There it is: I have repeated what Athanasius said in the 4th century – “He was made man that we might be made God”. This is God’s desire and His intention – to make man the same as He is. God wants to be expressed in a collective way, through many human beings constituted as the universal Body of Christ. But God is so different & in many ways impossible to be reached/attained unto by the sinful / fallen human beings.
That’s why He entered into humanity – through His incarnation, God became a man. God brought divinity into humanity, mingling the two natures(without the third one being produced): divinity was expressed through humanity, and humanity flowed out & lived the divine life within (John 1:14). And the goal of His becoming man is so that He might make man God!
In His resurrection, Christ brought humanity into divinity, divinizing the human nature, bringing man into God. Through the process of incarnation, Christ brought God into man, and through the process of resurrection, He brought man into God. This is why He became a man: to make man God!
Now here we need to be careful: we the believers in Christ, the ones who receive Christ as our life, become children of God having His life and nature(John 1:12-13) BUT not His Godhead! If something is born of a cat, it is a cat – it has the life and the nature and the characteristics of a cat. If a man begets something, it must be a man.
In the same way, the Bible says that by believing into the Lord Jesus, we become children of God – born of God. What are we then? We are God-men! We are both God and man – God mingled with man, man having another life added to him(the divine life). But we are not God in the sense of being worshipped, adored, omni-present, omni-potent, or omni-scient.
A father begets a child, and the child has the same likeness, life, nature, expression, but does not have the fatherhood – the child is not and will never be the father! We will never be God in His un-communicable attributes, but in life and nature, expression and function, we are just like Him!
And as we grow in life by enjoying Christ, we receive more of the divine element into our being – the divine life in us grows, spreads into every part of our being. We are daily being constituted with the divine life, and more and more live by the divine nature in us. Eventually, we are being made God in life, nature, expression, and function – but not in the Godhead.
What a destiny – that man may be made God! God Himself became a man, so that man may be made God in life and nature but not in the Godhead! There is so much to this, the Bible speaks so much about this – but here I just wanted to share a little of my appreciation of this fact of our Christian life.
