Prayer: O Lord, we need You. We need You to come as the Spirit to pour Yourself on us outwardly and fill us inwardly. Lord, without the Spirit we have no hope or deliverance; the One whom we look to is the Spirit. Thank You that You have been processed and consummated as this Spirit, who is Your very self. O Lord, open the eyes of our heart that we may see clearly.
We have seen that the vision that governs and controls us in the Bible is the economy of God. The first step in God’s economy is God’s becoming flesh; after this there are the steps of Christ’s passing through human living, death on the cross, and resurrection; eventually, there will be the New Jerusalem. This is a comprehensive statement of God’s economy. Christ’s birth, His living on earth, His death in crucifixion, and His resurrection from death are all familiar terms in Christianity. Unfortunately, however, throughout church history over the last two thousand years, both the teaching ones and those who have received the teaching have only known about these terms. Few have entered deeply into their intrinsic significances. It was not until the time when the Lord raised up the recovery in China, beginning with Brother Nee, that the intrinsic significances of these matters were made known to us one by one.
The first step in God’s economy was the incarnation. We have spent over seventy years on this matter, but it was not until recently that we obtained its crystallized significance. The crystallized significance of incarnation is not only that divinity was brought into humanity but also that God was brought into man that He might be mingled with man to be a God-man. God brought Himself into man to be mingled with man as one—this is a tremendous matter in the universe. In Christianity this matter is generally referred to as “the birth of Christ.” However, Bible readers must know that God Himself is the Word and that this Word became flesh (John 1:1, 14). “The Word became flesh” is deeper than the shallow phrase the birth of Christ.
Christianity has “Christmas” and “carolling” in relation to “the birth of Christ.” Ordinary Christians know only the event mentioned in Luke 2, where on the night of the birth of Christ, an angel of the Lord appeared to shepherds who spent their nights in the fields and announced to them the good news of great joy for all people that a Savior was born to them in David’s city (vv. 8-14). Any reader of the Bible can see this and understand it without any need of explanation. Christ indeed was born to be a Savior, but this is still not the crystallized significance of His birth. The crystallized significance of Christ’s birth is that God became flesh in Christ; that is, God Himself entered into man to be mingled with man.
After His incarnation, Christ passed through thirty-three and a half years of human living. Christian theology neither pays much attention to this matter nor enters into its crystallized significance. God becoming flesh was His bringing Himself into man. When God passed through human living in the human life, this was God living the God-man life in the flesh to live out the divine attributes in human virtues. Some people may realize that the Lord Jesus expressed God when He was on the earth, but they do not know how He did it. Actually, the Lord Jesus expressed God on the earth by becoming a man to live a human life in which He lived out all that God is in His divine attributes to be His human virtues. This is the crystallized significance of Christ’s passing through human living.