"Coming on the Clouds of Heaven"
If there ever was a window into the thinking of the ancient world, it would be the notion of "coming on the clouds of heaven". Jesus of Nazareth used this quote while standing before the hypocritical Jewish Sanhedrin in Matthew 26:64, who wanted to see him humiliated and crucified:
"From now on you will see the Son of Man sitting at the right hand of the Mighty One and coming on the clouds of Heaven."
When Jesus said this, he was quoting the ancient prophet, Daniel (7:13-14), when he had been given a vision of the future:
"In my vision at night I looked, and there before me was one like a son of man, coming with the clouds of heaven. He approached the Ancient of Days and was led into his presence. He was given authority, glory and sovereign power; all nations and peoples of every language worshiped him. His dominion is an everlasting dominion that will not pass away, and his kingdom is one that will never be destroyed."
By quoting Daniel in this context (after they asked him if he was the "Messiah", the "Son of the living God"), he was telling them that he was, in fact, the one that Daniel had anticipated; that he indeed would soon be "coming on the clouds of heaven" and "sitting at the right hand of the Mighty One" -- despite the fact that he was shamefully on trial before the powerful and prestigious Sanhedrin, who would see to it that he would be humiliated and killed in the worst way possible.
But despite the shameful horror that the Jewish elites had arranged for this Jesus of Nazareth, he anticipated he would rise again from such a shameful death and be restored to a place of honor -- a place that was signified by the phrase: "at the right hand of the Mighty One". But this status that Jesus predicted he would eventually rise to also had implications for the compromised religious elites who had arranged his demise -- it portended that, despite their great prestige at that time, they would ultimately be brought down to horrific shame. In other words, those insincere Jews who had "lost the plot" would soon see a time when the "script" would be "flipped", as Jesus had predicted in Matthew 20:16:
"So the last will be first, and the first will be last."
And lo and behold, this was precisely what came of the religious elites in the year AD70 when the Roman state, under General Titus, sieged Jerusalem and its corrupt Temple, setting it ablaze, turning it into a "lake of fire" (Revelation 20:10) that ultimately killed over 1 million people. This was the most shameful retribution that history had ever seen; even Titus felt compelled to make a display for the gods showing that he did not delight in such wholesale slaughter and shameful chaos.
But as the man from Nazareth had predicted, so it came to pass, that, after the fall of the great (but greatly corrupt) city of Jerusalem, the Christian message of "Christ-crucified" spread all over the world, proving that Jesus was (and indeed, has been now for the last 2,000 years) "coming on the clouds of heaven". He was indeed "at the right hand of the mighty one". And for 2,000 years, we have been living in something called "Christendom" -- that is, the dominion of Christian values, and the supremacy of the man from Nazareth who was said to have actually risen from the most shameful of deaths that could ever be inflicted on anyone.