What is the incarnation? What is the difference between the incarnate Christ and the prophets and apostles used by God?
Question: It is clear that the second coming of the Lord in the last days is the incarnation here to do the work of judgment. But we don’t understand the truth of the incarnation and so are easily deceived by the rumors and falsities of the CCP government and the pastors and elders of the religious world. As a result, we will treat God incarnate as merely a man and even resist and blaspheme Him. Thus, I wish to ask you about the truth of the incarnation. What is the incarnation? What is the difference between the incarnate Christ and the prophets and apostles used by God?
Answer: It is a key issue. The reason why many are still unable to accept Almighty God’s work in the last days is that they get caught up on this point! If people don’t understand the truth of the incarnation, they may easily fall prey to the rumors and falsities of the CCP government and the pastors and elders of the religious world who would lead people to believe that Almighty God is just an ordinary person and fail to acknowledge that Almighty God is the incarnation of God. Since this is a very crucial issue, we ought to commune on this point. As for the question of what is the incarnation and what is Christ, you could say this is a mystery of the truth that no believers understand. Though believers for thousands of years have known that the Lord Jesus is the incarnate God, no one understands the incarnation and the actual substance of the incarnation. Only now that Almighty God of the last days has come, has this aspect of the mystery of the truth been revealed to man. Let’s see how Almighty God puts it. Almighty God says, “The meaning of incarnation is that God appears in the flesh, and He comes to work among man of His creation in the image of a flesh. So, for God to be incarnated, He must first be flesh, flesh with normal humanity; this, at the very least, must be true. In fact, the implication of God’s incarnation is that God lives and works in the flesh, God in His very essence becomes flesh, becomes a man.”
“The Christ with normal humanity is a flesh in which the Spirit is realized, possessing normal humanity, normal sense, and human thought. ‘Being realized’ means God becoming man, the Spirit becoming flesh; to put it plainly, it is when God Himself inhabits a flesh with normal humanity, and through it expresses His divine work — this is what it means to be realized, or incarnated.”
“The incarnate God is called Christ, and Christ is the flesh donned by the Spirit of God. This flesh is unlike any man that is of the flesh. This difference is because Christ is not of flesh and blood but is the incarnation of the Spirit. He has both a normal humanity and a complete divinity. His divinity is not possessed by any man. His normal humanity sustains all His normal activities in the flesh, while His divinity carries out the work of God Himself. Be it His humanity or divinity, both submit to the will of the heavenly Father. The substance of Christ is the Spirit, that is, the divinity. Therefore, His substance is that of God Himself; this substance will not interrupt His own work, and He could not possibly do anything that destroys His own work, nor would He ever utter any words that go against His own will.”
From Almighty God’s words, it is clear God’s incarnation refers to God’s Spirit being materialized in the flesh. God’s Spirit is clothed with a flesh and becomes an ordinary Son of man to bring His word and work on earth and appear to man. Which is to say that God in heaven has become man to speak, do His work, redeem, and save man within the human world. He has both normal humanity and complete divinity. From His appearance alone, God’s incarnation seems just like an ordinary and normal human being. He has the same rules of life and participates in the same activities as any other normal human. He is possessed of emotions just like any other normal human: He lives practically and realistically within the company of men. From His outward appearance, He doesn’t seem different than anyone else. But the true substance of the incarnate God is divinity. He can express God’s disposition, all that God is and has. According to man’s needs, He can express truth to supply life and save man at any time and place. He can do the work of God Himself, that which nothing else in all of creation is capable of. We all know that the Lord Jesus is the incarnation of God, is Christ. From His outward appearance, He seems just the same as us, just an ordinary and normal person. Yet, the Lord Jesus can express the truth and provide man with the way of repentance. He has the authority to pardon man of his sins and be crucified to complete the work of the redemption of mankind. No man is capable of this. The Lord Jesus can also perform signs and wonders. He can calm the winds and sea, feed five thousand men with just five loaves of bread and two fishes, and resurrect the dead, etc. The Lord Jesus performed many miracles and truly manifested many of God’s actions. He also went far and wide to preach. According to man’s real needs, He expressed the truth to supply life and shepherd man at any time and any place, allowing man to see how His words and work were those of the real and practical God. The Lord Jesus’ words and work are a manifestation of God’s life disposition and all that God has and is. No created humans are possessed with this or are capable of reaching such attainments. This is proof that the Lord Jesus is the incarnate God. Though He has normal humanity, His substance is divine. As such, He is capable of expressing the truth and God’s voice. He can work as God to do God’s work. So, if man were only to see Christ’s normal humanity, they would be apt to treat Him as an ordinary person; but if they were to realize that all that Christ says is the truth, that all He manifests is God’s disposition and all that God is and has and see the doings of God within the flesh, only by reaching this level would they come to know the divine substance of Christ.
It’s crucial to believers to know the divine substance of Christ! If we do not recognize the divine substance of Christ, we’ll just take Christ for a normal person and will even treat the prophets and apostles which God uses as God Himself. This is no small issue! So now let us commune on the difference between Christ and the apostles and prophets used by God. Everyone knows that in outward appearance, God’s incarnation has normal humanity and is an ordinary and normal person, but in actuality, He is God’s Spirit realized in the flesh, He is divine in substance. That is why He is able to do the work of God Himself, expressing the truth, God’s disposition, will, and demands of men at any time and any place. He can judge, expose, and even curse man, just as He can redeem, purify, and save man. The prophets and apostles are men whom God uses. They only possess normal humanity but lack God’s divine substance. As such, they are only capable of doing the work of man. In God’s management plan, they can do nothing more than fulfill human duties. None of them can express the truth, much less do the work of God Himself. Though their communions are endowed with the Holy Spirit’s enlightenment and illumination and are in keeping with the truth, they are not the truth itself, but just an expression of their understanding and experience of God’s word. If we consider the apostles of the Age of Grace, what they communed was mainly an expression of their understanding and experience of the Lord Jesus’ words and work. They represented a testimony of experiencing God’s work. When we look at the epistles of the apostles, we can see that they are clearly written by men, they are discourses on their experiences and testimony. Not a single word of these epistles contains the truth which God expresses. Not a single word of these epistles contains the authority and power of the Lord Jesus’ word. As we can see, the words of the apostles and those of the Lord Jesus are vastly different. We can not view them in the same light. Some ask, “But prophets like Isaiah and Daniel can speak God’s word. How do you explain that?” Actually, when the prophets express God’s word, they are only doing so because they have been ordered by God to convey His word. The prophets cannot express God’s word using God’s identity. They cannot speak in the first person. They also are unable to express the truth at will. This is because they are merely men whom God uses, they are not God themselves. They are just delivering God’s word, and that which they are able to deliver is very limited. So, when the prophets deliver God’s word, they state clearly that they are speaking the word of God, it is not their own word. Is this not the case? When the prophets conveyed God’s word, they always say, ‘thus said the LORD,’ ‘the Lord spoke unto me saying.’ All this proves that the prophets and the apostles are merely men whom God uses, they are not incarnations of God. God’s incarnation can be called God because He has divine substance. The prophets and apostles have only humanity. They lack divine substance and as such can only be considered human. This is the difference in substance between God’s incarnation and the prophets and apostles.
from the movie script of The Mystery of Godliness: The Sequel
Source from: Find the shepherd
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