Crystallization-Study of Jeremiah and Lamentations
Message Six
The Principle of Being One with God as Revealed in the Book of Jeremiah
Scripture Reading: Gen. 2:8-9, 16-17; Jer. 2:13; 15:16, 19; 23:5-6; 31:31-34; 40:5-6, 13-14
I. God's desire to be one with man and for man to be one with Him can be seen in the resemblance of God and man in their images and likenesses:
A. There was no "mankind" created by God in His creation; rather, what God created was after His own kind, that is, God-kind; God created man with the breath of life for a spirit that man may con-tact Him and receive Him—Gen. 1:24-26; 2:7.
B. In Genesis 18:2-13 three men appeared to Abraham; one of these men was Christ—Jehovah—and the other two were angels (19:1); this means that two thousand years before His incarnation, God appeared as a man when He visited His friend Abraham— 2 Chron. 20:7; Isa. 41:8; James 2:23.
C. The Angel of God (God, Jehovah, a man of God—Christ) appeared to Manoah and his wife before Christ's incarnation—Judg. 13:3-6, 22-23.
D. Daniel saw a vision of Christ as the Son of Man before Christ's incarnation; according to Daniel 7:13-14, Daniel saw the Son of Man coming with the clouds of heaven, and He came even to the Ancient of Days—the God of eternity—and they brought Him near before Him; there was given Him dominion, glory, and a king dom that all the peoples, nations, and languages should serve Him; His dominion is an eternal dominion, which will not pass away, and His kingdom is one that will not be destroyed.
E. Adam was a type, a prefigure, of Christ—Rom. 5:14.
F. Christ is the image of the invisible God—Col. 1:15.
G. The Word (God) became flesh (John 1:14), coming in the likeness of the flesh of sin (Rom. 8:3) and not having the sin of the flesh (2 Cor. 5:21; Heb. 4:15).
H. Christ, who exists in the form of God, took the form of a slave, becoming in the likeness of men and being found in fashion as a man, in His incarnation—Phil. 2:6-8.
I. Stephen saw the heavens opened up and the Son of Man— Christ—at the right hand of God (Acts 7:56); this indicates that after Christ's ascension to the heavens, He is still the Son of Man (see Hymns, #132).
J. In Matthew 26:64 the Lord Jesus said, "You will see the Son of Man sitting at the right hand of Power [God] and coming on the clouds of heaven"; this shows that when the Lord Jesus comes back, He will still be the Son of Man.
K. In Romans 8:29 Paul tells us that those whom God foreknew (we believers), He also predestinated to be conformed to the image of His Son, that He might be the Firstborn among many brothers; by His resurrecting to make us His many brothers, we became a new kind, "God-man kind."
L. Second Corinthians 3:18 says, "We all with unveiled face, behold-ing and reflecting like a mirror the glory of the Lord, are being transformed into the same image from glory to glory, even as from the Lord Spirit"; Romans 12:2a speaks of our being trans-formed by the renewing of the mind.
M. Philippians 2:15 speaks of our being blameless and guileless, children of God without blemish in the midst of a crooked and perverted generation, among whom we shine as luminaries in the world.
N. The Lord Jesus Christ will transfigure the body of our humilia-tion to be conformed to the body of His glory, according to His operation by which He is able even to subject all things to Him-self—3:21.
O. When Christ is manifested, we will be like Him wholly, perfectly, and absolutely, because we will see Him even as He is—1 John 3:2b.
P. All this will consummate in the New Jerusalem; Revelation 4:3 says, "He [God] who was sitting was like a jasper stone"; the appearance of God, the One sitting on the throne, is like jasper.
Q. According to Revelation 21, the New Jerusalem's light is like a most precious stone, like a jasper stone (v. 11b); the building work of its wall is jasper, and the first foundation of the wall is also jasper (vv. 18a, 19):
1. Eventually, God and man, man and God, all have the appear-ance of jasper; thus, the conclusion and consummation of the Bible is the New Jerusalem—divinity mingled with human-ity; divinity becomes the dwelling place of humanity, and humanity becomes the home of divinity.
2. In this city the glory of God is manifested in man, brightly and splendidly; now we are in the process of being deified to become the New Jerusalem and to bear the same appearance of God—jasper—vv. 11, 23.
3. At the end of this age, we are teaching and preaching the truth that God became a man in order to make man God, the same as He is in life and in nature but not in the Godhead; it is a great blessing to hear this truth.
4. Eventually, the God-men will be the victors, the overcomers, the Zion within Jerusalem; having a God-man living in all the details of our daily life will bring in a new revival that has never been seen in history, and this will end this age—read Psalm 48:2 and footnote 1.
II. The book of Jeremiah shows us the principle of being one with God:
A. The principle of being one with God, which is the principle of the tree of life, versus the principle of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil is seen in Jeremiah 2:13, which reveals the two basic sins of God's people:
1. The first sin was forsaking Jehovah as the fountain, the source, of living waters; the second sin was hewing out for themselves broken cisterns that could not hold water.
2. The principle in the Bible is that God does not want His cho-sen people to take anything other than Himself as their source; by placing man in front of the tree of life, which signifies God as life, God was indicating that He wanted man to partake of the tree of life, not anything else; to partake of the tree of life is to take God as our unique source, as our source of every-thing—Gen. 2:8-9.
3. The second sin was a matter of God's people not trusting in God but of trusting in themselves to do whatever they could do to work out something by themselves for their own enjoy-ment; sin is to forsake God and do something by ourselves and for ourselves.
