A Digital Newsletter from Living Stream Ministry
The words God-man and God-men have been used in the ministry publications to refer to the Lord Jesus and to the believers.
Brother Watchman Nee first used the term God-man in 1922 in his “Meditations on Revelation.” He pointed out that “Christ is the God-man exalted by God” and “the One ‘who became dead and lived again.’…He is the God-man who had experienced the greatest suffering on the whole earth and had Himself passed through death” (The Collected Works of Watchman Nee (CWWN), vol. 4, pp. 200, 325-326). The only other published book in which Watchman Nee uses the term God-man is How to Study the Bible under the heading “God and His Relationship with Man”: “We have the God-man, which we see in the Gospels; the Lord Jesus is the God-man” (CWWN, vol. 54, p. 111).
Brother Witness Lee first mentioned the term God-man in his published ministry in 1947 in “Speakings Given During the Resumption of Watchman Nee’s Ministry.” In it he talks about the purpose of the incarnation, which is for God to work Himself into us so that God and man are completely mingled together.
God has taken on the form of man. Now He wants us to put Him on. He has put on humanity, and He has ascended to heaven with His humanity. He is the God-man, and He is the man-God. He desires to see that man has put on God in the same way that He, as God, desires to put on man. Now God can say, “O man, I have your human nature,” and we can say, “O God, our great God, I have Your divine nature” (2 Pet. 1:4). This is God’s eternal purpose. It is for this purpose alone that God created us, redeemed us, forgave our sins, regenerated us, has come to live in us, and has sent the Holy Spirit to work in us. God desires to work Himself into us. God’s work is to work Himself into us. (The Collected Works of Witness Lee (CWWL), 1932–1949, vol. 2, p. 111)
The plural term God-men was first mentioned in 1949 in Witness Lee’s published work Crucial Truths in the Holy Scriptures, Volume 4. God’s work of salvation produces God-men.
God’s salvation involves the impartation of His Spirit of life into our spirit, enabling our innermost part to respond to the law of the Spirit of life so that we can live by God’s life and become God-men who flow out God’s life because we are full of God’s life (CWWL, 1932–1949, vol. 4, p. 137).
The Lord Jesus was the unique God-man, the product of the mingling of the complete God with the perfect man. We can know Him outwardly or inwardly.
Outwardly, Christ was a typical man. Inwardly, He was absolutely and fully God. Outwardly, He was a man. This is the reason He become tired; He wept, drank, slept, and behaved absolutely as a man (Phil. 2:8). Even those who knew Him said that He was just a man, a carpenter (Mark 6:3), including His brothers and sisters who said that He was a Nazarene. At the critical moments, however, He revealed that He was the Christ of God, the God-man. On the Mount of Transfiguration and while He was performing miracles, He could be seen as God, and when others asked Him who He was, He said that He was God (John 8:58). Apart from Him, man could not find God. The content of Christ was God, but outwardly, He was just a man. Such a One, who was a man outwardly, was expressing God who lived in Him. (CWWL, 1932–1949, vol. 2, “Speakings Given During the Resumption of Watchman Nee’s Ministry,” p. 355)
To describe the living of the Lord Jesus on earth, Witness Lee called it a God-man living, a living according to the highest standard of morality, produced from the mingling of the divine attributes with the human virtues. “Man’s virtues became a shell, an image, to express God’s attributes so that God could be expressed in man’s living” (Life-study of Luke, p. 515). The Lord Jesus did not live His genuine and perfect human life by Himself but lived out the divine life of the Father in His human life.
First in 1963 and again in 1984, Witness Lee also used the term Triune God-man to show that the Son, who is called the Father and who is the Spirit, was incarnated as a man and is now dwelling as the Spirit in our spirit. All the accomplishments and attainments of the God-man are included in the Spirit. In 1967 he referred to this Spirit as the God-man-Spirit: “At the beginning of the book of John, we see the Word. Then at the conclusion of the book, we see the Spirit as the holy breath (20:22)…We should not think that when Christ was incarnated to be a man, He was no longer God. On the contrary, He was God plus something more; He was also man, a God-man. In the same way, we should not think that when the last Adam, Christ as a man in the flesh, became the Spirit, He was no longer a man. He is now a God-man with something more; He is a “God-man-Spirit.” All the elements of God in eternity and of Christ in His incarnation are in the Spirit, who is the holy breath for us to receive. When we breathe the all-inclusive Spirit as the holy breath, we receive all the elements that are in the God-man-Spirit, for all His elements are in the holy breath, that is, in the Spirit. (CWWL, 1967, vol. 2, p. 606). As the Spirit compounded with all the elements of Christ’s process, He enables us to live a God-man life, a repetition of the life Jesus lived as a God-man.
