God’s intention is to mingle Himself with us so that we may be one with Him to become His expression. In this chapter we will begin to consider the way that God mingles with man, that is, how He accomplishes this matter. Although it is correct to say that He accomplishes this mingling through the Spirit and by Christ’s death on the cross, the main thing we must stress is that God’s way to mingle Himself with us is by life. Life is a great subject in the Scriptures. God became life to us so that He could mingle Himself with us.
We may illustrate this by the physical food that we eat. In order for an apple to be mingled with us, it must be life to us. We need to eat and digest it and allow it to become a life element to us. Then the apple will enter into our blood and will become one with us. This is the genuine mingling. We may say that we are mingled with many cows, chickens, fish, eggs, apples, peaches, etc. For us to be mingled with a chicken does not require both the chicken and us to be chopped up and then mixed together. This would not be a mingling but a killing. In order for us to be mingled with something, we need to take that thing as our life so that it becomes our content.
The matter of mingling has been lost in Christianity. Many Christians today speak in different ways about Christ and God, but they neglect the fact that God in Christ is life to us. Even though some may say that Christ is life, many times they do not understand what they are saying. Actually, the matter of life is difficult to speak about. To speak concerning our physical body is easy, but it is difficult to speak about our physical life because life is abstract and mysterious. We all know that we have a physical life, but it is difficult to define our physical life. Because it is difficult to define and explain the matter of Christ and God being life to us, this matter has been lost in Christianity.
In the Scriptures the primary matter is that God is life to us. After God created man, the first picture revealed to us concerning God is that God is life to man. In the record of Genesis chapters one and two, God created man in His own image (1:26), using the dust of the ground to form man’s body and God’s breath of life to form man’s spirit, with the result that man became a living soul (2:7). It is significant that after creating man, God did not tell man to worship and serve Him or to do good things to please Him. Instead, God told man to take care of his eating, implying that God wanted man to eat the tree of life, which signifies God as life to created man (vv. 8-9, 16-17). God intended that created man would take God into him as life.
We must be clear that God has no intention to ask us to serve Him. Even though some may argue that there are passages in the Scriptures that tell us to serve God, this is not what is in God’s mind or heart. God intends that we come to Him to receive Him and take Him as life. The more we take Him as life, the more we please Him. Mankind always thinks that he must do something for God, that he must work, serve, and worship God (cf. Luke 15:17-24). We simply do not understand God’s heart, mind, or desire. God’s heart and desire are that He would be life to us, that we would receive Him and take Him as life.
For example, in John chapter six, when the Lord Jesus fed five thousand people with five loaves and two fish, the Jewish people considered this to be a great matter. They thought that Jesus was a great prophet, and they wanted to force Him to be King (v. 15). But the Lord indicated that, instead of coming as a great prophet or a great king, He came to be small pieces of bread to be eaten by them (vv. 32-35, 48-51, 57). The Lord does not want to be enthroned by us in an outward way; rather, He desires to be eaten by us.
Today many in Christianity praise Christ for His greatness. However, whatever we take in as food must be small, certainly smaller than we are. Thus, the human concept is absolutely different from the divine thought. The human concept is that God is great and that we must serve and worship Him. The divine thought is that God desires to come into us as life. In order to be life to us, God became small, as small as a piece of bread or fruit (Rev. 22:2), for us to take and eat. Although God’s being life to us in Christ through the Spirit is unsearchably rich, the picture in John chapter six shows that this matter also involves smallness. The one who contributed the five loaves and two fish was not a great man but a little boy (v. 9), indicating something small yet rich. There were only five loaves and two small fish, but five thousand men with women and children were all filled, and still there were twelve baskets left over (vv. 10-13). This is the way in which Christ is life to us.
The Bible is a book of life. The Bible begins with the tree of life and also ends with the tree of life, proving that it is a book of life. Throughout the Scriptures there is a line of life. After man was created, he was put in front of a tree of life, which is the symbol of God in Christ as the Spirit being life to us (Gen. 2:9; John 15:1; 14:6). When Christ came, He told us that He came that we may have life and have it abundantly (10:10) and that He is the life (14:6). John 1:4 also tells us that life is in Christ. Therefore, Christ came that we may have life, the life is in Christ, and Christ is the life. This gospel tells us to believe in Him so that we may have life, the eternal life (3:15-16). If we have the Son of God, we have life, and if we do not have the Son of God, we do not have life (1 John 5:12). The apostle Paul tells us that Christ is our life (Col. 3:4) and even that it is Christ who lives in us (Gal. 2:20). Finally, at the end of the Scriptures there is the tree of life again, with the flow of the living water (Rev. 22:1-2).