We praise the Lord for bringing us to see the high peak of the divine revelation in the Bible, which is that God became man so that man may become God in life, nature, and expression but not in the Godhead to produce and build up the organic Body of Christ consummating in the New Jerusalem for the fulfillment of God’s economy to close this age and bring Christ back to set up His kingdom on earth (see John 1:12-14; 1 John 3:1-2; Rom. 8:3; 12:4-5; Rev. 11:15).
Why did God become a man? Why is God’s intention to make man God in life and nature but not in the Godhead? It is not for man to be super-spiritual or good, ethical, and moral, but for Christ to obtain a Body, a corporate expression on the earth. In this age God desires to produce and build up the corporate organism of the Body of Christ.
Many believers want to build up the church as the Body of Christ, but in order for us to genuinely and properly build up the Body, we need to become God in life and nature but not in the Godhead so that we may become His fulness, His corporate expression. The Body of Christ is Christ Himself; He is the Head, and He is the Body – therefore, we need to become the same as He is so that we may build up the Body of Christ!
God Redeemed us to make us God in Life and Nature so that He can have the Body of Christ
Man’s concept toward God is mistaken and wrong, thinking that God is almighty and He can control everything in our life and in the world, and so when we’re in trouble we can pray to Him and He will deliver us and give us what we need.
God is not here to “listen to our requests” and “give us what we need”; God has a heart’s desire, an eternal purpose, and we are part of God’s eternal purpose. God’s desire is to work Himself into us and make us the same as He is in every possible way. Many times He delays His answers to our prayers and requests so that we may be made God a little more today and so that He may mingle Himself with us a little more for His Body.
God is not here to make us better persons, more ethical and moral people, or even spiritual believers; God wants that God and man would be one and the same for the building up of the Body of Christ, His corporate expression. For this, He works Himself into us so that He would grow, increase, spread, and flow in us and through us for the building up of the church.
When God builds Himself into us, something will come out of us for the building up of the Body. No human being can by himself and of himself build up the church as the Body of Christ, no matter how good they are with organizing things, managing affairs, etc; only when the Christ who mingles Himself with us is qualified to build the church as the house of God.
We need to allow God to build Himself into us and even become us so that we may be built into God, become God, and be mingled and incorporated with God until we are indistinguishable from God – we look like God and God is fully expressed through us. This is why God has redeemed us: God redeemed us to make us God in life and nature so that He can have the Body of Christ which consummates in the New Jerusalem as God’s enlargement, His expression for eternity.
In Christ we have redemption, the forgiveness of offenses (Eph. 1:7); we experience redemption not as a thing or event but in Christ as a person. It is of God that we are in Christ Jesus, and He transferred us into Christ out of darkness and sin. In Christ we have been made God’s inheritance; in ourselves there’s nothing that we naturally have for God to inherit, but as Christ’s element is worked into us, in Christ we become God’s inheritance.
Our own righteousness and meekness are but a filthy rag in God’s eyes, but when we allow God to work Himself in Christ as the Spirit into our being, we become worthy to be God’s inheritance. Hallelujah!
As God is working Himself into us, we are men yet God just as He is God yet man; He is making us the same as He is, His attributes become our human virtues, and His glorious image is expressed and lived out through us. This is the unique, highest, deepest, most mysterious, and most glorious subject in the Holy Scriptures, that is, the highest purpose of God concerning man.
Lord, thank You for redeeming us to make us God in life and nature so that You may have the Body of Christ, Your enlargement and expression in humanity. Lord, work Yourself into us a little more today. Build Yourself into us, grow in us, and cause the quantity and measure of God in us to increase more today. May we decrease and may God increase in us. Lord, build Yourself into us and build us into You for the building up of the Body of Christ consummating in the New Jerusalem!
The Marvelous Process through which God became Man to make man God in Life and Nature
We need to have our mind renewed and realize what is God’s highest intention and purpose concerning man; God is not merely the almighty God in the heavens having mercy on the pitiful sinners on earth, neither is God merely interested to “bring man into heavens” where He and man can fellowship for eternity.
God created man and later became a man so that He would make man God in life, nature, and expression through a marvelous process. Athanasius, one of the church fathers, is the one who first said, He was made man so that we might be made God. But what does this mean?
God becoming man is not just Him being born as a human being but the producing of a God-man, and man becoming God in life and nature but not in the Godhead means that man becomes a man-God, a God-man.
With God, there’s the process of incarnation (the Word became flesh and tabernacled among us, John 1:1, 14), human living (John 6:57), crucifixion (to terminate all negative things and redeem man, see John 1:29, 12:24), and resurrection (to become the life-giving Spirit and be begotten by God as the Firstborn Son of God in his humanity). God went through a long process from the manger to the cross to become man, so that man might be made God in life and nature but not in the Godhead.
