The way for God to be mingled with us is the way of life. It is through His being life to us that God is able to mingle Himself with us. If we wish to take something into us and be mingled with it, we must take that thing as our intrinsic constituent. We may illustrate this by considering the way food becomes our constituent. In order for our food to mingle with us, we must take it as our life supply. It must become a constituent of our physical life before it can be mingled with us. This portrays the way that God mingles Himself with us, and this mingling is the central thought of God. God’s eternal plan, which God made in eternity past for eternity future (Eph. 3:9-11), is that He might be life to us in order that He might be mingled with us as one.
God’s thought and ultimate intention are not for us to worship Him and serve Him in an objective way. Rather, He desires to enter into us to be life to us and to be mingled with us as one. A model and pattern of the mingling of God with man was accomplished in the Lord Jesus Christ. Jesus Christ is not only God, nor is He merely man; He is both God and man, a God-man. He is God mingled with man. The Lord Jesus is a wonderful model of the mingling of God with man.
All genuine and true believers in Christ must be exactly the same as Christ. Christ is a mingling of God with man, and every Christian also must be such a mingling. This is the reason that God must be life to us. God must live within us as our life in order that He might be mingled with us, making every one of us God-men, men who are filled with God, permeated with God, and saturated with God. You may think that you should be a good man; however, God’s thought is not that you should be a good man but that you should be a God-man, a man who is mingled with God as one.
In order for God to accomplish this, we must take God as life. We should all realize that God has put Himself into us as life. Most Christians know that when we believe in the Lord Jesus, we have the eternal life (John 3:16). However, few realize that the divine life, the eternal life, that we received at the moment we believed in the Lord Jesus is God Himself in Christ as the Spirit. The Triune God—God the Father in God the Son as God the Spirit—comes into us to be life to us when we believe in Christ. We must be clear that the life that we receive through faith in Jesus Christ is the Triune God Himself. As believers in Christ, we now have the Triune God living within us as life.
Now that we have been regenerated and possess the life of the Triune God, we should not consider this life to be something separate from the Triune God. Rather, we need to realize that this life is the Triune God Himself. Hence, the Triune God is now within us. Although it may be difficult for you to believe that the great Triune God is in a small person such as you, you certainly have some experience of God being in you, because you have been troubled by Him. As we have seen, the life within us, which is Christ Himself and the Triune God, is the light. When we have this life, we have something within us shining all the time, because the life is the light. John 1:4 says, “In Him was life, and the life was the light of men.” Therefore, we know that we have Christ within us as life because there is something within us shining all the time. We are not in darkness but in the light because the life which is Christ Himself is the light. If we have Christ as life, we have the light.
In this chapter we will consider the matter of law. Christ is life, the life is the light, and the light is the law. Light is something that rules, controls, and regulates. Under the light, everyone is regulated. For example, if the light goes out in a certain place and that place becomes full of darkness, the result will be lawlessness and confusion. Suppose an entire city such as San Francisco had no light. The whole city would be in darkness, and there would be much confusion. Where there is no light, there is no government, no rule, and no regulation. By this illustration we can realize how the light is the law. Nothing is mentioned in the Scriptures concerning going to movies, nor is there any regulation in the church forbidding this; nevertheless, when young people go to the movies, they are bothered inwardly by Christ. This is because the light within them rules, and this ruling is a matter of law.
Romans 8:2 says, “The law of the Spirit of life has freed me in Christ Jesus from the law of sin and of death.” The law of the Spirit of life is simply the law of life, and the law of life is the law of Christ (Gal. 6:2), which is nothing less than Christ Himself. The law of life is also the law of love, which is the issue and expression of the divine life (1 Cor. 13). The life is the Lord Jesus, the light is the Lord Jesus, the law is the Lord Jesus, and love is the Lord Jesus. Thus, the Lord Jesus is everything. Nevertheless, among these items there are certain differences, because Christ is one Lord with many functions. Christ as life has the function of shining within us to enlighten us; thus, He is the light. Christ as life has another function, that is, to regulate, rule, and control us; thus, He is the law. When He enlightens, He is the light, and when He rules, He is the law.