Can you imitate such a One? We cannot even make imitation tea. We should not try to produce an imitation tea, but simply drink real tea. Every imitation is a falsehood. In Christianity, people are taught to imitate Christ, but it is impossible to imitate Him. We are all familiar with artificial flowers. As plastic imitations of real flowers, they have the same color, shape, and appearance as genuine flowers. When they first came out, I liked them. But after awhile I came to hate them because they have no life. Man can imitate, but he cannot create. Praise the Lord that while we cannot imitate Christ, He has a way of reproducing Himself in us.
In a factory, a company firstly manufactures a prototype. Then the mass production is according to that prototype. In a good sense, our wonderful Christ is a prototype. God’s way is to put this prototype into us. This living model is a living Person including divinity, humanity, human living, crucifixion, and resurrection. Such a model, consisting of all these marvelous elements, has come into our being. The human, religious way is to correct or improve us from without. God’s way is to put Christ into us. Who is Christ? He is the Son of God, the Son of Man, and the life-giving Spirit. God has put this wonderful Person into the very center of our being. If we agree and cooperate with this wonderful One, opening up to Him, He will spread outward into our soul from our spirit. This is not imitation; it is the spreading of the prototype within our being. This is what the Bible calls sonship. Christ has come into us as the Son to be the life of the Son in us. According to Romans 8:15, we have the spirit of sonship. We have the sonship which makes us real sons. This sonship is actually the wonderful model Himself, the Firstborn Son of God. We have the life of the Son, the Spirit of the Son, and the sonship within us.
Consider once again the illustration of a tea bag placed in a glass of water. The more we stir the water, the more it will be saturated with the tea. The tea will spread into and mingle with the water until it becomes tea-water. No one can imitate Jesus. If we could imitate Jesus, then a monkey could imitate a boy. Christ is such a wonderful Person. How can we imitate Him? It is not a matter of imitating Jesus; it is a matter of being saturated with the sonship, just as water is saturated with tea. The Son, as the very sonship, has come into us. As the sonship, He is the life, the Spirit, the position, and the right of the Son. This sonship is now waiting for our cooperation that He might spread throughout our being.
In both Hebrews and Romans the matter of sonship is covered. In Hebrews we are told that, after His first coming, Christ eventually became, through resurrection, the Firstborn Son (1:5-6). Before His incarnation He was the Only Begotten Son of God, but through resurrection He was born the Firstborn Son of God. When I read the Scriptures years ago, I was bothered by Psalm 2:7, which says, “Thou art my Son; this day have I begotten thee.” This verse is quoted both in Acts 13:33 and in Hebrews 1:5. Being troubled by this, I asked myself, “Wasn’t Christ the Son of God already? Since He already was the Son of God, why did He need to be born of God in order to be the Son of God?” Later I realized that before His incarnation, Christ was the Son of God without human nature. When He was incarnated, He put on humanity. His divine element was the Son of God, but His human element was not. Hence, He had to be resurrected that His human element might be born of God. Through this birth, the Only Begotten Son of God became God’s Firstborn Son. In other words, the Only Begotten Son did not have the humanity which had been begotten of God. When He became the Firstborn Son of God, His humanity was born of God. In this way He became the Firstborn Son of God, and this Firstborn Son became the prototype, the model. This is what it means to say that Christ is the Firstborn among many brothers (Rom. 8:29). The Firstborn Son is the prototype, and the many brothers are the mass production. This model today is a living Person, the Lord Jesus Christ, who is the totality of the divine sonship. When this living Person comes into us, we have the sonship and become a son of God. Now we are the sons of God, and the Lord Jesus as the model is working and moving in us.