Except a Man

This phrase "Except" almost always signals a categorical exclusion or a condition for change. This gives rise to its implications that there is a fixed or limited condition that prevails unless a specific, transformative event occurs.
It implies that without a higher intervention or a fundamental change of heart, a person is stuck in their current state.
If someone says, "No one can survive that desert," and you respond, "Except a man who has a plan and is determined to do so," then you are only highlighting human agency, that is the limitations or confines of man.
The exception you are then suggesting is that while the laws of nature, or logic, apply to that statement, a change can be applied if that person acquires the unique willpower, intellect, or resilience of a human being that can break those rules.
The version of the person who started the journey is not the one who gets to finish it. To "transcend," the natural man has to change his fundamental "operating system." There is no "middle ground." You are either limited by your humanity, or you have been transformed by something outside of it.
You see "Except a man" reach the end of his own strength, he cannot witness the beginning of God's power.
In this transition from the internal to the external, the Lord does a work in our lives which may be instant or it may take many years. Many would like to see this period of change as being a "waiting room" moment for our flesh loves nothing more than to be passive and yet partake in all the spoils.
That transition takes place in a school room rather where there is no passive moments, rather the time is taken up with intentional, rigorous and developmental moments. In the "waiting room," you are a spectator of your own life, whereas in the "school room," you are a participant in a curriculum.
It is in that schoolroom, things that seem to be one thing are revealed to be of another.
Jesus was baptised at Bethabara, the crossing point of the River Jordan by the greatest prophet the Old Testament produced. Strange how we always thought of Moses and others as being the greatest, but it is Jesus who gives John that title.
Bethabara was also the place where Elijah was taken up into Heaven by a fiery chariot, Bethabara was also the place where Joshua crossed over into the Promised Land.
Joshua took Israel over; it was the crossing point from the old to the new. Did the manna not cease once they crossed over?
A representative from each tribe took a stone from the riverbed during that crossing and they built a memorial on the other bank for future generations.
Joshua himself also too twelve stones and set them in the riverbed where the ark had stood.
When Jesus was baptised, did He not stand on the twelve stones of Joshua (Yeshua) in the riverbed?
God was declaring the Jesus was the bridge between the Old Testament and the New Testament He came to establish.
Jesus is the cornerstone and as such a cornerstone must be laid out on a firm level surface which the twelve stones in the river would have provided. But a cornerstone also needs to face the direction that the building is to be constructed toward.
Did the twelve stones on the riverbank not serve as the direction beacon for Jesus?
Layer upon layer the Scripture reveals its treasures, stone upon stone it builds into our lives.
At that crossing did John not let the people know that if they would not worship God then the very stones would cry out? Do you think John was pointing to the pile of stones on the bank?