40. THE RECOVERY IS HERETICAL (1)
It goes beyond the Bible, teaching that Christians are becoming God in life and nature but not in the godhead, even though none of Jesus’ own disciples even came to that conclusion.
Published 02/04/2021, Written by Jacob Howard
The Lord’s Recovery teaches that Christians are becoming God Himself and even are God Himself:
I especially point out that man becomes God without sharing the Godhead but having only God’s life and nature.
WITNESS LEE, THE HIGH PEAK OF THE VISION AND THE REALITY OF THE BODY OF CHRIST, CHAPTER 3, SECTION 4 (EMBOLDENED EMPHASIS MY OWN)
In a sense, we have become Him in life and in nature but not in the Godhead.
WITNESS LEE, ONE BODY, ONE SPIRIT, AND ONE NEW MAN, CHAPTER 4, SECTION 5 (EMBOLDENED EMPHASIS MY OWN)
As shown in these two quotes, Witness Lee, the lead teacher of the Lord’s Recovery, clearly taught that Christians are becoming God and even have become Him. But his teaching denotes two specific qualifiers:
- Christians are becoming God in life and in nature.
- Christians are becoming God but not in the Godhead.
No matter which way the teaching is spun, Witness Lee taught that Christians are becoming God and even are God. But according to the Bible, Christians cannot be God. According to the Bible, Witness Lee’s teaching of man being God is heresy.
Addressing the Qualifiers: Not in the Godhead
The term “Godhead” occurs only one time in the Recovery Version Bible, in Colossians 2:9. Multiple English translations of the Bible use the term “Godhead” in Colossians 2:9, including ASV, NKJV, and KJV. In the ESV (the main translation this website uses) and NASB Bibles, the term is rendered deity, yet it refers to the same word — Godhead:
9 For in him the whole fullness of deity [or Godhead] dwells bodily
Colossians 2:9 (ESV) (Emboldened Emphasis and Brackets My Own)
According to Thayer’s Greek Lexicon, the specific Greek word for Godhead in Colossians 2:9 is used only once in the Bible and has the following definition:
…deity i. e. the state of being God, Godhead
STRONG’S G2320 – theótēs, THAYER’S GREEK LEXICON
Based on this definition, the word for Godhead in the Bible means in its essence “the state of being God.” Yet according to Witness Lee’s teaching of being God, we can be Him…just not in the Godhead; Witness Lee is asserting we can be Him, but at the same time, we can’t be Him. It’s clearly a self-contradicting statement.
The term Godhead/deity in Colossians 2:9 directly denotes the state of being God Himself. Who can be Him but not be Him? Who can be God other than God Himself? Who can be God apart from God?
Simply put, a person not in the Godhead is not God. Only the Godhead is God, and only God is the Godhead. He is the I Am, not anyone else.
Addressing the Qualifiers: In Life and Nature
I especially point out that man becomes God without sharing the Godhead but having only God’s life and nature. Not one teacher in Christianity can oppose this. Once we believe in the Lord, we receive God’s life, and 2 Peter 1:4 says clearly that we can “become partakers of the divine nature.” No one can refute this.
Witness Lee, The High Peak of the Vision and the Reality of the Body of Christ, Chapter 3, Section 4 (EMBOLDENED EMPHASIS MY OWN)
Witness Lee’s defense for Christians being God, specifically in His nature, is from 2 Peter 1:4, which says that Christians are partakers of His nature. According to Thayer’s Greek Lexicon, the word for “partaker” in 2 Peter 1:4 is to be a partaker or sharer in any specific thing. So Christians share in, or are partakers of, the divine nature of God.
Why does Witness Lee bring up 2 Peter 1:4? Is it to make a case for Christians being partakers of the divine nature? No. The verse is used as evidence to make the case that Christians are God.
It’s the Bible that asserts and concludes that Christians are partakers of God’s divine nature. It’s the Bible that cannot be opposed. It’s Witness Lee’s extra-biblical conclusion based on this verse that should be held in contention.
This is not a mere mincing of words. Man becoming God and man having God’s divine nature are not the same thing.
Does 2 Peter 1:4 mean Christians are God or are becoming God? No. It means what it says. It means Christians are partakers (or sharers) of God’s divine nature. That’s it. If 2 Peter 1:4 actually said, “you may become partakers of the divine nature, becoming God,” that would be different. But it doesn’t say that. And it never will.
Does the Bible Say We Are Becoming God?
Neither does the Bible say Christians are becoming God, nor does it say Christians are God. It’s not there.
