As the transforming Spirit, the all-inclusive Spirit conforms us, His many transformed brothers, to His image, the image of the firstborn Son of God, that we may fully be what He is (Rom. 8:29; 1 John 3:2). The Spirit's transformation has a goal, and that is to conform us to the image of the firstborn Son of God. Christ as the firstborn Son of God is the model, the mold, to which we all must be conformed. In baking bread, there is the need of a mold. Once we have the mold, the dough can be placed into the mold so that it will have the same image as the mold. Christ is the mold, and we are the dough. Before being placed in the mold, we are without a proper image. But once we are put into the mold, we have the proper image. All the saints bear the same image because they have all been placed into the same mold.
Colossians 1:15 tells us that Christ "is the image of the invisible God, the Firstborn of all creation." Verse 16 then says that all things were created in Christ. Christ is the mold. Before God created anything, He first created Christ as the mold, the model. In this model all the other creatures were created. How could Christ be created first? He was created by putting on human nature. By putting on human nature, Christ became a creature. But how could His putting on human nature, which took place after Adam was created, cause Him to be the Firstborn, the first creature? The answer is that there is no element of time with God. With Him there is only the fact. In the universe there is the fact that Christ was created first among all the creatures. Then, this Firstborn of creation became a mold, or a model, for a mass production.
Was Christ crucified before Adam or after Adam? According to Revelation 13:8 Christ was slain from the foundation of the world. This indicates that He was crucified before Adam was created. After drawing a circle, we will not be able to locate the starting point or the ending point. If we put a dot on some point on the circle, it would be difficult to say what is before that point and what is after it. Adam was before Christ, and he was also after Christ. Christ is actually the first because He is the center and centrality of God's move (Col. 2:16-17). It is difficult to say whether we are before or after Him. According to human history, Abraham was before Christ. But in John 8:58, Jesus said, "Before Abraham came into being, I am." The proper grammar for the phrase "I am" should be "I was." Because Abraham was in the past, the Lord Jesus was grammatically wrong. But according to actual fact, He was right because He is eternal. As the great I Am, He is the eternal, ever-existing God. Hence, He was before Abraham and is greater than Abraham. With Him there is no element of time.
The transforming Spirit will conform us to the image of the firstborn Son of God that we may fully be what He is. First John 3:2 says, "Beloved, now we are children of God, and it has not yet been manifested what we will be. We know that if He is manifested, we will be like Him because we will see Him even as He is." The real meaning of this verse is that the glorified Christ in our spirit will both saturate us vertically and permeate us horizontally, filling us that we may express Him. Eventually, we will be conformed to His glorified image and be exactly as He is.