As those who are born of God, the God-men have not only the divine life but also the divine nature. Thank God that in the Bible, among the sixty-six books, there is one verse, 2 Peter 1:4, that says that we are partakers of the divine nature, which is the nature of God. We should mark such a verse in our Bibles so that whenever we open the Bible, that verse will stand out. We are not turtles, because we do not have the turtle nature. We are men, for we do have the human nature. But we have also been born of God; we are God’s sons, God’s children. Thus, we have God’s nature. Since we have God’s nature, are we not God? In fact, we are God in His life and His nature, but not in His Godhead.
As God-men, we also have two lives, human and divine, living together as one life. We may wonder how two lives could live together as one life. The answer is very simple. In grafting, a branch from one tree is grafted into another tree. The two are joined together, and the two lives live together as one life. In the same principle, we, the believers, have been grafted into Christ (Rom. 11:17-19) and are living in an organic union with Him. In such a union the human life and the divine life are joined as one so that they live together as one mingled life and one living.
The God-men not only have two lives, but they also have two natures, humanity and divinity. This is marvelous. Today’s Christianity makes God’s salvation merely a religion. Religion does not teach people to be God-men by receiving God into them. Religion always cultivates man’s natural capacity in order to build up the self. Education does the same thing; it merely builds up the human being. Apparently, the Bible also does this, but actually it does not. The Bible does not build up the natural man; rather, it builds up a God-man. We are born of God, and we are children of God. The Bible builds us up to be proper God-men.
My burden in the Lord’s ministry is not to build you up to be a nice man, a good man, or a gentle man, but to be a God-man. I have given thousands of messages on how to be a Christ-man, a God-man. In the Lord’s recovery our teaching is not to raise up good men. Our teaching, absolutely according to the Bible, is to raise up God-men.
Eventually, the Bible builds up a corporate man. Ultimately, this corporate man will be enlarged to be its consummation, the New Jerusalem. The issue of the Bible’s teaching is just one entity, the New Jerusalem as the aggregate of all the God-men.
We need to know by seeing that we have God’s life and possess God’s nature. There is such a fact that the divine life is mingled with our human life. Therefore, we must learn how to live not by our human life but by God’s life mingling with our human life to make us divine.
Our human life (the old man) has been crucified for the living of the divine life with the resurrected human life (the new man) (Gal. 2:20a; Eph. 4:22-24). Our old man, the natural man, should not be cultivated. Rather, it should be cut off; it should be crucified. It has been crucified already with Christ on the cross (Rom. 6:6). Christ has crucified all His believers so that His believers may live not by the crucified life but by the divine life in a humanity that is resurrected. Now the divine life is living not in the natural humanity but in the resurrected humanity. That is the new man. We all need to see such a vision. Because I have seen this, I always hate my own humility. I hate my humility much more than my pride, because both my pride and my humility belong to the old man. We should always be reminded that our old man was crucified. Then, in regeneration our natural humanity was resurrected. Regeneration is a resurrection (cf. Acts 13:33). To be regenerated is to be resurrected with the divine life. Therefore, today we should live a life conformed to the death of Christ (Phil. 3:10) that the divine life may have an opportunity to live with our resurrected humanity.
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