In the Lord’s new move today, the home meetings are a crucial matter. Through our practical experience we can say that gaining the new ones by door-knocking is not a difficult matter. However, to take care of the home meetings is not as easy. This is the heavy burden within us.
The primary function of the home meetings is to keep and stabilize the new ones. However, merely to keep and stabilize the new ones is not adequate. First, we must bring them into fellowship with the Lord. Second, we need to bring them into the Lord’s Body, which is the church. This is the matter that Christianity has missed for thousands of years. Today there are many zealous Christians who serve the Lord fervently, and they are willing to pay whatever price is required. However, it appears that they do not know what fellowship with the Lord means. They may know a little about drawing near to the Lord and praying to the Lord, yet they do not know that the One who dwells in them is the Triune God. They do not know that this Triune God is processed and is already dwelling in them to be their life. This life is not separate from God, as if God is God, and the life of God is something else. Neither does it mean that the life of God is merely related to God. The Bible tells us that the life of God is simply God Himself.
In the New Testament there are phrases in Greek such as the life of God, the love of God, and the power of God. Such phrases indicate that the two items are one. The life of God means that God is life, the love of God means that God is love, and the power of God means that God is power. We can see many instances of these phrases in the Bible. First John 4:8 says that God is love, and speaking in another way verse 9 says, “The love of God was manifested among us.” These two ways of speaking refer to the same thing: that the love of God is God Himself. In the same way, the life of God is God Himself. However, it is not simply that God Himself was willing to be our life and that He came in a simple way to be our life. Rather, He needed to pass through many processes. Although He is God and is life, if He had not passed through many processes, He could not be our life and He would not be able to dwell in us. Therefore, He needed to pass through many processes so that He could enter into us and be our life.
First Corinthians 15:45 says that the Lord became “a life-giving Spirit” to dispense life into us. It is very easy for us to understand this verse to mean that God has merely given us a gift. When someone gives us a gift, the gift is the gift, and we are we; the gift and we are separate. This is a wrong understanding of dispensing. When God dispenses His life into us, He dispenses Himself into us. He is not separate from us. Moreover, for God to dispense Himself into us and enter into us to be our life, He needed to pass through various processes.
First, He needed to become a man. He was God on high in eternity, but in order to enter into man, He had to become a man. How could He become a man? It was by putting on a physical body, that is, by becoming flesh. There is a difference between the body and the flesh. The body is that which was created by God. It was sinless; it was not contaminated by sin, defiled by sin, or corrupted. Nevertheless, after the fall of man, man was contaminated and corrupted by sin inwardly, which caused the body that God created to become flesh. This is true even to the extent that the Bible calls man “flesh.”
Genesis 6 speaks of the corruption of man. Concerning man, verse 3 says, “For he indeed is flesh.” This proves that the man that God created in the beginning was a man with a body but not flesh. It was at the time of Noah that man became flesh. Not only was his body flesh, but even the whole being of man was flesh. Therefore, Romans 3:20 says that out of the works of the law no flesh, that is, no man of blood and flesh, shall be justified before Him. The Greek word here denoting the man of blood and flesh is flesh. No flesh shall be justified before God out of the works of the law. Flesh refers not to the man created by God but to the man that was fallen and corrupted.
At the time God was incarnated, two thousand years ago, man was no longer in the condition in which God originally had created him. Man had been corrupted and had become flesh. Therefore, since God became flesh, did He become a corrupted man? Romans 8:3 says, “God, sending His own Son in the likeness of the flesh of sin and concerning sin, condemned sin in the flesh.” When the Son of God came in the flesh, He came not merely in the likeness of the flesh but in the likeness of the flesh of sin. To be sure, Christ became flesh. However, He had only the likeness of the flesh of sin and had no reality of sin. He had the shell, the outward form, but no inward substance of sin within Him.
In the Old Testament the bronze serpent is a type of Christ in the flesh. When the bronze serpent was lifted up on the pole, the children of Israel who looked upon the bronze serpent lived. In the New Testament the Lord Jesus said that as Moses lifted up the serpent in the wilderness and everyone who looked upon the serpent would live, “so must the Son of Man be lifted up, that everyone who believes into Him may have eternal life” (John 3:14-15). This word was uttered by the Lord Himself and proved that the bronze serpent, which Moses lifted up, was a type of Him. In Christianity we most often hear, “Behold, the Lamb of God.” Many preach only that Christ is the Lamb of God. Never can we hear, “Behold, the bronze serpent.” The Brethren liked to interpret typology, but they also mainly preached that Christ is the Lamb of God. This is because to say that Christ is the bronze serpent seems dangerous and is irritating to the ear. Some people may even think that this is a heresy. In fact, the Bible says clearly, “As Moses lifted up the serpent in the wilderness, so must the Son of Man be lifted up.” The word as denotes that the Son of Man was according to the form and image of the serpent. However, He had only the likeness of the serpent. He did not have the serpent’s poison, which is the very sin within the serpent.
For God to enter into us and to be our life, the first process that He went through was the process of incarnation. When God became a man, man was already corrupted and was no longer pure and complete; man had become flesh. Therefore, when the Lord was on the earth, He was not in the likeness of a pure, complete, undefiled, and uncorrupted man. Rather, He was in the form of a man who had fallen and become flesh. However, He had only the shape, the outward form of the flesh but without the inward sin. The Bible explicitly says, “Him who did not know sin He made sin on our behalf” (2 Cor. 5:21). This is a sober word. God not only became flesh, but God made Christ to be sin. John 1:14 says, “And the Word became flesh,” and 2 Corinthians 5:21 says, “Him...He made sin on our behalf.” Became and made are used here. The One who became flesh was also made sin. However, He did not know sin and did not comprehend it subjectively. This means that He had no sin whatsoever. He was not related to sin at all, yet He was made sin. This is a mystery in the universe, and this is also the first process which God passed through.