Our burden is to see God’s original intention. According to the record of Genesis 1 and 2 God’s original intention was to have a Bride. After God created man, Adam was single. He was a bachelor. But then God said it was not good for man to be alone. This was a type. According to the revelation of the Bible, God is the unique husband in the entire universe. In Jeremiah 31:32 the Lord considered that He was a husband to the house of Israel and the house of Judah. Isaiah told the children of Israel that their maker was their husband (Isa. 54:5).
In the New Testament we find the same thing. In John 3:29 John the Baptist indicated that Christ was the Bridegroom. Paul continued this thought in 2 Corinthians 11:2 where he said that he had betrothed the Corinthian believers to one husband, to present them a pure virgin to Christ. And in Ephesians 5 he likened Christ as the husband and the church as the wife. Finally, at the end of the Bible in Revelation 19:7 there is the marriage of the Lamb whose wife has made herself ready. The church as the Bride will be married to Christ as the Bridegroom. This tells us that unless man becomes God’s wife, God is alone. For the Bible to say that it was not good for man to be alone implies also that it was not good for God to remain alone. God needed a counterpart, a wife.
The first two chapters of the Bible reveal that God was planning to have a Bride which would bear His image. After God created Adam, He brought all the animals to him and Adam named them, but he did not find among them a counterpart. So God caused him to sleep and took a piece of rib from his side. Genesis 2:22 tells us that God builded a woman from that piece of bone. When he looked at the woman he saw that she resembled him and bore his image, so he said, “This is now bone of my bones, and flesh of my flesh: she shall be called Woman, because she was taken out of Man” (Gen. 2:23). Adam then took her to be his counterpart. This is a picture of what God wants for Himself. It was for this purpose that God created man: to bear His image, to resemble Him in order to be His counterpart.
For such a one to be produced, there was a need to have God’s divine life. This is why in Genesis 1 and 2, after God had created man in His image, He brought him to the tree of life. This indicated that although man had God’s image, man did not have God’s life. Man was like a photograph. A photograph may bear an image of a person, but it has no life. Adam was created like a photograph of God. He did not have the eternal, uncreated life, the life of God. This life was indicated by the tree of life. So God brought the man who did not yet have God’s divine life to the tree of life so that he might eat of the tree of life. If Adam had eaten of the tree of life, he would have received God’s life. Of course we know that Adam did not eat of the tree of life at that time. But nevertheless God’s original intention was that the man who was created in His image should have God’s divine life.
The picture in Genesis 2 is very wonderful! There is the tree of life, and near the tree of life there is a river flowing in four directions. With the flow of the river there is gold, bdellium, and onyx stone. Eventually in this picture there is also a bride. This picture, with the tree of life growing, with the river flowing, with the gold, the bdellium, the precious stones, and the bride, shows us that God’s original intention is to have a Bride bearing His image, possessing His life, and transformed by the flow of life into precious materials to be built up as a Bride.
We all are Adam. As men we bear the image of God. As believers we also have the life of God. Furthermore, we have a river flowing within us. In John 7 the Lord indicated that whosoever drinks of Him would have the rivers of living water flowing out of his being. This means you bear the image of God, you have the divine life, and you have the flowing river within you. But are you gold, bdellium, onyx, or are you still muddy? If you say that you are now gold, bdellium, and onyx, your wife or those who serve with you may say that they have never seen them. They may say they have seen mostly mud. This is our problem, but God has such an intention. God will work this out by the way of His dispensation. God has an administration to distribute Himself into all of us.
In Genesis 2 there are three categories of precious things. Why are there exactly three and not two or four? It is because God is triune—the Father, the Son, and the Spirit. In typology, gold always signifies the nature of God the Father, bdellium signifies the produce of the overcoming death and life-secreting resurrection of God the Son, and the precious stones signify the issue of the transforming work of God the Spirit. How could we who are the muddy human beings be transformed? It is by God the Father’s golden nature, by God the Son’s death and resurrection, and by God the Spirit’s transforming work. If I ask whether you are gold, bdellium, onyx stone or mud, it would be hard for you to answer because you are in between. You are the mud with a little gold. You are the mud with some amount of bdellium. You are the mud with some amount of precious stone. But let me ask you: Don’t you have God the Father’s nature? Are you not in the death and resurrection of God the Son? Are you not under the transforming work of God the Spirit? To these questions you can boldly answer yes. You can even boast that although you are muddy you have God the Father’s nature in you. You are in the death and resurrection of God the Son. You are under the transforming work of God the Spirit. We are all under the transformation today. Hallelujah, we are the people under God’s transformation! One day we will be fully transformed into the gold, bdellium, and precious stones. One day we will be the Bride constituted with these three precious elements to be ready (Rev. 19:7). This is God’s original intention revealed in the first two chapters of the Bible.