Message Five
God's Intention with Job— a Good Man Becoming a God-man
Scripture Reading: Job 1:1, 8; 2:3, 9; 27:5; 31:6; 42:5-6; John 1:14; Rom. 1:3-4; 8:29
I. Job was a good man, expressing himself in his perfection, uprightness, and integrity—Job 27:5; 31:6; 32:1:
A. Being perfect is related to the inner man, and being upright is related to the outer man—1:1.
B. Job was a man of integrity; integrity is the totality of being perfect and upright—2:3, 9; 27:5; 31:6:
1. With respect to Job, integrity is the total expression of what he was.
2. In character Job was perfect and upright, and in his ethics he had a high standard of integrity.
C. Job feared God positively and turned away from evil negatively—1:1:
1. God did not create man merely to fear Him and not do anything wrong; rather, God created man in His own image and according to His likeness that man may express God—Gen. 1:26.
2. To express God is higher than fearing God and turning away from evil.
3. What Job had attained in his perfection, uprightness, and integrity was altogether vanity; it neither fulfilled God's purpose nor satisfied His desire, and thus, He was lovingly concerned for Job—Job 1:6-8; 2:1-3.
D. Only God knew that Job had a need—he did not have God within him; therefore, God wanted Job to gain Him in order to express Him for the fulfillment of His purpose—42:5-6.
II. God's intention was that Job would become a God-man, expressing God in His attributes—22:24-25; 38:1-3:
A. God ushered Job into another realm, the realm of God, so that Job might gain God instead of his attainments in his perfection, righteousness, and integrity—42:5-6.
B. God's intention was to make Job a man of God, filled with Christ, the embodiment of God, to be the fullness of God for the expression of God in Christ—1 Tim. 6:11; 2 Tim. 3:17.
C. God's stripping and consuming were exercised over Job to tear him down that God might have a base and a way to rebuild him with God Himself so that he might become a God-man, the same as God in His life and nature but not in His Godhead, in order to express God—Eph. 3:16-21.
D. God does not want us, the believers in Christ, to be a good man; He wants us to be a God-man—John 1:12-13; Rom. 8:16:
1. God created us in His own image for the purpose of expressing God and with His dominion to represent Him—Gen. 1:26-28.
2. If we are merely a good man, we cannot express God or represent Him.
3. It is not a good man but a God-man who expresses God and represents God—2 Cor. 3:18.
4. God-men who express God are God's representative and have God's authority over all things—Gen. 1:27-28.
III. The incarnation of Christ, the embodiment and expression of the Triune God, produced a God-man—Luke 1:31-32a; John 1:1, 14, 18, 51:
A. The Gospel of Luke is a revelation of the God-man who lived a human life filled with the divine life as the content—1:35; 2:7-16, 34-35, 40, 49, 52.
B. In Christ, God and man have become one entity, the God-man—1:35; John 1:14; Matt. 1:18, 20-23:
1. Because the Lord Jesus was conceived of the divine essence and born of the human essence, He was born a God-man; hence, for His being as the God-man, He had two essences—the divine essence and the human essence—v. 18.
2. The conception of the Holy Spirit in a human virgin constituted a mingling of the divine nature with the human nature, producing the God-man, the One who is both the complete God and the perfect man—Luke 1:35.
3. As a perfect man and the complete God, the God-man has the human nature with its virtues to contain God and express Him with the divine attributes.
C. As the God-man, the Lord Jesus lived on earth not by His human life but by the divine life—John 5:18-19, 30; 6:57a:
1. When the Lord Jesus was on earth, although He was a man, He lived by God—v. 57a; 5:19, 30; 6:38; 8:28; 7:16-18:
a. The Lord Jesus lived God and expressed God in everything; whatever He did was God's doing from within Him and through Him—14:10.
b. The Lord Jesus lived as a God-man by the life of God, not by the life of man—6:57a.
c. His human living was not lived out by the human life but by the divine life—1:4; 11:25; 14:6.
2. Because the Lord Jesus always lived by rejecting His human life—by always putting Himself under the cross—His human living did not express humanity but divinity in the divine attributes becoming human virtues—Matt. 16:21, 24.