The only way Christians can possibly conclude they are God is if they make that conclusion apart from the origination of Scripture.
The Bible Tells Us What We Are
1. Peter, a Man
25 When Peter entered, Cornelius met him and fell down at his feet and worshiped him.
26 But Peter lifted him up, saying, “Stand up; I too am a man.”
Acts 10:25 – 26 (ESV)
Peter (the same Peter who, being divinely inspired by the Spirit to write the Words of God, wrote that Christians are partakers of God’s divine nature) had every opportunity in Acts 10:26 to say, “Stand up; I’m God, but only in life and nature, not in the Godhead; therefore, you shouldn’t worship me.” Instead, Peter declared that he was a man, just like Cornelius.
Peter never concluded he was God, but he definitively concluded that he was a man.
2. Sons of God
26 For in Christ Jesus you are all sons of God, through faith.
Galatians 3:26 (ESV)
Christians are sons of God. Being a son of someone and being someone are not the same thing. It is incorrect to conflate sonship of God with being God Himself.
One of Witness Lee’s arguments for Christians being God is actually based on this erroneous conflation:
In this way He began to make us God; that is, He begot us as children of God. Since we were born of God the Father in Christ, and since our Father God is God, how can we, the children begotten of Him, not be God? Since our Father is God, we who are born of Him surely also are God.
Witness Lee, The High Peak of the Vision and the Reality of the Body of Christ, Chapter 4, Section 2 (Emboldened Emphasis My Own)
The conclusion that Witness Lee came to in the above quote lacks 1) origin in Scripture and 2) origin in self-evident experience.
Concerning origin in Scripture, the Bible does not conflate sonship of God with sameness of God, so neither should Christians.
Concerning self-evident reality, consider the following fairly self-evident example: let’s take a child, a boy. Obviously, that boy would be the son of his mother. However, that boy is not his mother. This should be self-evident, meaning proving it is a waste of time because the evidence speaks for itself; the reality that the boy is not his mother is plain and deserves no elaboration. Obviously his mother birthed him and is his family member, his parent, but if the boy claimed to be his mother and tried to make a case for it, he’d be incorrect. In this example, no matter which way someone tries to phrase it, the boy is not his mother. He is her son.
Witness Lee said, “Since our Father is God, we who are born of Him surely also are God” in 1994 in The High Peak of the Vision and the Reality of the Body of Christ. But in 1977, he argued the opposite:
Every child has the life and the nature of his father, but this does not mean that the child eventually will become his father.
Witness Lee; One Body, One Spirit, and One New Man; Chapter 4; Section 5)
1977’s Witness Lee argued that children cannot become their father. Yet 1994’s Witness Lee argued that since Christians’ Father is God, Christians are therefore God (but not the Father, per 1977?). This is the tangled web of contradictions and confusing esoteric insights that Witness Lee provides, all so he could defend his teaching of Christians being God.
3. Unknown, Yet Like Him
2 Beloved, we are God’s children now, and what we will be has not yet appeared; but we know that when he appears we shall be like him, because we shall see him as he is.
1 John 3:2 (ESV) (Emboldened Emphasis My Own)
What will Christians be? According to 1 John 3:2 (ESV), it hasn’t appeared. But there is some window of understanding, thanks to the Bible. Christians will be like Him!
Christians are not Him now. Nor will they be Him later. But God’s very Speaking reveals that Christians will be LIKE Him. It is incorrect to conflate likeness with sameness. And once again, because the Bible never says that mankind is or is becoming God, Witness Lee makes an assertion based on this erroneous conflation:
Therefore, it is through regeneration, sanctification, renewing, transformation, conformation, and glorification that we may become God. When we reach this point, 1 John 3:2 says that when “He is manifested, we will be like Him because we will see Him even as He is.”
The High Peak of the Vision and the Reality of the Body of Christ, Chapter 2, Section 5
Being like God and being God Himself are not even remotely the same. Once again, the conclusion that Witness Lee came to in this quote lacks 1) origin in Scripture and 2) origin in self-evident experience.
Concerning origin in Scripture, the Bible does not conflate likeness of God with sameness of God (or being God), so neither should Christians.
Concerning self-evident experience, the example is straightforward: if a man is like his best friend, he is not his best friend; he is only like him.
Conclusion: “Being God” is Heresy
The Bible is not covert on what Christians are. Christians are children of God, humans, a saved people that will one day be like God. Witness Lee’s “being God” teaching is propped up by fairly overt Bible verses, which are obviously inherently biblical; however, Lee ignores the conclusions of these Bible verses in his own conclusions, making assertions that extend and reinterpret the Bible beyond their meaning.
