There are two great principles concerning Christ. One is incarnation, and the other is death and resurrection. These two principles include everything that Christ experienced. Through His incarnation He brought God into man, and through His death and resurrection He brought man into God. This coming and going accomplished God’s work of mingling Himself with man, and as a result, God was able to gain a man in this universe. This man is not a natural man but one who has God mingled with Him and has passed through death and resurrection. This man is a God-man, a man who is the mingling of God and man, and a man of resurrection. This man enabled God to gain a model, a standard, in the universe.
In Christ we can fully see both the divine element and the human element. These two elements, however, do not exist separately from each other. God is no longer merely God, and man is no longer merely man, but God and man have been mingled together. Through His death and resurrection Christ brought man completely into God, just as His incarnation brought God completely into man. Through His incarnation and through death and resurrection, God and man, man and God, were fully mingled as one. The God who is in Christ is a man-God, and the man who is in Christ is a God-man. His divinity contains humanity, and His humanity contains divinity. As a result of Christ’s resurrection, divinity and humanity are no longer separated but are mingled together.
The mingling of divinity and humanity is the purpose of God’s plan in eternity. In the Scriptures we see that the one thing God desired from eternity past was to mingle His nature with the human nature so that He and man would no longer be separated. The accomplishment of this mingling required two procedures. The first is incarnation, and the second is death and resurrection. Through incarnation and through death and resurrection, divinity and humanity were mingled as one. Hence, in the Lord Jesus Christ we see the result that God desired—the mingling of divinity with humanity.
The goal that God has been intending to achieve throughout the ages and the purpose of His choosing, predestinating, redeeming, edifying, building, leading, and being gracious to us is to work Himself into us and, at the same time, to completely work us into Himself. In other words, the purpose of all of God’s work is to work divinity into humanity and humanity into divinity, that divinity and humanity would become fully one. Through this, God will be able to obtain what He is after in the universe. Apart from divinity and humanity, God has no other goal. God has no intention to obtain some other result in His work. What God desires to obtain is divinity and humanity, that is, to work divinity into humanity and humanity into divinity, that the two would be fully mingled as one and that divinity would be in humanity and humanity in divinity.
Today this goal has not yet been accomplished in us. Thus, the new heaven and new earth and the New Jerusalem have not yet appeared. Hence, what God wants to do in us is to work His nature into us and our nature into Him more and more. This procedure or process involves a “coming” and a “going.” The coming is His incarnation, and the going is His death and resurrection. The principle of incarnation is God coming into man to be mingled with man, and the principle of death and resurrection is man going into God to be mingled with God. From the day of our salvation, God’s work in us has been to bring our humanity into divinity, to bring us into God.