I.　Man is a vessel created in the image of God to receive God and to contain God for the reproduction of God—Gen. 1:26-27; 2:7, 9:

A.　The basic teaching of the Scriptures is that we are vessels to receive and contain God as the unique content—Gen. 2:7; 2 Cor. 4:7; Rom. 9:21, 23.

B.　We need to love the Lord and keep ourselves open to Him, giving Him every opportunity to do everything He wants to do in us and through us—Mark 12:30; 1 Cor. 2:9; Eph. 3:16-17a.

C.　God's purpose in the creation of man in His image and after His likeness was that man would receive Him as life and express Him in all His attributes—Gen. 1:26-27; 2:9:

1.　God created man in His image and after His likeness because His intention is to come into man and to be one with man—Eph. 3:17a.

2.　God created man in His own image in such a way that man has the capacity to contain God's love, light, righteousness, and holiness—1 John 1:5; 4:8; Eph. 4:24; 5:2, 8-9.

3.　Because we were created according to God's kind, our human virtues have the capacity to contain the divine attributes—2 Cor. 10:1; 11:10.

D.　For God to create man in His image means that God created man with the intention that man would become a duplicate of God, the reproduction of God for His corporate expression—John 12:24:

1.　The first grain—the first God-man—was a prototype, and the many grains—the many God-men—produced by this one grain are the mass reproduction; this is the reproduction of God—Rom. 8:29.

2.　God's "hobby" is to have His reproduction throughout the earth; this reproduction makes God happy because it looks like Him, speaks like Him, and lives like Him—Rom. 8:29; Heb. 2:10; 1 John 3:1.

E.　If man had eaten of the tree of life and thereby had taken God into him as life, he would have become a God-man, a man filled with God as his life and with the divine attributes filling his human virtues.

II.　God's intention in dealing with Job was to turn him from the way of good and evil to the way of life that he might gain God to the fullest extent and become a man of God, a God-man, filled with Christ, the embodiment of God, for the expression of God in Christ—Job 1:1; 42:1-6; 1 Tim.6:11; 2 Tim. 3:17:

A.　Job had the highest attainment in building up himself in integrity, righteousness, and perfection—Job 2:3, 9a.

B.　Because Job's pursuit was in the realm of ethics, not in the realm of God, God stripped Job of all his attainments in order to show him that his only need was God Himself:

1.　God's stripping and consuming were exercised over Job to tear Job down that God might have a base and a way to rebuild him with God Himself and make him a God-man.

2.　God's intention is to tear us down and rebuild us with Himself as our life and our nature that we may be absolutely one with Him—2 Cor. 4:16.

3.　The desire of God's heart is that we would gain Him in full as life, as the life supply, and as everything to our being—Eph. 3:16-19.

C.　God's intention in His appearing to Job was to show him that he was in the wrong realm and to attract Job to receive Him with His life, nature, element, essence, and being—Job 42:5-6.

III.　Christ's incarnation and God-man living fulfilled God's intention in His creation of man—Gen. 1:26-27; John 1:1, 14; Luke 1:31-32, 35; 2:40, 52:

A.　The hidden mystery is that God in His Divine Trinity desires to dispense Himself into man and to work Himself into man to make man His duplication for His expression—Rom. 16:25; Eph. 1:9; 3:9; Col. 1:27.

B.　The incarnation of Christ is closely related to God's purpose in the creation of man in His image and after His likeness—that man would receive Him as life and express Him in His divine attributes—Gen. 1:26; 2:9; Acts 3:14; Eph. 4:24.

C.　The Man-Savior was born of the human essence with the human virtues in order to uplift these virtues to such a standard that they can match God's attributes for His expression—Luke 1:35:

1.　As the One who was conceived of the divine essence with the divine attributes to be the content and reality of His human virtues, Christ fills the empty human virtues—Matt. 1:18, 20.

2.　The divine attributes fill, strengthen, enrich, and sanctify the human virtues for the purpose of expressing God in the human virtues.

D.　When the Lord Jesus saves us, He comes into us as the One with the human virtues filled with the divine attributes—Luke 2:10-11, 25-32; 19:9-10:

1.　As the life-giving Spirit He enters into us to bring God into our being and to fill our virtues with God's attributes—1 Cor. 15:45b; 6:17.

2.　Such a life saves us from within and uplifts our human virtues, sanctifying and transforming us—Rom. 5:10; 12:2.

IV.　God's intention in His New Testament economy is that all the believers would become a reproduction of Christ, the God-man, who lived a life in which the attributes of God were expressed in the virtues of man—Phil. 1:19-21; 3:9-10:

A.　In order to become a reproduction of Christ, we need to be reborn of the pneumatic Christ in our spirit and transformed by the pneumatic Christ in our soul—John 3:6; 2 Cor. 3:18.

B.　The more we are transformed, the more we will live Christ, the God-man, by the bountiful supply of His Spirit—Phil. 1:19-21:

1.　We will be found in Christ as our surpassing righteousness in the power of His resurrection—3:9-10.

2.　We will express Him with the divine attributes of the God-man strengthening, enriching, and uplifting our human virtues—1:20.