The life that Jesus lived on earth was a normal life of the flesh. He lived in the normal humanity of His flesh. His authority—to do His work and speak His word, or to heal the sick and cast out demons, to do such extraordinary things—did not manifest itself, for the most part, until He began His ministry. His life before age twenty-nine, before He performed His ministry, was proof enough that He was just a normal fleshly body. Because of this, and because He had not yet begun to perform His ministry, people saw nothing divine in Him, saw nothing more than a normal human being, an ordinary man—just as at that time, some people believed Him to be Joseph’s son. People thought that He was the son of an ordinary man, they had no way of telling that He was God’s incarnate flesh; even when, in the course of performing His ministry, He performed many miracles, most people still said that He was Joseph’s son, for He was Christ with the outer shell of normal humanity. His normal humanity and His work both existed in order to fulfill the significance of the first incarnation, to prove that God had entirely come into the flesh, that He had become an utterly ordinary man. His normal humanity before He began His work was proof that He was an ordinary flesh; and that He worked afterward also proved that He was an ordinary flesh, for He performed signs and wonders, healed the sick and cast out demons in the flesh with normal humanity. The reason that He could work miracles was that His flesh bore the authority of God, was the flesh in which God’s Spirit was clothed. He possessed this authority because of the Spirit of God, and it did not mean that He was not a flesh. Healing the sick and casting out demons was the work that He needed to perform in His ministry, it was an expression of His divinity hidden in His humanity, and no matter what signs He showed or how He demonstrated His authority, He still lived in normal humanity and was still a normal flesh. Up to the point that He was resurrected after dying upon the cross, He dwelt within normal flesh. Bestowing grace, healing the sick, and casting out demons were all part of His ministry, they were all work He performed in His normal flesh. Before He went to the cross, He never departed from His normal human flesh, regardless of what He was doing. He was God Himself, doing God’s own work, yet because He was the incarnate flesh of God, He ate food and wore clothing, had normal human needs, had normal human reason, and a normal human mind. All of this was proof that He was a normal man, which proved that God’s incarnate flesh was a flesh with normal humanity, and not supernatural. His job was to complete the work of God’s first incarnation, to fulfill the ministry that the first incarnation ought to perform. The significance of incarnation is that an ordinary, normal man performs the work of God Himself; that is, that God performs His divine work in humanity and thereby vanquishes Satan. Incarnation means that God’s Spirit becomes a flesh, that is, God becomes flesh; the work that the flesh does is the work of the Spirit, which is realized in the flesh, expressed by the flesh. No one except God’s flesh can fulfill the ministry of the incarnate God; that is, only God’s incarnate flesh, this normal humanity—and no one else—can express the divine work. If, during His first coming, God had not possessed normal humanity before the age of twenty-nine—if as soon as He was born He could work miracles, if as soon as He learned to speak He could speak the language of heaven, if the moment He first set foot upon the earth He could apprehend all worldly matters, discern every person’s thoughts and intentions—such a person could not have been called a normal man, and such flesh could not have been called human flesh. If this were the case with Christ, then the meaning and the essence of God’s incarnation would be lost. That He possesses normal humanity proves that He is God incarnated in the flesh; the fact that He undergoes a normal human growth process further demonstrates that He is a normal flesh; moreover, His work is sufficient proof that He is God’s Word, God’s Spirit, become flesh. God becomes flesh because of the needs of His work; in other words, this stage of work must be done in the flesh, it must be performed in normal humanity. This is the prerequisite for “the Word become flesh,” for “the Word’s appearance in the flesh,” and it is the true story behind God’s two incarnations. People may believe that Jesus performed miracles throughout His life, that He showed no sign of humanity right up until His work on earth ended, that He did not have normal human needs or weaknesses or human emotions, did not require the basic necessities of life or entertain normal human thoughts. They imagine Him to only have a superhuman mind, a transcendent humanity. They believe that since He is God, He should not think and live as normal humans do, that only a normal person, a bona fide human being, can think normal human thoughts and live a normal human life. These are all human ideas and human notions, and these notions run counter to the original intentions of God’s work. Normal human thinking sustains normal human reason and normal humanity; normal humanity sustains the normal functions of the flesh; and the normal functions of the flesh enable the normal life of the flesh in its entirety. Only by working in such flesh can God fulfill the purpose of His incarnation. If the incarnate God possessed only an outer shell of the flesh, but did not think normal human thoughts, then this flesh would not possess human reason, much less bona fide humanity. How could a flesh like this, without humanity, fulfill the ministry that the incarnate God ought to perform? A normal mind sustains all aspects of human life; without a normal mind, one would not be human. In other words, a person who does not think normal thoughts is mentally ill, and a Christ who has no humanity but only divinity cannot be said to be God’s incarnate flesh. So, how could God’s incarnate flesh have no normal humanity? Is it not blasphemy to say that Christ has no humanity? All activities that normal humans engage in rely on the functioning of a normal human mind. Without it, humans would behave aberrantly; they would even be unable to tell the difference between black and white, good and evil; and they would have no human ethics and moral principles. Similarly, if the incarnate God did not think like a normal human, then He would not be a bona fide flesh, a normal flesh. Such non-thinking flesh would not be able to take on the divine work. He would not be able to normally engage in the activities of the normal flesh, much less live together with humans on earth. And so, the significance of God’s incarnation, the very essence of God’s coming into the flesh, would have been lost. The humanity of God incarnate exists to maintain the normal divine work in the flesh; His normal human thinking sustains His normal humanity and all His normal corporeal activities. One could say that His normal human thinking exists in order to sustain all the work of God in the flesh. If this flesh did not possess a normal human mind, then God could not work in the flesh, and what He needs to do in the flesh could never be accomplished. Though the incarnate God possesses a normal human mind, His work is not adulterated by human thought; He undertakes the work in the humanity with a normal mind, under the precondition of possessing the humanity with a mind, not by the exercise of normal human thought. No matter how lofty the thoughts of His flesh are, His work is not tainted by logic or thinking. In other words, His work is not conceived by the mind of His flesh, but is a direct expression of the divine work in His humanity. All of His work is the ministry He must fulfill, and none of it is conceived by His brain. For example, healing the sick, casting out demons, and the crucifixion were not products of His human mind, and could not have been achieved by any man with a human mind. Likewise, today’s work of conquest is a ministry that must be performed by the incarnate God, but it is not the work of a human will, it is the work His divinity should do, work of which no fleshly human is capable. So the incarnate God must possess a normal human mind, must possess normal humanity, because He must perform His work in the humanity with a normal mind. This is the essence of the work of the incarnate God, the very essence of the incarnate God.

—The Word, Vol. 1. The Appearance and Work of God. The Essence of the Flesh Inhabited by God