Prayer: Lord, we thank You for Your presence all the time. Lord, Your presence does prove that You are the Spirit. You are the Spirit, so You are present with us all the time. Your presence means everything to us in our life and in our work. Lord, we need You. We love You, dear Lord. You are so dear, so loving, and even, Lord, so sweet to us. Amen.

The Lord has brought us to the center of His gospel, and this center is Christ Himself. When we touch Christ, we have to realize that our Christ is mainly in two aspects: His person and His work. He is a wonderful, excellent person. He is also an all-inclusive person who is not so simple.

He is a person in two elements: the divine element and the human element. In the divine element He is God, possessing His marvelous divinity. We worship Him, admire Him, and adore Him for He is so divine. Then in His humanity He is a human being, but this human being is not that pleasant to us because in His humanity He belonged to the old creation. God’s original creation became old. This implies that it became corrupted. When new clothing becomes worn-out and dirty, it becomes corrupted, that is, it becomes old. Christ became a part of the old creation, and spontaneously He became an old man. In His incarnation, was He something new in humanity? John 1:14 says, “The Word became flesh.” That means God became flesh. Is flesh a positive term? It is altogether negative. Christ became an old man with the flesh.

In this flesh there are three involvements. First, this flesh is involved with Satan, the enemy of God. Satan is a poison, so this flesh is poisoned by Satan. Second, the flesh is involved with sin. Sin is a top evil in the whole universe; it is the evil nature of Satan. Sin is a poison which is contaminating and corrupting. Christ became flesh, which had been contaminated and corrupted with sin, but praise the Lord, He became flesh only in the likeness of the flesh of sin (Rom. 8:3b). His being in the likeness of the flesh of sin is typified by the bronze serpent which Moses lifted up in the wilderness (John 3:14; Num. 21:4-9). That serpent became Israel’s savior in life. A serpent is not a good thing. But that serpent, as a type of Christ, uplifted by Moses in the wilderness was only in the likeness of a serpent, not in its nature. This bronze serpent had no poison. Christ became the flesh only in its likeness, but within Him there was no sin. This must mean something. Why did God in Christ become flesh? The flesh is negative. But He became this flesh only in the likeness of the flesh of sin without the poison of sin. Later, we will see that He did this with a purpose.

The third involvement with the flesh is the world. God did not create the world. God created an earth. But Satan came in to systematize the entire earth, making it a cosmos, which we call the world. This cosmos is full of Satan’s power and evils. It is the domain, the little monarchy, of Satan. The cosmos is Satan’s kingdom which attracts and usurps people. So our flesh is attracted and usurped by the world. Such a flesh is poisoned by Satan, the enemy of God, contaminated and corrupted with sin, which is the nature of Satan, and also attracted and usurped by the world.

In this sense, Christ, as a man, being in the old creation, was an old man in its likeness with the flesh, which is involved with Satan, sin, and the world. He was such a person. This is what I call the crystallization of this part of the Word. This is uttered only by Paul with such a simple expression—the seed of David. What I have mentioned to you is a crystallization of this one term in Romans 1:3—the seed of David. Christ as God became the seed of David in His humanity. As such, He became a man of the old creation and was an old man with the flesh, which had been poisoned by Satan, corrupted with sin, and usurped by the world. These are all related to the man Jesus. God became such a person for the purpose of terminating all these things, to get rid of them for our redemption.

God would not, however, get rid of what He creates. God would still keep it by the way of redemption. God became such a man in order to terminate all the negative things on earth, even in the universe. But He would redeem that part which was created by Him. Thus, there is termination along with redemption. Now let us go on to see the essence of the work of Jesus Christ the God-man.