The Essential Difference Between the Incarnate God and the People Used by God

The Essential Difference Between the Incarnate God and the People Used by God

  For so many years God’s Spirit has been ceaselessly searching as He goes working upon the earth. Throughout the ages God has used so many people to do His work. Yet God’s Spirit still has no suitable resting place. So God does His work, ceaselessly moving about in different people, and on the whole He uses people in order to do this.
That is, in all these many years, God’s work has never stopped, but keeps being carried forward in man, all the way down to this day. Although God has spoken so many words and done so much work, man still does not know God, all because God has never appeared to man and also because He has no tangible form. And so God must bring this work to completion—causing all men to know the practical significance of the practical God. To achieve this end, God must reveal His Spirit tangibly to humanity and do His work in their midst. That is, only when God’s Spirit assumes physical form, puts on flesh and bone, and visibly walks among people, accompanying them in their lives, sometimes showing and sometimes hiding Himself, only then are people able to arrive at a deeper understanding of Him. If God only remained in the flesh, He would not be able to fully complete His work. After working in the flesh for a period of time, fulfilling the ministry that needs to be done in the flesh, God will depart the flesh and work in the spiritual realm in the image of the flesh just as Jesus did so after He had worked for a period of time in normal humanity and completed all the work that He needed to complete. You may remember this passage from “The Path … (5)”: “I remember My Father saying to Me, ‘On earth, only carry out Your Father’s will and complete His commission. Nothing else concerns You.’” What do you see in this passage? When God comes to the earth, He does only His work within divinity. This is what the heavenly Spirit has entrusted to the incarnate God. When He comes, He goes only to speak everywhere, to give voice to His utterances in different methods and from different perspectives. He chiefly takes supplying man and teaching man as His goals and working principle, and does not concern Himself with such things as interpersonal relationships or the details of people’s lives. His main ministry is to speak for the Spirit. When God’s Spirit appears tangibly in the flesh, He only provides for man’s life and releases the truth. He does not get involved in man’s work, which is to say, He does not participate in the work of humanity. Humans cannot do divine work, and God does not participate in human work. In all the years since God came to this earth to do His work, He has always done it through people. But these people cannot be considered God incarnate, only people who are used by God. But the God of today can speak directly from the perspective of divinity, sending forth the Spirit’s voice and working on behalf of the Spirit. All those people whom God has used throughout the ages are likewise instances of God’s Spirit working within a fleshly body, so why can’t they be called God? But today’s God is also God’s Spirit working directly in the flesh, and Jesus too was God’s Spirit working in the flesh; both of these are called God. So what’s the difference? Throughout the ages, the people God has used are all capable of normal thought and reason. They all know the principles of human conduct. They hold normal human ideas, and they are equipped with all the things ordinary people should have. Most of them have exceptional talent and innate intelligence. In working upon these people, God’s Spirit harnesses their talents, which are their God-given gifts. God’s Spirit brings their talents into play, using their strengths in God’s service. However, God’s essence is free of ideas and free of thought, unadulterated with human intentions, and even lacks what normal humans are equipped with. That is to say, He is not even conversant with the principles of human conduct. This is how it is when today’s God comes to the earth. His work and His words are unadulterated with human intentions or human thought, but they are a direct manifestation of the intentions of the Spirit, and He works directly in God’s behalf. This means that the Spirit comes forth to work, without mixing in even one bit of man’s intentions. That is, the incarnate God embodies divinity directly, is without human thought or ideas, and has no understanding of the principles of human conduct. If only divinity were at work (meaning if only God Himself were at work), there would be no way for God’s work to be carried out on earth. So when God comes to earth, He has to have a small number of people He uses to work within humanity in conjunction with the work that God does in divinity. In other words, He uses human work to uphold His divine work. Otherwise, there would be no way for man to come into direct contact with the divine work. This is how it was with Jesus and His disciples. During His time in the world, Jesus abolished the old laws and established new commandments. He also spoke many words. All this work was done in divinity. The others, such as Peter, Paul, and John, all rested their subsequent work on the foundation of Jesus’ words. That is, God was launching His work in that age, ushering in the beginning of the Age of Grace; that is, He brought in a new era, abolishing the old, and also fulfilling the words “God is the Beginning and the End.” In other words, man must do human work on the foundation of divine work. After Jesus said all He needed to say and finished His work on earth, He departed man. After this, all people, in working, did so according to the principles expressed in His words, and practiced according to the truths of which He spoke. These were all people working for Jesus. If it had been Jesus alone doing the work, no matter how many words He spoke, people would still not have been able to come into contact with His words, because He was working in divinity and could only speak words of divinity, and He could not have explained things to the point where ordinary people could understand His words. And so He had to have the apostles and prophets who came after Him supplement His work. This is the principle of how God incarnate does His work—using the incarnate flesh to speak and to work so as to complete the work of divinity, and then using a few, or perhaps more, people after God’s own heart to supplement His work. That is, God uses people after His heart to do the work of shepherding and watering in humanity so that all people may attain the truth.