With man the process of becoming God is regeneration (we are born again of God, John 1:12-13; 3:6), sanctification, renewing (Rom. 12:2), transformation (2 Cor. 3:18), and glorification (Rom. 8:29). From our spiritual birth of God to our being glorified (when our physical body is transfigured), this whole process speaks of our becoming God.
When we are born again we are begotten of God as “little baby God-man”, and daily we need to grow and mature in the divine life. Hallelujah, we are God-men! We are God-men to a certain degree, and we need to let Christ increase (as we decrease) in us.
We daily need to reach further, pursue Christ, and become a little more God-man in our experience. As we spend time with the Lord to behold Him and reflect Him, He is transforming us not just to be a holy and spiritual person but into the SAME IMAGE as He is (2 Cor. 3:17-18). We are not merely made different people but we are made Him, into the same image from glory to glory.
We are being made God until we become like Him just as He became like us. He is God having both the divine nature and the human nature, and we are God-men having the human nature and the divine nature. He lives in us and we live not by our human life but by the divine life in our spirit.
The One who is God yet man dwells in the one who is man yet God (that’s us), and the one who is man yet God (that’s us) dwell in the One who is God yet man (that’s God).
This is God’s economy, something completely outside of the realm of good or evil, right or wrong, moral or immoral, or ethical or unethical; God’s economy is absolutely about God becoming man so that man might be made God in life and nature but not in the Godhead through a marvelous process so that the Body of Christ would come into being to consummate the New Jerusalem, the ultimate and consummate expression of the Triune God in man.
Lord Jesus, thank You for becoming man through incarnation, human living, crucifixion, and resurrection, so that we might be made God in life and nature but not in the Godhead through the process of regeneration, sanctification, renewing, transformation, conformation, and glorification. Lord, minister more of Yourself into us as the life-giving Spirit to transform us into Your image, making us the same as You are in life, nature, and expression, for the building up of the Body of Christ to consummate the New Jerusalem!
References and Hymns on this Topic
- Inspiration: the Word of God, my Christian experience, bro. James Lee’s sharing in the message for this week, and portions from, The Dispensing, Transformation, and Building of the Processed Divine Trinity in the Believers, chs. 1, 4 (by Witness Lee), as quoted in the Holy Word for Morning Revival on, The Need for a New Revival, week 2 / msg 2, Reaching the Highest Peak of the Divine Revelation (2) – Becoming God in Life, Nature, and Expression to Produce the Body of Christ Consummating in the New Jerusalem.
- All Bible verses are taken from, Holy Bible Recovery Version.
- Hymns on this topic to strengthen this burden:
# Every time I say “Amen” to His Spirit / And walk by my spirit, / The kingdom seed grows and develops / Deep inside of me. / On the outside, it may seem that there’s / No change in me— / But I’m not the same, / ’Cause as the seed grows in me, / Inside I’m becoming God! (Song on Being a God-man)
# Incarnation, / Human living, / Crucifixion, / Resurrection, / Became Spirit, / And ascended man! / God became a man / According to God’s plan / To dispense Himself as life to us. / He was processed thus: / Oh, how marvelous! / Then like Him we’re processed through… / Regeneration, / Sanctification, / Then renewing, / Transformation, / Conformation, / Glorification — we / Become God in life / And nature, not in Godhead / Through His organic salvation. / We are processed thus: / Oh, how glorious / To express the processed Triune God. (Song on the Process of Becoming a God-man)
About aGodMan
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We definitely have a burden to focus on the unique, highest, deepest, most mysterious, and most glorious subject in the Holy Scriptures, that is, God’s highest purpose concerning man….The Bible is a book concerning God, especially concerning God’s relationship with man. In God’s relationship with man we can see that God has a heart’s desire and a purpose; that is, God wants to make Himself man and to make man God that the two—God and man—may become altogether the same. God is God, yet He made Himself a man and lived a human life exactly the same as man in the human nature and the human life….Man is man, yet God wants to make man the same as He is, of the same kind and the same likeness as He is in life and in nature, except that we human beings have no share in His person. Thus, His attributes become our human virtues and His glorious image is expressed and lived out through us. Eventually, God and man become a matching pair in the universe. (Witness Lee, The Dispensing, Transformation, and Building of the Processed Divine Trinity in the Believers, p. 9)
**Deification** is accepted in modern evangelical Christianity…
The following is an exert from John Piper at the 2005 Desiring God pastors conference:
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Finally, we must not assume that old books, which say some startling things, are necessarily wrong, but may in fact have something glorious to teach us that we never dreamed.43
For example, Athanasius says some startling things about human deification that we would probably never say. Is that because one of us is wrong? Or is it because the language and the categories of thought that he uses are so different from ours that we have to get inside his head before we make judgments about the truth of what he says? And might we discover something great by this effort to see what he saw?