As a slight extension of your argument, we are made in ‘God’s image and likeness’ according to Genesis in chapters 1 and 2. So He made us to reflect Him in appearance, and in substance. To become more ‘like’ our origional created template is to become more ‘like’ Him, that is clear in Genesis. But again, as His child and created being, not being absorbed into Him, but as one who can relate to and fellowship with Him as Adam and Eve in the garden. He wants relationship with us, not enlargement of Himself through us.
So my comment above is to say that, further to the error of believing we become God in ‘life and nature but not in the godhead’ as our present or future destiny, it was also not in our past before we ‘fell’ from our origional state of perfection in the beginning. Yet we were ‘like’ Him (made in His likeness…) which affirms the Scripture that it is Gods wish we be restored to fully reflecting His image and likeness. Adam and Eve were made perfect but were not gods then as we are not becoming gods now.
Very good arguments here Jacob. I was thinking while reading this article and considering the fact that satan’s desire to be God is what caused him to be cast out of the presence of God. Original sin is pride and it manifests itself in wanting to be God.
I enjoyed meeting with Christians of local churches. I love being a child of God, a son of God, who is being renewed and transformed daily to experience being part of the “new man.” What a blessing!
My human spirit was regenerated in 1979 during a gospel meeting, and I became a re-born believer since then. The Holy Spirit has been blessing me with His revelation of the Lord Jesus Christ to me, and the very thing I need to grow in Christ – disciplines from Him. I understand that this is a designated divine process by the Holy Spirit to have the image of the Son of God to be conformed in me as part of my Christian maturity, like-Christ, inwardly, before God. This is a process of my soul salvation – living a sin-free Christian life, denying my soul-life, bearing my cross daily to follow the indwelling Christ, forsaking the world ruled by Satan and the evil authorities in the air, and awaiting the coming of the Lord as He promised, being eager to have my humiliated and perishing physical body to be transfigured and raptured – a redemption of my body, a full materialization of the divine sonship. Only at this moment, my entire being would be just like that of the resurrected Christ, becoming a part of His eternal counterpart, His bride! This is the purpose of my Christian life, as Christ is the hope of my glory. This is what Witness Lee and his ministry had been teaching me for all these years.
A believer will never become God like Jehovah God (Yahweh Elohim), an Almighty creator of the entire universe and all the angelic beings. Only the I AM WHO I AM (EHYEH WHO EHYEH) is the very object of worship from all creatures. Only Jehovah God is able to create heavens and earth out of nothing. Only Jehovah God can say, Let there be light; so there is light. Only the Triune God – God the Father, God the Son, and God the Holy Spirit – is omnipotent, omniscient, and omnipresent from eternity to eternity, Yet the fact that our Lord Jesus Christ went through His death and resurrection to become a life-giving Spirit is to impart His divine yet human life in all the believers, making them all just like the God-man Jesus, possessing the same divine and transformed human life as many grains, as many sons of God, as many God-men (divine humans.) In eternity, all believers are still humans, but a different kind of humans; humans with their tripartite beings fully redeemed, transformed, and glorified by the Holy Spirit, having the same divine humanity, the same spiritual and human body of the resurrected Christ, the unique God-man’s, possessing the same divine and human life and nature in resurrection, having the same manifestation and appearance like the jasper wall of the holy city, New Jerusalem (a consummated and matured Body of Christ as the Bridegroom’s bride) with the Holy One sitting on the throne like a Jasper. How glorious! This is what Witness Lee and his ministry had been teaching me for all these years.
Brother Jacob, if you are a truly regenerated believer, you and I , along with Witness Lee, and all the believers meeting in all the local churches, will end up the same – being God-men like Christ, possessing the same divine and human life and nature of the resurrected Christ, as the sons of God in eternity, but without the Godhead.
I am truly enjoying being a son of God, a divine-human God-man, like the resurrected Christ but without a Godhead. Are you?
PS. I am so sorry to see that so many well-versed believers are confused by Witness Lee’s God-man teaching, which is essentially based on the proper interpretation of the Holy Scriptures.
“For to me to live is Christ, and to die is gain.” (Phil. 1:21) The apostle Paul declares that he is Christ in this verse. But we would not interpret his saying as if he is God, or he becomes God, and accuse him preaching heresy. See that he also says that he could die (as a human) in the same verse. Witness Lee died in 1979, and surely he is not a god like Jehovah Elohim as he was said by so many people like you, Jacob.
In Christ,
Stanley