“For the reproduction of the God-man, the believers need to experience the two-step procedure of incarnation and death and resurrection. Believers have experienced the first step of the procedure—incarnation” (CWWL, 1955, vol. 2, p. 423). On the day that we were regenerated, the Spirit entered into us and was born in us.
The believers’ experience of the second step of the procedure—death and resurrection—is still going on and is not yet complete…Maturity in life means that our whole being has experienced death and resurrection and thus has fully entered into God. From the time of our salvation until we reach maturity in life, we will experience death and resurrection. God’s works of discipline, chastisement, and dealings and the discipline of the Holy Spirit are in the principle of death and resurrection in order to put us into death so that the life within us can be lived out. By experiencing death and resurrection, we can enter into God. (CWWL, 1955, vol. 2, pp. 423-424)
God desires that we would be not a good man (or, for that matter, an evil man) but a God-man.
A believer who walks by the spirit can express the things of God’s divine nature as a God-man who lives out God. Thus, if we live according to our soul, that is, according to our mind and the faculty of reason in our mind, the most we can be is a person who desires to do good. If we live according to our body, that is, according to our flesh and its lusts, we will be a person who does evil. But if we live according to our spirit, that is, according to the Holy Spirit and according to God, we will be a God-man who is full of life and who lives out the life of God…We can be a God-man, living according to the Spirit of life…in our spirit. (CWWL, 1932–1949, vol. 4, pp. 136-137)
In Christ, the first God-man, we see the mingling of two natures. “Although His two natures were mingled to produce a God-man, the individual characteristics of the two natures remained distinct; the two natures did not intermix to form a third nature” (CWWL, 1978, vol. 2, “Living, Growing, and Producing Christ as Branches in the Vine,” p. 526). Although God and man are mingled in Christ, He as the God-man is truly God and truly man, the complete God and a perfect man.
In 1979, while conducting his life-study of Exodus, Witness Lee recognized two Old Testament types of the God-man: the Ark and the tabernacle, both constructed of acacia wood (humanity) overlaid with gold (divinity); and the ephod, composed of golden and linen thread woven together, signifying a living of divinity (gold) mingled with humanity (linen) (pp. 1021, 1367).
This God-man is a corporate God-man, the new man, a God-man living in the reality of the Body of Christ. In the years following 1994 until the end of his life, Witness Lee emphasized even more the God-man living and the reality of the Body of Christ, as well as being conformed to Christ’s death by the power of His resurrection.
In our preaching the gospel, expounding the Bible, or visiting the brothers and sisters, we should check whether it is something lived out of a God-man living. Only that which is lived out of a God-man living is the Body of Christ…This God-man living is also a living of being conformed to the death of Christ through the cross. This conformation to the death of Christ is through the power of Christ’s resurrection (Phil. 3:10)…Only such a living is the God-man living, and only such a living can live out the reality of the Body of Christ. (CWWL, 1994–1997, vol. 1, “A General Outline of God’s Economy and the Proper Living of a God-man: A Fellowship with the Elders from Taiwan, Hong Kong, and Malaysia,” p. 514)
The goal of the God-man living is to bring man into God, to consummate the mingling of divinity with humanity. This is best seen in Romans 1:3 and 4. These verses show the God-man as one person with two natures through His incarnation and resurrection. Christ came out of the seed of David according to the flesh (referring to His humanity) and was designated the Son of God according to the Spirit of holiness (referring to His divinity) out of the resurrection of the dead (CWWL, 1994–1997, vol. 1, “Crystallization-study of the Epistle to the Romans”). His designation as the firstborn Son of God uplifted His humanity into divinity, and He became a prototype for the mass production of many God-men as the many sons of God and many brothers of Christ (Rom. 8:29). The goal of His process is to conform us to the image of the firstborn Son, to deify humanity.
Witness Lee used the term God-man, which had been used by numerous writers in the past centuries, to refer particularly to the life of the Lord Jesus on this earth. He described the life of Jesus on the earth as a God-man living, a life according to the highest standard of morality, in which the divine attributes are expressed in human virtues. He used the terms Triune God-man and God-man-Spirit to indicate the process the Triune God passed through to enable His believers to live the God-man living.
Witness Lee used the terms God-man and God-men to indicate the believers’ experience of the God-man living—a reproduction of the living of Jesus—by denying their human life to live by the divine life, thus being conformed to Christ’s death by the power of His resurrection so that they might grow and mature in life. Eventually, this God-man living is a corporate living, the living of the one new man, the living in the reality of the Body of Christ. The God-man living consummates in deified humanity, the consummation of God’s work in humanity.
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