For example, he says, “[The Son] was made man that we might be made God (theopoiëthõmen).”44 Or: “He was not man, and then became God, but He was God, and then became man, and that to deify us.”45 The issue here is whether the word “make God” or “deify” (theopoieõ) means something unbiblical or whether it means what 2 Peter 1:4 means when it says, “that you may become partakers of the divine nature” (hina genësthe theias koinõnoi phuseõs)? Athanasius explains like this:
John then thus writes; ‘Hereby know we that we dwell in Him and He in us, because He hath given us of His Spirit. . . . And the Son is in the Father, as His own Word and Radiance; but we, apart from the Spirit, are strange and distant from God, and by the participation of the Spirit we are knit into the Godhead; so that our being in the Father is not ours, but is the Spirit’s which is in us and abides in us, . . . What then is our likeness and equality to the Son? . . . The Son is in the Father in one way, and we become in Him in another, and that neither we shall ever be as He, nor is the Word as we.46
What becomes clear when all is taken into account is that Athanasius is pressing on a reality in the Scriptures that we today usually call “glorification” but is using the terminology of 2 Peter 1:4 and Romans 8:29, “Those whom he foreknew he also predestined to be conformed to the image of his Son, in order that he might be the firstborn among many brothers.” He is pressing the destiny and the glory of being a brother of the second person of the Trinity, and “sharing in his nature.”47
And thus Athanasius raises for me one of the most crucial questions of all: What is the ultimate end of creation—the ultimate goal of God in creation and redemption? Is it being or seeing? Is it our being like Christ or our seeing the glory of Christ? How does Romans 8:29 (“predestined to be conformed to the image of his Son”) relate to John 17:24 (“Father, I desire that they also, whom you have given me, may be with me where I am, to see my glory”)? Is the beatific vision of the glory of the Son of God the aim of human creation? Or is likeness to that glory the aim of creation?
Athanasius has helped me go deeper here by unsettling me. I am inclined to stress seeing as the goal rather than being. The reason is that it seems to me that putting the stress on seeing the glory of Christ makes him the focus, but putting the stress on being like Christ makes me the focus. But Athanasius will not let me run away from the biblical texts. His language of deification forces me to think more deeply and worship more profoundly.
My present understanding would go like this: the ultimate end of creation is neither being nor seeing, but delighting and displaying. Delighting in and displaying “the glory of God in the face of Jesus Christ” (2 Cor. 4:6). And the displaying happens both in the delighting, since we glorify most what we enjoy most, and in the deeds of the resurrection body that flow from this enjoyment on the new earth in the age to come. The display of God’s glory will be both internal and external. It will be spiritual and physical. We will display the glory of God by the Christ-exalting joy of our heart, and by the Christ-exalting deeds of our resurrection bodies.
How then should we speak of our future being and seeing if they are not the ultimate end? How shall we speak of “sharing God’s nature” and being “conformed to his Son”? The way I would speak of our future being and seeing is this: By the Spirit of God who dwells in us, our final destiny is not self-admiration or self-exaltation, but being able to see the glory of God without disintegrating, and being able to delight in the glory of Christ with the very delight of God the Father for his own Son (John 17:26),48 and being able to do visible Christ-exalting deeds that flow from this delight.
And in this way a wave of revelation of divine glory in the saints is set in motion that goes on and grows for all eternity. As each of us sees Christ and delights in Christ with the delight of the Father, mediated by the Spirit, we will overflow with visible actions of love and creativity on the new earth. In this way we will see the revelation of God’s glory in each other’s lives in ever new ways. New dimensions of the riches of the glory of God in Christ will shine forth every day from new delights and new deeds. And these in turn will become new seeings of Christ which will elicit new delights and new doings. And so the ever-growing wave of the revelation of the riches of the glory of God will role on for ever and ever.
And we will discover that this was possible only because the infinite Son of God took on himself the human nature so that we in our human nature might be united to him and display more and more of his glory. We will find in our eternal experience that his infinite beauty took on human form so that our human form might increasingly display his infinite beauty.
I am thankful to God that I did not run away from the word “deification” in Athanasius. There is here “a grace the magnitude of which our minds can never fully grasp.”49 Thank you, Athanasius. And thank you, Father. And thank you, Holy Spirit. In Jesus’ name, Amen.