According to the divine principle, although God is able to do everything to carry out His economy and He will do everything for this purpose, He will not carry out His economy by Himself apart from man. The principle for God to accomplish His economy must be the same as the principle of incarnation. The principle of incarnation is very great. God is surely able to save the fallen people. Because He is God and He is sovereign, He is able to do everything. Nevertheless, He has a divine principle—He must do everything concerning His economy in the principle of incarnation. The principle of incarnation requires that God enter into man to make man one with Him. Therefore, man is a vessel for the mingling of God and man.
Even in the Old Testament, we see the principle of incarnation. Nevertheless, it was hard for God to make a type of incarnation. Only in creation did God do everything by Himself, apart from man, apart from the principle of incarnation. In God’s work to produce the old creation, the first creation, man had no share because he had not yet been created. When man was created, everything else had already been created. Therefore, man had nothing to do with God’s creating work.
However, to carry out His economy, God depends upon His second creation much more than on His first creation. His first creation resulted in physical materials but it was not God’s intention merely to create the old things and stop there. His intention was to go from the first creation to the second creation. It is by the second creation that God accomplishes His economy. In God’s second creation nothing has ever been done nor will be done without man. God does not accomplish His economy apart from man, and man cannot accomplish it himself. It can only be accomplished by God mingled with man.
The first case, the first instance, the first accomplishment, of God’s economy was by Jesus Christ. We need to see who this Jesus Christ was for the first accomplishment of God’s economy. He was neither only God nor only man. He was both God and man, a God-man. Although God is altogether mighty and altogether able, He cannot accomplish redemption without man. Apart from man, He cannot do anything to accomplish His economy in the second step, the step of redemption. In the first step, in the old creation, He did everything by Himself, but in the second step He can do nothing apart from man. In the second creation it is necessary for Him to be one with man and to make man one with Him, not in adding Himself to man, but in mingling Himself with man.
The very conception of the Lord Jesus of the Holy Spirit, the conception of the incarnation, is itself a mingling. A conception of any kind cannot take place without mingling. Therefore, we should not listen to the traditional, so-called theological teaching against mingling. Actually, the strong ground for the teaching of the divine mingling is the divine conception.
Incarnation is a conception that equals a mingling of God with man, a mingling of divinity with humanity. This mingling produces a God-man, a holy One who is both God and man. This holy One is the complete God and the perfect man, and He was the first One used by God to accomplish His economy. He was the beginning. Following Him is His reproduction, His increase, His continuation. This reproduction, this increase, this continuation, is corporate. This is His Body, a composition of all the members who all are the reproduction, increase, and continuation of that unique One who is both God and man. In principle, we are the same. Therefore, it is altogether scriptural and necessary to say that we are God-men, according to the principle of incarnation, a principle kept by God to fulfill His economy.
In the Old Testament there was a ministry for the preparation of the New Testament economy. Actually, the Old Testament ministry and the New Testament ministry are one. The Old Testament ministry was a preparation, a shadow, a prefigure, and the New Testament ministry is the fulfillment. What took place in the Old Testament was a shadow of what would take place in the New Testament ministry. Therefore, the New Testament ministry is the very fulfillment of the Old Testament ministry.
I am burdened to stress this point of the oneness of the ministry because of all the divisions and confusions that have taken place in the past centuries among the Christians. The most damaging thing among the Christians is the divisions and the confusions. Moreover, all the divisions and confusions came out of one source, and that source is the different ministries.
In the Old Testament there are thirty-nine books with the accounts of different services, but these different services do not constitute different ministries. There is the service of the priesthood, of the kingship, and of all the prophets. It is true that the word service equals the word ministry in Greek, but in our present language we need to use different words to denote different aspects. In order to make this matter clear, we need to use these two different words, the ministry and the service, or the services. Everyone would have to agree that there was only one ministry in the Old Testament. The priests, the kings, and the prophets all bore the same one ministry in different aspects of service. Some, including Aaron and Melchisedek, served in the priesthood. Some, including David and Solomon, were in the service of the kingship. Nevertheless, their different services were all for that unique ministry. In the same principle, Isaiah and Jonah served as prophets, yet they accomplished God’s unique ministry. God did not have two ministries in the Old Testament, but He had one ministry definitely called the ministry of the old covenant, according to the word of the apostle Paul in 2 Corinthians 3. That ministry was a figure of the real one that was to come.
The reality of the one ministry, the ministry that fulfilled the figure of the old covenant ministry, did not actually begin from the Lord Jesus, but from John the Baptist. First there was John the Baptist, then the Lord Jesus, then the twelve disciples, and then so many others from Acts to Revelation. In all of these ministers the New Testament bears or unveils only one unique ministry, a ministry to carry out Christ to bring forth the church. Eventually the unique ministry of God is to carry out the ministry of Christ that the church might be brought into being. Christ and the church are the central subject of the entire Bible. This is the center, the focus, and also the circumference of God’s economy. Christ and the church must be everything in God’s economy. To carry out this economy, God has only one ministry, a unique ministry. Of course, the service of John the Baptist was different from that of the Lord Jesus. The service of the Lord Jesus laid a foundation for the service of the apostles. The apostles accomplished a service which occupies the great part and the main part of the New Testament ministry to accomplish God’s economy.