THE LIVING OF JESUS ON THE EARTH BEING A MODEL OF A LIVING SHARED BY GOD AND MAN
When the Lord Jesus lived on the earth, He was genuinely a man, but instead of living by the life of man He lived by God as His life. Thus, in His life and in His living He lived the divine attributes as His human virtues manifested before the eyes of men. When people looked at Him, outwardly they saw that He was really a man. However, the more they observed Him and the more they followed Him, the more they had to admit that He truly was God. In the four Gospels we see the Galileans who followed the Lord for three and a half years. In the beginning they realized that He was the son of a carpenter, that He was a man. Gradually, the more they observed Him, the more they saw the virtues that were manifested in the Lord Jesus. Those virtues could never have been something of man. Where did those virtues come from? In those days the Galileans did not know, but today we know that those virtues were lived out of the God-man Jesus, who as a man lived not by Himself but by God and who lived out the divine attributes and manifested them as the virtues of such a One who is God yet man.
After the Lord Jesus was resurrected from the dead, His disciples also understood. At that time they began to realize that Christ is God. They had this realization not only because they saw the miracles He did, such as His calming the winds and the sea and raising the dead. Rather, they realized that He is God because they saw the attributes of the very nature of God lived out through a man to become the very virtues of that man. No doubt, God is in the virtues of Christ as a man. Therefore, at the end of the Gospels we can see that, unlike today’s Christians in their general situation, the disciples had a very deep and high realization of Him as God.
In His death and resurrection Christ also produced us. He brought God into us not in an objective way but in a subjective way. As He had brought God into Mary, so also now He brought God into us, His redeemed ones. In this way He began to make us God; that is, He begot us as children of God. Since we were born of God the Father in Christ, and since our Father God is God, how can we, the children begotten of Him, not be God? Since our Father is God, we who are born of Him surely also are God.
However, although we have been born in this way, we are still the old creation and we are still in our flesh. We are still natural and we still have our old “I.” At the same time, we must also admit that we are still filthy and corrupt. We live in the world and are constantly contaminated by the filthiness of this world. What then shall we do? Generally, Christians are taught that Jesus is the almighty Lord and the One who is the same yesterday, today, and forever, and that He is in heaven today praying for us and is able to save us to the uttermost. But what God shows us is that although such teachings are good, they are superficial and not quite accurate. Christians know that Christ intercedes in heaven for us and sympathizes with us in our problems by rendering help to us in the environment. However, in reality, it is not like that. Actually, this ascended God-man is both God and man. He is man, not the man who was created and became fallen, but the man who was created and became fallen but who went through death and resurrection and was uplifted. He is such a man now in resurrection. At the same time, He is also God, but He is not the God who is purely God, the God before His incarnation. Now this God is the consummated God. Within Him are God, man, human experience, the effectiveness of death, and the power of resurrection. All these elements are compounded together to become one compounded Spirit. There is a clear type of this in the Old Testament in Exodus 30:23-29. A hin of olive oil was compounded with four kinds of spices—myrrh, cinnamon, calamus, and cassia—making a total of five ingredients. This signifies that the Spirit of God is compounded with Christ’s death and its effectiveness and also with Christ’s resurrection and its power. All these elements are compounded together to become a compound anointing ointment. It is not just oil but an ointment. The tabernacle, the serving priests of God, and everything related to the worship of God were anointed with this anointing ointment.
(The High Peak of the Vision and the Reality of the Body of Christ, Chapter 4, by Witness Lee)
