In this chapter we will present a brief outline of what we have seen so far concerning life. For this purpose, we will use the twelve charts arranged on pages 166-167. To my realization, these charts are the best of their kind in all the publications of Christianity. They were prepared by an American sister named Mary E. McDonough, who only recently left to be with the Lord, for her book God’s Plan of Redemption. It is remarkable that we cannot find this book in almost any Christian bookstore in this country. Shortly after this book was written in 1922, it was translated into Chinese. However, the translator was not clear about the way of life, so we did not agree with his translation. About fifteen years ago we retranslated it into Chinese, and we published it in our bookrooms in Shanghai and in Taiwan. This book was eagerly accepted and familiar to all the brothers and sisters in the Far East, and they received much help from it. I myself have used it in North China, in Shanghai, in Taiwan, and in the Philippines to help people several times. The charts presented here are very revealing, giving us a clear vision and impressing us with God’s plan, His way in His redemption, and the way of life.
The first chart, Figure 1, contains a golden circle. In its spiritual meaning a circle denotes something eternal, something without beginning or end. If someone puts his finger on a point of a circle, he cannot say what part of the circle comes before it and what part comes after it. With God there is no limit of time and space. Therefore, this circle signifies the eternal life. In the types in the Scriptures, gold signifies the nature of God, that is, God Himself. This is very clear with the types in the tabernacle. Many of the furnishings in the tabernacle, such as the ark and the showbread table, were made either of gold or of acacia wood overlaid with gold. These are types of the Lord Jesus with His two natures-the divine nature and the human nature. The acacia wood represents His human nature, and the gold represents His divine nature. The divine life is the Triune God, and this life is the self-existing, eternal, uncreated, and unlimited life, without beginning and without end.
Figure 2 signifies that the Triune God created a man. God created man because God desires to express Himself through man. The Scriptures clearly tell us that man is a vessel to contain God in order to express God. Man is not eternal; he has a beginning in time, signified by the vertical line at the top of the circle. As we know, this man is the first Adam (1 Cor. 15:45a), who is the created, limited life with a beginning and an end. This life, as it was created, was good, pure, and sinless.
Figure 3 shows us that the man created by God as a vessel to contain God has three parts-a spirit, a soul, and a body (1 Thes. 5:23). The spirit is the inner content to contain and contact God, who is Spirit, while the body is the outward appearance to contact the physical world. Between the inward spirit and the outward body is the soul as a medium, which is the personality of man. With this tripartite man there was no sin.
Figure 4 requires little explanation; we are clear just by looking at it. Every part has become dark; this is the fallen Adam. Man was made as a vessel to contain God, but before God came into him, something else came in. That was Satan, the enemy of God, personified Sin. In the universe a particular creature, Satan, rebelled against God and became the enemy of God. Now Satan is the very Sin in the universe. Satan came into the created life, so the whole person of man-body, soul, and spirit-was corrupted, damaged, and spoiled by Satan as Sin. The fallen man became filled with Sin and possessed by Satan, and his every part is full of darkness. We all know how much corruption has come out of this corrupted human being. He is truly dark, corrupted in body, corrupted in soul, and corrupted in spirit.
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