  If, in coming into the flesh, God only does the work of divinity without additionally having a few people after God’s heart working in concert with Him, then there would be no way for man to understand God’s will or to come in contact with God. God must use normal people after His heart to complete this work, to watch over and shepherd the churches, to arrive at the level that man’s cognitive processes, his brain, are capable of conjuring. In other words, God uses a small number of people after His heart to “translate” the work that He does within His divinity, so that it can be opened up, that is, to transform divine language into human language, making it so that people can all comprehend it, all understand it. If God did not do so, no one would understand God’s divine language, because the people after God’s heart are, after all, a small minority, and man’s ability to comprehend is weak. That is why God chooses this method only when working in the incarnate flesh. If there were only divine work, there would be no way for man to know or be in contact with God, because man does not understand God’s language. Man is able to understand this language only through the agency of the people after God’s heart who clarify His words. However, if there were only such people working within humanity, that could only maintain man’s normal life; it could not transform man’s disposition. God’s work could not then have a new starting point; there would only be the same old songs, the same old platitudes. Only through the agency of the incarnate God, who says all that needs to be said and does all that needs to be done during the period of His incarnation, after which people work and experience according to His words, only thus will their life disposition be able to change and will they be able to flow with the times. He who works within divinity represents God, while those who work within humanity are people used by God. That is to say, the incarnate God is substantively different from the people used by God. The incarnate God is able to do the work of divinity, whereas the people used by God are not. At the beginning of each age, God’s Spirit speaks personally to launch the new era and bring man into a new beginning. When He has finished speaking, this signifies that God’s work within His divinity is done. Thereafter, people all follow the lead of those used by God to enter into their life experience. By the same token, this is also the stage in which God brings man into the new age and gives everyone a new starting point. With this, God’s work in the flesh concludes.

  God comes to the earth not to perfect His normal humanity. He comes not to do the work of normal humanity, but only to do the work of divinity in normal humanity. What God speaks of normal humanity is not what man imagines it to be. Man defines “normal humanity” as having a wife, or a husband, and sons and daughters. These are proof that one is a normal person. But God does not see it this way. He sees normal humanity as having normal human thoughts, normal human lives, and being born of normal people. But His normalcy does not include having a wife, or a husband, and children in the way that man understands normalcy. That is, to man, the normal humanity that God speaks of is what man would consider the absence of humanity, almost lacking in emotion and seemingly devoid of fleshly needs, just like Jesus, who had only the exterior of a normal person and took on the appearance of a normal person, but in essence did not completely possess all that a normal person should possess. From this it can be seen that the incarnate God’s substance does not encompass the entirety of normal humanity, but only a portion of the things with which people should be equipped, in order to support the routines of normal human life and sustain normal human powers of reason. But these things have nothing to do with what man considers normal humanity. They are what God incarnate should possess. There are those who maintain, however, that God incarnate can be said to possess normal humanity only if He has a wife, sons and daughters, a family. Without these things, they say, He is not a normal person. I ask you then, “Does God have a wife? Is it possible for God to have a husband? Can God have children?” Are these not fallacies? However, the incarnate God cannot spring from a crack between rocks or fall down from the sky. He can only be born into a normal human family. That is why He has parents and sisters. These are the things that the normal humanity of the incarnate God should have. Such was the case with Jesus. Jesus had a father and mother, sisters and brothers. All this was normal. But if He had had a wife and sons and daughters, then His would not have been the normal humanity that God intended for the God incarnate to possess. If this were the case, He would not have been able to work on behalf of the divinity. It was precisely because He did not have a wife or children, and yet was born of normal people into a normal family, that He was able to do the work of divinity. To clarify this further, what God considers a normal person is a person born into a normal family. Only such a person is qualified to do divine work. If, on the other hand, the person had a wife, children, or a husband, that person would not be able to do divine work, because he would possess only the normal humanity that humans require but not the normal humanity that God requires. What God considers to be and what people understand are often hugely different, leagues apart. In this stage of God’s work there is much that runs counter to and vastly differs from people’s notions. One could say that this stage of God’s work consists entirely of divinity working hands-on, with humanity playing a supporting role. Because God comes to the earth to perform His work Himself rather than allowing man to put his hand to it, this is why He incarnates Himself in the flesh (in an incomplete, normal person) to do His work. He takes advantage of this incarnation to present mankind with a new age, to tell mankind of the next step in His work, and ask them to practice in accordance with the path described in His words. With this, God concludes His work in the flesh, and He is about to depart mankind, no longer residing in the flesh of normal humanity, but rather moving away from man to proceed upon another part of His work. Then, using men after His own heart, He continues His work on earth among this group of people, but in their humanity.

