In God's incarnation, He came from eternity into time. This is the first intrinsic significance we have to pick up. In eternity God was unlimited. With Him everything was eternal. But when the day of incarnation came, He came out of eternity and entered into time. Eternity has no limit. Time is limited. In eternity He could be everywhere, but in time He could not be in Nazareth when He was in Jerusalem. As a finite man, He was greatly limited.
In John 7 His brothers challenged Him by telling Him to manifest Himself to the world (vv. 3-4), but He told them, "My time has not yet come, but your time is always ready" (v. 6). Although the Lord is the eternal, infinite, unlimited God, He lived here on earth as a man, being limited even in the matter of time. As the unlimited God, He entered into the limiting factor of time.
God created everything by speaking. He said, "Let there be light," and there was light (Gen. 1:3). But He was not incarnated in this instant way. Instead, He came out of His eternity to enter into time and stay in a virgin's womb for nine months. This is very meaningful. We all know how difficult it is to make a believer of Christ spiritual, sanctified, victorious, and heavenly. God is omnipotent, and His power is unlimited. Why would He not produce millions of spiritual persons in an instant? In His New Testament economy God does not do things instantly. He does everything in the principle of incarnation. God's incarnation brought Him out of His eternity into the limit of time.
God came out of eternity into time and with His divinity to enter into humanity. In the Old Testament, the divine nature and essence never came into any human being. But one day the unique Divine Being, God, brought His divinity into the womb of Mary. From that day God put humanity upon Himself. He never had anything human before that time, but in His incarnation He entered into humanity and put on humanity as a part of His being. He was only divine in eternity, but through incarnation He became both divine and human.
God's move in His incarnation was to mingle divinity with humanity into one entity, keeping the two elements distinguishable in the one entity without producing a third element. A heretical teaching in the past said that when divinity and humanity were mingled together, this produced a third element. Webster's Third New International Dictionary defines the word mingle in this way: "to bring or combine together or with something else so that the components remain distinguishable in the combination." Thus, in God's incarnation, the elements of divinity and humanity were mingled into one entity, and the two elements remained distinguishable in the one entity without producing a third element.
The truth concerning divinity being mingled with humanity was present in the early days of the church with the church fathers. But because of the heretical and wrong teaching concerning mingling, few Christian teachers have dared to touch it again. We have to see the pure truth in the Bible concerning the mingling of divinity with humanity as a great significance of God's move in His incarnation.
Such a divine thing is very spiritual and mysterious because it is invisible. But in the Old Testament there is the marvelous type of the meal offering to show us the mingling of divinity with humanity in the person of Jesus Christ. Leviticus 2:4-5 says that the meal offering was of "fine flour mingled with oil." The oil is a sign of the Holy Spirit, and the fine flour is a sign of humanity. The Holy Spirit mingles Himself with man to produce a meal offering which is good for food both to God and to His priests.