The central revelation of the Bible is Christ as our life to complete God’s purpose. It is God’s eternal plan to have a body of people to manifest Him. For God to be expressed through man, He must enter into him and live within him. This God, who thus becomes our life, is Christ, who is the Spirit.
The first chapter of the Bible tells us that God created man in His own image and according to His likeness (Gen. 1:26). There are two reasons why man was created in this way. The first is that he might be able to express God. Suppose I take a picture of you, but it turns out to look like a tiger. Such a picture cannot express you, because it does not look like you. For man to be able to express God, he had to be made in God’s image and likeness. The second reason is that God might one day be able to enter into man. The container must be shaped like its content. For a glove to contain a hand, the glove must be shaped like a hand, with a thumb and four fingers. When a glove is a good fit, the hand feels comfortable in it. When God enters into man, He feels as comfortable as that hand in the glove. He feels that He is where He belongs.
In the creation of man God used two materials: one, visible and of the earth; the other, spiritual. Man’s body was formed of the dust of the ground (Gen. 2:7); this physical part was not living. Then God “breathed into his nostrils the breath of life; and man became a living soul.” In Hebrew the word breath is the same as the word translated spirit in Proverbs 20:27. The breath of life, though it could not be seen, was living. When it came into man, man became a living soul. He then had an outward body, a soul within, and a spirit within that soul.
The spirit is the organ by which man can receive God. Man was created in God’s image, yet he did not contain God. In Genesis 1 and 2 man was an empty vessel. God placed him in a garden and called his attention to the tree of life. This tree signified God Himself as life. God wanted man to receive Him; the way for man to do this was to eat of the tree of life.
Right at the beginning of the Bible, then, it is plain that God is received into man like food. When we eat, the food is broken down metabolically and assimilated by all the cells of our body, thus becoming part of us. When we eat Christ, we become Christ. To speak of eating God is offensive to some Christians; to say that God becomes part of us, in their view is heretical. But it was the Lord Jesus Himself who said, “He who eats Me shall also live because of Me” (John 6:57). Paul could declare, “To me to live is Christ” (Phil. 1:21). His very living was Christ.
In the Old Testament there were ten commandments. In the New, however, there are only two. The first is that we must repent and believe in the Lord Jesus. John 16:9 says, “Concerning sin, because they do not believe in Me.” For unbelievers the one sin for which they will be judged by God is that of not believing in the Lord Jesus. Whether their behavior is good or bad is inconsequential. The kind, honest people and the thieves and liars will end up in hell together, if they do not believe in the Lord Jesus. The sin for which they will be condemned is that of rejecting Him.
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