself would be the determining factor in God’s judgment on the judgment day. “I tell you, everyone who acknowledges me before men, the Son of man also will acknowledge before the angels of God; but he who denies me before men will be denied before the angels of God” (Luke 12:8-9, RSV). “Son of Man” is often thought to indicate the humanity of Jesus, just as the reflex expression “Son of God” indicates His divinity. In fact, just the opposite is true. The Son of Man was a divine figure in the Old Testament book of Daniel who would come at the end of the world to judge mankind and rule forever. Thus, the claim to be the Son of Man would be in effect a claim to divinity. I have no doubt that in this passage Jesus is not referring to a third figure as the Son of Man, but is referring to Himself by means of that title. That is, however, for the moment beside the point. The point is that whoever the Son of Man may be, Jesus is claiming that men will be judged before Him on the basis of their response to Jesus. Men’s eternal destiny is fixed on their response to Jesus. Make no mistake: if Jesus were not the divine Son of God, then this claim could only be regarded as the most narrow and objectionable dogmatism. For Jesus is saying that men’s salvation depends on their confession to Jesus Himself.
A discussion of Jesus’ personal claims could go on and on, but I think this is sufficient to indicate the radical self-concept of Jesus. Here is a man who thought of Himself as the Son of God in a unique sense, who claimed to act and speak with divine authority, who held Himself to be a worker of miracles, and who believed that men’s eternal destiny hinged on whether or not they believed in Him. So extraordinary was the person Jesus thought Himself to be that Dunn, at the end of his study of the self-consciousness of Jesus, feels compelled to remark: “One last question cannot be ignored: Was Jesus mad?”6
Dunn rejects the hypothesis that Jesus was insane because it cannot account for the full portrait of Jesus that we have in the gospels. The balance and soundness of Jesus’ whole life make it evident that He was no lunatic. But the decisive disproof of this hypothesis is, of course, the resurrection. The resurrection vindicates the claims that Jesus made concerning himself. Wolfhart Pannenberg explains,
The resurrection of Jesus acquires such decisive meaning, not merely because someone or any one has been raised from the dead, but because it is Jesus of Nazareth, whose execution was instigated by the Jews because he had blasphemed against God. If this man was raised from the dead, then that plainly means that the God whom he had supposedly blasphemed has committed himself to him.7
Pannenberg points out that the key element in Jesus’ teaching was Jesus’ personal claim to authority, evident in His handling of the Mosaic law and His preaching of the dawning of the kingdom of God. It was this claim that led to His execution for blasphemy by the Jews. But His resurrection showed that Jesus’ claim was justified. “The resurrection can only be understood as the divine vindication of the man whom the Jews had rejected as a blasphemer.”8 Therefore, the resurrection shows that Jesus, in making those astounding personal claims was not mad, but really was who He claimed to be.
3. The resurrection of Jesus shows that He holds the key to eternal life. As the one who decisively conquered death, Jesus is the one to whom we must turn for victory over man’s most dreaded enemy. On the subject of death and immortality, Jesus spoke with the authority of the victor over death. In this light His dispute with the Sadducees becomes very important. The Sadducees were a Jewish sect that denied there was any future resurrection life and concocted puzzles designed to show its impossibility. For example, suppose a woman was widowed and remarried seven times in this life. In the resurrection, who out of the seven husbands will have her for his wife? The Sadducees posed that question to Jesus, and Mark recorded what He said:
Jesus replied, “Does not this show where you go wrong—and how you fail to understand both the scriptures and the power of God? When people rise from the dead they neither marry nor are they given in marriage; they live like the angels in Heaven. But as for this matter of the dead being raised, have you never read in the book of Moses, in the passage about the bush, how God spoke to him in these words, ‘I am the God of Abraham and the God of Isaac and the God of Jacob’? God is not God of the dead but of living men! That is where you make your great mistake!” [Mark 12:24-27, Phillips]
Jesus could not have been more clear or emphatic. He held that the Old Testament Scriptures teach immortality through resurrection, and He believed it himself. He rebuked the Sadducees for their ignorance of Scripture and their limited conception of God’s power, as evident in their puzzle. As for Jesus’ solution, He may mean simply that in the same way that angels are not married, neither will people in the resurrection life be married. But He may also mean that people will be like the angels in heaven physically. The descriptions of Jesus’ resurrection body in the gospels coincide closely with biblical descriptions of angels. Angels, too, can appear and disappear in space. When they appear, they are really physically present. Though they are created beings they are immortal. They are often described as glorious, and they possess superhuman powers. Thus, there is a great resemblance between angelic bodies and Jesus’ resurrection body. That does not mean that people become angels when they die, as is often mistakenly pictured in cartoons of people receiving their harps and wings. According to the Bible, angels are a separate order of beings higher than man. Jesus said that in the resurrection people would be like angels. If he means physically like angels, then his teaching is very similar to Paul’s teaching on the resurrection body as immortal, glorious, powerful, and supernatural.
Jesus’ teaching therefore holds out hope for man in the face of death. The grave is not the end. At history’s end we shall be raised up by God and simultaneously transformed into persons having glorious, supernatural bodies. We shall never again experience disease or deformity or aging. We shall have powers that the present body in no way possesses. We shall apparently overcome the limits of space, so that travel from one point to another may be accomplished instantaneously. At the same time we shall still be ourselves, as recognizable to others as Jesus was to His disciples after His resurrection. Evil will be gone, along with all the ugly sins that men have committed against one another. And death will be forever vanquished, never again to hold sway over man. What a wonderful prospect! What a hope! That is what Paul so magnificently describes:
Lo! I tell you a mystery. We shall not all sleep, but we shall all be changed, in a moment, in the twinkling of an eye, at the last trumpet. For the trumpet will sound, and the dead will be raised imperishable, and we shall be changed. For this perishable nature must put on the imperishable, and this mortal nature must put on immortality. When the perishable puts on the imperishable, and the mortal puts on immortality, then shall come to pass the saying that is written: