THE WAY TO RECEIVE THE DIVINE DISPENSING
In creating man, God used clay to form man’s body as his outward, physical organ with the physical consciousness to contact the physical world. Then God breathed His breath of life into that body, and this breath became man’s inward organ, his spirit. The combination of the body and the spirit produced man’s psychological person, his soul. The spirit as man’s inward, spiritual organ is higher than the body as man’s physical organ, since the spirit is composed of God’s breath. God’s breath is not God Himself, but it is very close to God. Proverbs 20:27 says, "The spirit of man is the lamp of Jehovah, searching all the inward parts of the belly." The breath of life out of God’s mouth became the spirit of man, which is the lamp of God to shine within us for God. As men, we have two organs, the physical organ and the spiritual organ, and we ourselves are living souls, living persons.
God’s desire was not merely to have a man as a living soul with a body of clay and a human spirit formed of God’s breath. This cannot satisfy God, because the central thought of God is that He would be one with man (Hymns, #972). In the garden of Eden, God was still not one with Adam. God was God and Adam was Adam. In order to carry out His desire, God put man in front of two trees, one tree, the tree of life, symbolizing God Himself, and the other tree, the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, being the embodiment of Satan. Then, God warned man to be careful about his eating. He said, "Of every tree of the garden thou mayest freely eat: but of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, thou shalt not eat of it: for in the day that thou eatest thereof thou shalt surely die" (Gen. 2:16b-17). God’s putting man in front of the two trees was a strong indication that God wanted man to take Him in by eating Him. If man would take God in, God would be life to man in his spirit. This was fulfilled in the New Testament. According to the New Testament, God came as the bread of life (John 6:35), good for us to eat. If we eat Him, we have the eternal life, the divine life, in our spirit. When we received the eternal life in our spirit, our spirit was regenerated, and we were born again. First, we were born of the flesh through our parents, but now we have been born of the Spirit in our spirit (3:6). Now we not only have God’s life within us, but we are one with God. God can rejoice because He has come into man and become one with man.
To be born of God is wonderful because this birth indicates that God and we are now one. We can rejoice and shout, "Hallelujah! I am one with God and God is one with me." God can also rejoice because He has obtained His heart’s desire—but not yet in full. After being regenerated, we, the God-created men, need to be transformed, renewed, and conformed to the image of God’s embodiment. All that God is, is altogether embodied in the Son (Col. 2:9). Moreover, the Son became a man, and this man went through death and resurrection to become the life-giving Spirit (1 Cor. 15:45b). Today our Savior, the Son of God, Jesus Christ, is a life-giving Spirit, and He is now in our human spirit (2 Tim. 4:22). Not only so, "He who is joined to the Lord is one spirit" (1 Cor. 6:17). This is the consummation of God’s being one with us. God is in us to be our life, and we are regenerated and are being transformed and conformed to His image. We were created in God’s image, but that image was merely a photograph of God. Now, however, God has wrought Himself into our being to make our very being into the image of His being.
(The Central Line of the Divine Revelation, Chapter 7, by Witness Lee)