  The incarnate God cannot stay with man forever because God has a lot more other work to do. He cannot be bound to the flesh; He has to shed the flesh to do the work He needs to do, even though He does that work in the image of the flesh. When God comes to the earth, He does not wait until He has reached the form that a normal person ought to attain before dying and leaving mankind. No matter how old His flesh is, when His work is finished, He goes and leaves man. There is no such thing as age for Him, He does not count His days according to the human life span; instead, He ends His life in the flesh in accordance with the steps in His work. There may be those who feel that God, in coming into the flesh, must develop to a certain stage, become an adult, arrive at old age, and leave only when that body fails. This is man’s imagination; God does not work like that. He comes into the flesh only to do the work He is supposed to do, and not to live an ordinary man’s life of being born to parents, growing up, forming a family and starting a career, having children, or experiencing life’s ups and downs—all the activities of an ordinary man. When God comes to earth, this is God’s Spirit putting on the flesh, coming into the flesh, but God does not live the life of an ordinary man. He only comes to accomplish one part in His management plan. After that He will leave mankind. When He comes into the flesh, God’s Spirit does not perfect the normal humanity of the flesh. Rather, at a time that God has predetermined, the divinity goes to work directly. Then, after doing all that He needs to do and fully completing His ministry, the work of God’s Spirit in this stage is done, at which point the life of the incarnate God also ends, regardless of whether His fleshly body has lived out its span of longevity. That is to say, whatever stage of life the fleshly body reaches, however long it lives on earth, everything is decided by the work of the Spirit. It has nothing to do with what man considers to be normal humanity. Let’s take Jesus as an example. He lived in the flesh for thirty-three and a half years. In terms of the life span of a human body, He should not have died at that age, and He should not have left. But this was not of the least concern to God’s Spirit. His work being finished, at that point the body was taken away, disappearing along with the Spirit. This is the principle by which God works in the flesh. And so, strictly speaking, God incarnate is without normal humanity. To reiterate, He comes to the earth not to live the life of an ordinary human being. He does not first establish a normal human life and then begin working. Rather, as long as He is born into a normal human family, He is able to do divine work. He is free of a single jot of man’s intentions, He is not fleshly, and He certainly does not adopt the ways of society or get involved in man’s thoughts or ideas, much less connect with man’s life philosophies. This is the work that God incarnate intends to do, and it is also the practical significance of His incarnation. God comes into the flesh primarily to do a stage of the work that needs to be done in the flesh, without undergoing other trivial processes, and, as for the experiences of an ordinary man, He does not have them. The work that God’s incarnate flesh needs to do does not include normal human experiences. So God comes into the flesh for the sake of accomplishing the work He needs to accomplish in the flesh. The rest has nothing to do with Him. He does not go through that many trivial processes. Once His work is done, the significance of His incarnation also ends. Finishing this stage means the work that He needs to do in the flesh has concluded, and the ministry of His flesh is complete. But He cannot keep working in the flesh indefinitely. He has to move on to another place to work, a place outside of the flesh. Only in this way can His work become more fully complete, and better expanded. God works according to His original plan. What work He needs to do and what work He has concluded, He knows as clearly as the palm of His hand. God leads every individual to walk a path that He has already predetermined. No one can escape this. Only those who follow the guidance of God’s Spirit will be able to enter into rest. It may be that, in later work, it will not be God speaking in the flesh to guide man, but a Spirit with tangible form guiding man’s life. Only then will man be able concretely to touch God, look upon God, and more fully enter into the reality God requires, so as to become perfected by the practical God. This is the work that God intends to accomplish, what He has planned since long ago. From this, you should all see the path you should take!

from 

The Word Appears in the Flesh 

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