The central thought of God is that He desires to work Himself into us. The only way for God to accomplish this is to be life to us. There is no other way for God to work Himself into us. For anything to become a part of us, it has to be eaten and digested by us, and it even has to be mingled with us. Nothing can be wrought into us as much as the food we have eaten. By the evening, the breakfast and lunch we ate earlier in the day already have become a part of us.
After we read the first part of Genesis about God’s creation, especially the record of God’s creation of man, we may ask what God’s purpose with this created man is. We find the answer right away in the second chapter of Genesis. Immediately after God’s creation of man, He did not give many commandments to man, telling him to do this and not to do that. It is not a matter of doing or not doing. God simply put man in front of the tree of life with the intention that man would eat of this tree (Gen. 2:8-9). By studying the whole Bible, we can realize that this tree of life signifies God Himself in Christ as the Holy Spirit to be life to us in the form of food. Therefore, God put man in front of the tree of life to eat God Himself, to receive something of God into himself as his life. The record of the picture in Genesis 2 is very clear; there is no other way for God to be life to us other than by being food to us.
The New Testament tells us clearly that man was made of clay to be a vessel (Rom. 9:20-23; 2 Cor. 4:7). Vessels are containers to contain something. What does man contain? Clearly, it is the tree of life, that is, the riches of God in Christ as the Holy Spirit.
In the New Testament we see that the Lord Jesus, who is the Word of God and God Himself, was one day incarnated to be a man. People thought that He was a great prophet or a great king. According to the Gospel of John, however, the Lord Jesus made it very clear that He came that we may have life and may have it abundantly (John 10:10b). He came to be the bread of life for us to eat, saying, “As the living Father has sent Me and I live because of the Father, so he who eats Me, he also shall live because of Me” (6:57). In the twenty-one chapters of John, the Lord Jesus did not tell us many things to do or not to do. He simply reminds us to receive Him, love Him, and abide in Him-to feed on Him day by day as the small pieces of manna. By feeding on Him and drinking Him, we have Christ in us, and we become His multiplication, His increase, the many grains that come into existence from the one grain, and the many branches of the one vine (3:30; 12:24; 15:4-5). All these items give us a very clear picture of God’s intention to come into us in Christ His Son as the Spirit to be our life, that we may have life and have it abundantly.
Although I believe that we are all very clear about this, I have the deep burden to share this with you again. Throughout all the generations and especially today, there have been too many things-good things, even the best things-that distract, frustrate, hinder, and veil people from life. I almost cannot express the burden in my heart. What I am speaking did not come from a dream; I speak out of the realization I have received through my recent visits. In the past two and a half years I have visited more than sixty cities in the United States, from the west to the east and in the southern, northern, and middle parts of the country. I have visited different groups and have met different situations. Just in a recent period of about two weeks, we encountered more than five different kinds of Christian meetings. Through all this I have realized something concerning God’s intention and the enemy’s activity.
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