3. All His days on the earth, He denied Himself and took up the cross so that He might live God to express God in His divine attributes becoming human virtues; this was the life of the first God-man as a prototype—Luke 1:31-32a; 7:11-16; 10:25-37; 13:10-16; Rom. 8:3, 29.
IV. Initially, the Bible speaks of the God-man; through His resurrection this God-man was reproduced as the many God-men—Rom. 1:3-4; 8:29; Heb. 2:10:
A. The Lord Jesus, the first God-man, is the prototype for the producing of the many God-men, His reproduction—1 Pet. 2:21.
B. God became man to have a mass reproduction of Himself and thereby to produce a new kind; this new kind is God-man kind—Rom. 8:3, 29; Heb. 2:10.
C. The Lord Jesus, the God-man, was a grain of wheat falling into the ground in order to produce many grains as His reproduction—John 12:24:
1. The first grain—the first God-man—was the prototype, and the many grains—the many God-men—produced by this one grain through death and resurrection are the reproduction of the first God-man.
2. The many grains, as the many God-men, are the reproduction of God; such a reproduction makes God happy because His reproduction looks like Him, speaks like Him, and lives like Him—1 John 2:6; 3:2; 4:17b.
D. The first step of the reproduction of the God-man is that we must be reborn of the pneumatic Christ in our spirit with His divine life and nature—John 3:3, 6.
E. For the reproduction of the God-man, we need to be transformed by the pneumatic Christ in our soul with His divine attributes to uplift, strengthen, enrich, and fill our human virtues for His expression in our humanity—2 Cor. 3:17-18; Rom. 12:2.
F. We need to see that we are God-men, born of God, possessing the life and nature of God, and belonging to the species of God—John 1:12-13:
1. As children of God, born of God with the divine life, we are God-men, divine persons; we are the same as the One of whom we are born—1 John 3:1; 5:1.
2. Since we have been born of God, we may say that we are God in life and in nature but not in the Godhead—John 1:12-13; Rom. 8:16; 2 Pet. 1:4.
3. To think of ourselves as God-men and to know and realize who we are revolutionizes us in our daily experience—1 John 2:20; 3:1-2; 5:13, 20.
4. We are not merely Christians or believers in Christ; we are God-men, God-man kind, the reproduction of God—John 12:24; Rom. 8:16, 29; Heb. 2:10-11.
V. Christ's God-man living constituted Him to be a prototype so that He might be reproduced in us and live again in us, the God-men—John 14:19; Gal. 2:20:
A. As the reproduction of the God-man, we need to live the life of a God-man—Phil. 1:19-21a; 3:10.
B. Christ's human living was man living God to express the attributes of God in the human virtues; His human virtues were filled, mingled, and saturated with the divine attributes—Luke 1:26-35; 7:11-17; 10:25-37; 19:1-10.
C. As the expansion, increase, reproduction, and continuation of the first God-man, we should live the same kind of life that He lived—1 John 2:6:
1. The Lord's God-man living set up a model for our God-man living—being crucified to live so that God might be expressed in humanity—Gal. 2:20.
2. We need to deny ourselves, be conformed to Christ's death, and magnify Him by the bountiful supply of His Spirit—Matt. 16:24; Phil. 3:10; 1:19-21a.
3. We must reject self-cultivation and condemn the building up of the natural man; we need to realize that the Christian virtues are related essentially to the divine life, to the divine nature, and to God Himself—Gal. 5:22-23.
4. The One who lived the life of a God-man is now the Spirit living in us and through us; we should not allow anything other than this One to fill us and occupy us—2 Cor. 3:17; 13:5; Eph. 3:16-19.
D. The Christ in Philippians 1:21a is the God-man in Philippians 2:5-8; therefore, to live Christ is to live the God-man by the bountiful supply of the Spirit of Jesus Christ—1:19.
E. When we open ourselves to the Lord, love Him, and desire to be joined to Him as one, we are filled and possessed by Him and live out the glory of divinity and the virtues of humanity—1 Cor. 2:9; 6:17; Phil. 4:4-9.