“The people who drafted the Athanasian Creed had a distant glimpse
of this. Even after splitting God into three persons they wrote that in
Christ, God and a human being, that is, the divine nature and the
human nature, are not two; they are one like the soul and the body in
one human being.
[ 4 ] “The Lord’s praying to the Father while in the world as if the
Father were someone else and humbling himself before the Father as if
the Father were someone else followed the unchangeable divine design
established from the time of creation, which everyone has to follow in
order to form a partnership with God. That design is that as we forge our
connection with God by living according to the laws of the divine
design, which are God’s commandments, God forges his connection
with us and turns us from earthly people into spiritual people.
“The Lord united himself to his Father and God the Father united
himself to the Lord in the same way. When the Lord was an infant, he
was like an infant. When he was a child, he was like a child. We read that
he advanced in wisdom and grace, and later on asked the Father to glo-
rify his name, meaning his human nature. (To glorify is to make divine
through union with God himself.) When the Lord prayed to the Father,
then, he was clearly in a state of being emptied out, which was his state
of progress toward union.
[ 5 ] “That same design has been built into every one of us from cre-
ation. Of course, it all depends on how we prepare our intellect with
truths from the Word and adapt it to receive faith from God, and how we
prepare our will with acts of goodwill and adjust it to receive love from
God. In a similar way, depending on how jewelers cut a diamond they
can adapt it to receive and transmit the brilliance of the light, and so on.
“We prepare ourselves to receive God and to forge a partnership with
him by following the divine design in our lives. The laws of that design
are all God’s commandments. In the case of the Lord, he fulfilled all
these laws down to the finest details. By so doing he made himself a ves-
sel for divinity in all its fullness. This is why Paul says that all the fullness
of divinity dwells physically in Jesus Christ, and why the Lord himself
says that all things belonging to the Father are his.
[ 6 ] “Furthermore, we must keep in mind that only the Lord is actu-
ally active in us. On our own we are completely passive. Thanks to life
inflowing from the Lord we too can be active. Because of the constant
inflow from the Lord it seems to us as though we are active on our own.
§110 the lord the redeemer & redemption 149