“We are not stoning you for any good work,” they replied, ”but for blasphemy, because you, a mere man, claim to be God.”
In 1959 a man named John Griffin did something quite unique. He lived in an America that was still segregated by race. As a white man, he was aware of the injustice of racism, but he wanted to know more about its effect, so he underwent treatments that turned his skin black, and then he traveled the deep South for six weeks to explore what life was like on the other side of the race line. The effect of the skin treatment was so startling that he didn’t even recognize himself in the mirror.
Have you ever wondered how Jesus felt giving up life in heaven to become a man? To be transformed from the most powerful being in the universe, in all of existence really, to a human that the Bible describes as a man of common appearance:
He had no beauty or majesty to attract us to him,
nothing in his appearance that we should desire him.
He was despised and rejected by mankind,
a man of suffering, and familiar with pain.
Like one from whom people hide their faces
he was despised, and we held him in low esteem.
(Isaiah 53: 2b-3)
Of course, he made the blind to see, fed thousands with a little boy’s lunch, healed the sick, and raised the dead, but that really didn’t count to the people who were interrogating him.
“… you, a mere man…”
He really wasn’t a “mere man,” was he…?
Let’s Discuss: How did the Jews reason that Jesus as a “mere man?”
I really think it was their only option without accepting his message an authority. The decided to reject him, therefore rejecting what he did, the work of the Spirit, and Jesus divinity. People still do this today – if Jesus was only a mere man one doesn’t have to obey or believe him.
I agree with Nathan. The issue is a hard heart that chooses to see Jesus in a light that diminishes His true character and value.
It is interesting to me that they would characterize Jesus as “mere” man when obviously he was capable of doing so much more than a mere man.