In this series of messages we want to see the God-man living. This God-man living is the eight major items of Christ’s organic saving: regeneration, shepherding, dispositional sanctification, renewing, transformation, building, conformation, and glorification. To touch the God-man living means to touch these eight major items. The commencement of the God-man living is our being born of God through regeneration. We need a particular beginning to have a certain kind of living. The living must have the birth as its beginning.
God so loved the world that He gave them His only begotten Son, that they may receive Him by believing into Him to have the eternal life—the divine life (John 3:16). John 3:16 says that God so loved. God loved the world so much, to such an extent, that He gave His only begotten Son to us. This was for the purpose that we may believe in Him and receive Him that we may have the eternal life. The eternal life is the goal of God’s loving of us. Then we can be His children forming the church, issuing in the Body of Christ and consummating in the New Jerusalem. This conjoins God’s love with the New Jerusalem. God’s love is linked with the New Jerusalem, which is the ultimate consummation of God’s love.
God’s good pleasure is to be one with man and make man the same as He is in life and in nature but not in His Godhead (Eph. 1:5, 9). Ephesians 1:5 says that God predestinated us unto sonship according to the good pleasure of His will. Unto sonship means to make us sons. God predestinated us, marked us out, before the foundation of the world that we could be made His sons according to His good pleasure. If we would ask, “Father God, what is Your good pleasure?” He would say, “My good pleasure is to make Myself one with you and to make you My sons.”
Ephesians 1:9 also speaks of God’s good pleasure, which He purposed in Himself. God has some plan to fulfill, and this plan is to have the church as the Body of Christ which consummates in the New Jerusalem. We need the entire Bible to understand this one verse of the Bible in Ephesians. The good pleasure of God is to have us as His sons, and eventually, all these sons ultimately consummate the New Jerusalem. We should not forget these items—first, God loves us and second, He has a good pleasure. According to the revelation of the Bible, God’s good pleasure is to have many sons and have all these many sons consummated as the New Jerusalem.
In view of His good pleasure to have many sons consummated as the New Jerusalem, He created man in a special way.
According to Genesis 1:26 God created man in His image and after His likeness.
Furthermore, God created man with a spirit for man to receive and contain Him that man may live by Him as man’s life (signified by the tree of life) and everything (Gen. 2:7). Man’s human spirit is God’s breath of life. The Hebrew word for breath in Genesis 2:7 is the same word for spirit in Proverbs 20:27, which says that the spirit of man is the lamp of the Lord.
God created man in His image and with a human spirit for man to receive and contain Him. Ecclesiastes 3:11 also says that God put eternity in man’s heart. The things in this universe are mainly of two categories: temporal things and eternal things. Paul in 2 Corinthians 4:18 said, “We do not regard the things which are seen but the things which are not seen; for the things which are seen are temporary, but the things which are not seen are eternal.” This verse is the proper explanation of Solomon’s word in Ecclesiastes 3:11. The wise king said that God created everything beautiful in its own time and also put eternity in man’s heart. This matches our human experience. Regardless of how rich or successful a person becomes, he still feels empty. Man has a deep desire for permanent things, and the only things which are permanent are the eternal things. The Amplified Bible says that eternity in man’s heart is “a divinely implanted sense of a purpose working through the ages which nothing under the sun, but only God, can satisfy.” We have a sense of a purpose which nothing can satisfy but God. Only God can satisfy the sense of purpose in our heart.
In God’s creation of man there are three striking things: His image, our human spirit to receive Him, and a divinely implanted sense of a purpose in our hearts working through the ages which all things under the sun cannot satisfy—only God. The romance depicted in Song of Songs does not start from the Lord but from the seeker. A person becomes such a seeker because within him there is a sense of purpose to seek something eternal. Nothing can fulfill or satisfy this sense of purpose but God Himself, who is Christ. Many people would think that we are wasting our time, but actually we are redeeming the time. Those who pursue temporary things are wasting their time. They are busy for nothing. Anything they are busy for is temporary, not eternal. Only One in the whole universe is eternal, the eternal God.
God created man in His image, with a human spirit, and with a sense of a purpose deeply implanted in man’s heart. Then God put this man in front of the tree of life—signifying God, the Creator of man, to be man’s life (Gen. 2:9).