Now we need to ask where Christ is today. We have to answer strongly, "Christ is in us!" Christ has been located. Before Christ became a man, He was merely the universal, omnipresent God. But when He became a man, He became located. Before His incarnation, He was like a bird soaring everywhere in the air, but through His incarnation, He entered into a cage. He became located. Jesus was caged, limited. When He was in Jerusalem, He could not be in Galilee at the same time. He was caged in His humanity.

Before we were saved, we were soaring, wandering everywhere. I can testify that I was once wandering everywhere. But one day when I was nineteen years old, I believed in the Lord Jesus. At that time, I was caged. The cage into which Christ entered was the flesh, the human race. The cage into which we believers have entered is a wonderful cage. This cage is Christ! Today we are in Christ.

Positionally, we are in Christ, but at times in our experience we get out of Christ. Sometimes the enemy comes to open the door of the cage. Then we are released. When we get mad, we are out of the cage. Christ was caged when He united Himself with man. We were caged when we were united with God. In Christian theology, this is known as identification, but in our teaching, we do not usually use the term identification. Instead, we use the terms union and mingling.

Mingling is deeper than union. In the incarnation, God not only united Himself with man but also mingled Himself with man. If I clasp my hands together, my hands are in union with each other, but mingling is much more than this. When one item is grafted to another, the result is mingling. Sometimes in surgery, skin is taken from one part of a person's body and grafted to another part. Eventually, the two pieces of skin are not only united but also mingled together. When a branch from one tree is grafted to another tree, they are mingled together. In the same way, God was mingled with man in incarnation. Then in Christ's resurrection, man was mingled with God. This is why the New Testament tells us that we were crucified with Christ (Gal. 2:20a) and were resurrected with Christ (Eph. 2:6). Through Christ's death and resurrection we were not only united to Christ, to God, but also mingled with Him.

In our recent life-study of the book of Jeremiah, I pointed out that in God's new covenant (Jer. 31:33-34), we have been made God in His nature and in His life, but not in His Godhead. This is because we have been begotten of God (John 1:13). Dogs beget dogs; lions beget lions; and man begets man. Since your father is a man, and you are born of him, are you not a man? As believers in Christ, we have been born of God; we have been regenerated by God. God is our Father, and we are His sons. Since our Father is God, what are we, the sons? The sons must be the same as their Father in life and in nature. We have been born of God to be the children of God (1 John 3:1). Eventually, when Christ comes, He will make us fully the same as God in life and in nature (v. 2). However, none of us are or can be God in His Godhead as an object of worship. In a family, only the father has the fatherhood. The children of the father do not have his fatherhood. There is only one father with many children. The father is human, and the children also are human, but there is only one father. In the same way, God is our unique Father; only He has the divine fatherhood. But we as His children are the same as He is in life and in nature.

The early church fathers used the term deification to describe the believers' participation in the divine life and nature of God, but not in the Godhead. We human beings need to be deified, to be made like God in life and in nature, but it is a great heresy to say that we are made like God in His Godhead. We are God not in His Godhead, but in His life, nature, element, essence, and image.