At the beginning of my Christian life, I wondered why God did not save us in a fast way, in a way like His work in creation. When I asked my pastor about this, he told me that because we are human beings it was necessary for our Savior to become a man. In creation, of course, there was no need for God to become a man. But in salvation it certainly was necessary for Him to become a man.
It was easier for God to create man than it was for Him to become a man. In creating man God had no difficulty; He simply did the work of creation. But God became involved with certain difficulties when He became a man. In His creation God merely did certain things. But in His salvation He not only did things—He became a man.
As I considered God’s incarnation for our salvation, I realized that it was logical for God to become a man in order to save us. But I still did not understand why He needed to live on earth for thirty-three and a half years. Why did He not become a man, stay on earth for a short period of time, perhaps a month, and then go to the cross to accomplish redemption? Why did He need to become a baby growing day by day? Luke 2:40 says, “And the little child grew and became strong, being filled with wisdom, and the grace of God was upon Him.” Here we see that the Lord Jesus grew in a normal way; He did not grow to full stature in a short period of time. Furthermore, instead of preaching for only several days and then dying for our redemption, the Lord Jesus ministered for three and a half years before going to the cross to accomplish redemption.
In the four Gospels we have a lengthy record of the Lord’s life and ministry. The Gospel of Matthew, for example, contains twenty-eight chapters. Instead of simply telling that the Lord Jesus was born and that He died for our redemption and was resurrected, Matthew records many other matters. In the Gospels we see that the Man-Savior did not grow up miraculously; on the contrary, He grew up in a normal way. But why was this necessary? Because we were fallen and sinful, we needed the Lord Jesus to die for us. He suffered a vicarious death for our salvation. But why did He need to suffer so many things during the thirty-three and a half years of His life?
Actually, only the last three hours on the cross were hours of vicarious suffering. During the first three hours He did not suffer vicariously. During the second period of three hours, God came in to judge the Man-Savior as our Substitute, “and darkness came over the whole land until the ninth hour” (Luke 23:44). Why, then, did He need to suffer during His first three hours on the cross, since that suffering was not for our sins?
For years I tried to find answers to these questions in books, but I failed to do so in full. Answers in full to these questions came only as a result of more than fifty years of personal, direct study of the Word, especially during the last ten years in which we have been carrying on the Life-study of the New Testament, a study that will be completed with the book of Acts.
Let us compare two possible ways of saving people. First, suppose God simply stretches forth His hand, snatches a sinner out of hell, and brings him to heaven. This way of saving a person would be easy. The second way, the way taken by God, is much more difficult. According to His way, God became a man and lived a human life on earth.
Through His incarnation God brought the divine attributes into the human virtues, filling, restoring, recovering, sanctifying, and transforming them. Consider how much time it required for man’s virtues to be uplifted and transformed in this way. In His salvation, God does not simply snatch people out of hell and bring them into heaven. Rather, for our salvation the saving God became a man and lived the kind of life on earth that qualified Him to save us. This life also became the basic factor of the Man-Savior’s dynamic salvation. The procedure that qualified the Man-Savior required a long period of time.
The first step of God’s salvation was to become a man, live on earth, die on the cross, and be resurrected. In the second step, the Man-Savior comes into the saved ones, lives in us, and grows in us, repeating His life in us.
Not only does the Lord grow gradually in the believers; He has also been spreading gradually throughout the world. Instead of suddenly spreading everywhere, the Lord has spread gradually from place to place. At first, His spread was only in the area of the Mediterranean Sea, and eventually He spread to North America and to China. One day, He came into me and you. Fifty-nine years ago, in 1925, the Man-Savior came into me. From that time onward, He has been living in me and growing in me.
How shall we speak of the Lord’s saving us by coming into us and living in us? We may say that this is salvation in life. However, the term “salvation in life” has been damaged by some Bible teachers who actually do not know adequately what it means to be saved in life (Rom. 5:10). According to the Bible, life is God Himself coming into us to live in us. It takes time for us to be saved in this way.