4. These two basic sins show us the tree of life, which signifies God, and the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, which sig-nifies Satan (vv. 8-9, 16-17); Israel had been distracted from the tree of life to the tree of knowledge, from the fountain of living waters to the cisterns (idols).
B. God placed man in front of the tree of life, indicating His desire to be one with man, that is, to be man's life, life supply, and every-thing—vv. 8-9:
1. The tree of life signifies the crucified (implied in the tree as a piece of wood—1 Pet. 2:24) and resurrected (implied in the life of God—John 11:25) Christ as the embodi ment of all the riches of God for our food.
2. Eating the tree of life, that is, enjoying Christ as our life sup-ply, should be the primary matter in the church life; to receive Christ by eating Him is to have Him assimilated into our being organically and metabolically to mingle Himself with us—Rev. 2:7; John 6:57, 63:
a. The words that the Lord speaks are spirit and life; this shows that the Lord's spoken words are the embodiment of the Spirit of life—v. 63:
1) He is now the life-giving Spirit in resurrection (1 Cor. 15:45b), and the Spirit is embodied in His words.
2) When we receive His words by means of all prayer and petition (Eph. 6:17-18) by exercising our spirit, we get the Spirit, who is life.
b. To eat Christ is to eat His words, to receive His words, which are the embodiment of the Spirit of life, by exercis-ing our spirit—Jer. 15:16; Eph. 6:17-18; 1 Pet. 2:2; Heb. 5:13-14; Ezek. 3:1-4.
III. To take, receive, and keep the word of God, we must be abso-lutely one with Him:
A. The case of Gedaliah is the case of a person who was not one with God; although Geda liah was faithful in caring for Jeremiah, God's prophet, he did not seek the Lord's word, because this was not his habit—Jer. 40:5-6, 13-14:
1. Gedaliah did not take God as his source to be one with Him and to receive whatever issued from Him; if he had been a person who was one with God, the first thing he would have done would have been to receive the word of God.
2. To take, to receive, and to keep the word of God as the expres-sion of His thought, His will, His heart's desire, and His good pleasure, we must be absolutely one with God, trusting in Him, relying on Him, and not having any opinion that comes from the self—cf. 2 Cor. 1:8-9, and v. 12, footnote 2.
3. The principle of the Bible, especially of the New Testament, is that God opens Himself to us so that we may enter into Him, receive Him, and become one with Him; then He will be in us, and we will be in Him, taking Him as everything—John 15:4-5; 1 John 2:28; 3:24.
4. The first thing we will take is His word to express His thought, His will, His heart's desire, and His good pleasure; we will not care for our opinions or preferences; in this way we become His mouthpiece to speak Him forth to others for their supply— Jer. 1:6-9.
B. The Lord told Jeremiah, "If you bring out the precious from the worthless, I You will be as My mouth"—15:19; 23:29, cf. v. 16:
1. We need the eyes of our heart to be enlightened to see the excellency, the super eminence, the surpassing worth, of Christ as the preciousness to His believers in order to gain Christ, counting all things other than Christ as loss—Phil. 3:7-8; 1 Pet. 2:7, cf. vv. 4, 6.
2. We must treasure the Lord's words more than our apportioned food, tasting the Lord in His word as the reality of the good land flowing with nourishing milk and fresh honey for us to dispense to God's people for their full salvation—Job 23:12; 1 Pet. 2:2-5; Psa. 119:103; Deut. 8:8; S. S. 4:11a.
3. We must treasure the Lord's words more than all earthly riches so that we can speak oracles of God (God's speaking, God's utterance, which conveys divine revelation) to dispense the unsearchable riches of Christ as the varied grace of God to all the saints—Psa. 119:72, 9-16; Eph. 3:8; 2 Cor. 6:10; 1 Pet. 4:10-11.
IV. The secret of Israel's failures and defeats was that they had lost God's presence and were no longer one with God (cf. Josh. 7:3-4; 9:14); we should always be one with our God, who is not only among us but also in us, making us men with God— God-men:
A. As God-men, we should practice being one with the Lord, walk-ing with Him, living with Him, and having our entire being with Him (Rom. 8:4; 2 Cor. 2:10; Gal. 5:16, 25); this is the way to walk as a Christian, to fight as a child of God, and to build up the Body of Christ; if we have the Lord's presence, being one with Him, we have wisdom, insight, foresight, and the inner knowledge con-cerning things; the Lord's presence is everything to us.
B. The stubbornness of the children of Israel in sinning against God was due to their not being one with God (Jer. 42:1—43:2); if they had been one with God, they would have received God's word and would have known His heart, His nature, His mind, and His purpose; furthermore, they would have spontaneously lived Him and would have been constituted with Him to be His testimony on earth.
C. Those who are not one with God do not take His will and good pleasure but express their opinions and pursue their preferences; to do this is to forsake God as the source, the fountain, of living waters and hew out broken cisterns that can hold no water— 2:13.
V. In order to be one with God, we need Christ as the Shoot of David to be our redemption and justification; this ushers the Triune God into us to be our life, our inner life law, our capac-ity, and our everything to dispense Himself into our being to carry out His economy; this is the new covenant (31:33); even-tually, we will know God, live God, and become God in life and in nature but not in the God head so that we may become His corporate expression as the New Jerusalem— 23:5-6; 31:31-34; Rev. 21:2.