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Scripture Reading: Eph. 1:7, 10-11, 13-14; 4:30
III. In redemption — Eph. 1:7:
А. God the Son dispenses His rich life element into the believers’ inward parts.
B. Continuing God the Father’s dispensing in regeneration and going along with God the Spirit’s renewing, which follows God the Father’s regeneration.
C. To constitute the believers as God’s precious inheritance — v. 11.
D. That the believers may take the lead among all things to be headed up in Christ to restore the proper order in God’s creation — v. 10.
IV. Through sealing — vv. 13-14:
А. Through sealing, God the Spirit strengthens the dispensing of God the Father and God the Son.
B. Sealing the believers with the essence of the Triune God in a gentle and fine way to saturate them until their body is redeemed — 4:30.
C. That the believers may bear the image of God as their divine seal.
D. The divine essence with which the believers are sealed becoming the pledge, guarantee, and foretaste of God as the believers’ inheritance.
In the preceding chapter we saw that God’s highest purpose concerning man is His desire to build Himself into man; that is, He desires to have His divine element wrought into the created man that He and man may have an organic mingling. In this mingling God’s element increases more and more in man. When God’s element increases in man, man in the condition of the old creation will be gradually renewed and transformed until he becomes completely the new creation. What is the new creation? The new creation is just God Himself. In this universe, only God is “new,” and everything else is “old.” Every person, thing, and matter in the universe is old and is becoming old every day. Only our God is “new”; He is ever new and never becomes old. Therefore, when we have this God, we become the new creation. God does not want us to change ourselves, to make ourselves new. God wants us to receive Him, be filled and saturated with Him, and be permeated by Him, that we may have a metabolic change.
Christians know and accept the matter of God becoming a man. However, concerning man becoming God, they consider this as something incredible. Some brothers and sisters might have heard and declared this, but within them they may have a question mark concerning it. What! Man becoming God? It seems that this is heresy. The revelation concerning man becoming God is unacceptable to many Christians. However, in church history, during the time of the church fathers, the truth concerning God becoming man so that man may become God was generally accepted by the saints. But not long afterward, the church was distracted from the vision concerning this truth and the economy of God and became more and more degraded. Hence, today when we speak about man becoming God, people generally feel uncomfortable with it and find it difficult to accept. Today our mind needs to be transformed by being renewed so that we may see this truth revealed in the Bible. God became man so that man may become God. What a miracle this is! What a mystery this is! Although our mind cannot comprehend it, we need to simply receive it, and then we will be able to enjoy and experience this fact as our reality.
God’s highest purpose is attained through the unlimited dispensing of the processed and consummated Triune God. He is the Triune God — the Father, the Son, and the Spirit (Matt. 28:19). In His dispensing, as the Father, He regenerates us by dispensing His divine life and holy nature into us. After the dispensing through regeneration, He renews us through the Holy Spirit. Regeneration is the first step of dispensing. Originally, we were people without God’s life, but one day we heard the gospel and received the Lord Jesus into us by repenting and confessing our sins and calling on the name of the Lord. At the same time, the life of God the Father and His life element came into us through His dispensing. Christians like John 3:16. They pay much attention to phrases such as God so loved the world, His only begotten Son, everyone who believes into Him, not perish, and have eternal life. Yet, they neglect the key word gave. The most mysterious, excellent, and marvelous thing about this verse is in the word gave. This giving is the dispensing of God the Father. When God the Father gives us the Son, He gives us, He dispenses into us, His divine life so that we may be regenerated and become children of God.
Regeneration, as the initiation of the divine dispensing, has three issues. First, it causes the fallen old creation in Adam to become the new creation in Christ (2 Cor. 5:17). Second, it causes sinners as God’s enemies to become children of God (Rom. 5:10; John 1:12-13). Third, it causes the dead in Adam to become the organic Body of Christ (1 Cor. 15:22; Rom. 12:5). Hallelujah! The old creation becomes the new creation, sinners who were enemies become children of God, and the dead become the organic Body of Christ. How wonderful this is! Before we were saved, we were apparently alive, but we were actually dead. Outwardly, we seemed to be active, but inwardly we were full of death. However, once we are saved, we are no longer dead, nor are we individual living ones. Rather, we are the organic Body of Christ. This is the result brought in through regeneration.
When the divine life enters into us, it not only regenerates us but also begins to renew us. Since God is “new,” renewing is the continuous adding of God Himself into us. This is the second step of the dispensing of God. At our regeneration God enters into our spirit, so our spirit has the divine life. But we still have many troublesome things in us. First, our mind, emotion, and will are still in the old creation. Many of you came from faraway places to attend this conference, but when you go to see the Grand Canyon, you forget everything. Sometimes when we are busy on our jobs, dispensing, regeneration, and renewing seem to become unreal. Instead, the affairs of our daily life and our loans become very real. This is because our soul remains in the old creation.
After the dispensing in regeneration, we first need God to dispense His life element continuously into our spirit by the Holy Spirit (Titus 3:5b; 2 Cor. 4:16b). Then, we need to be metabolically renewed in our inward parts, beginning from our mind (Rom. 12:2a). This is not an outward correction or change; it is a change in the inner essence, a metabolic, organic change. This renewing begins in our mind. Our thinking, our concepts, our logic, and our habits need to be renewed. The genuine Christians need to be renewed continuously. It is not a matter of how much you have been renewed but of whether you are constantly being renewed. In the beginning you may feel that every day you are about the same. But after a period of time, by the change in your mind, people can detect that you are being renewed. If you have been renewed, people can sense that you have the “flavor” of God and that you also have the spiritual understanding.
For the believers to be renewed, they need to have their inward parts joined to the Spirit in order to absorb the divine element distributed by the Spirit (8:5-6). By ourselves we can never be renewed; we can be renewed only by being joined to the Spirit. The secret of being joined to the Spirit is first to pray unceasingly (1 Thes. 5:17). If all day long we do not pray, it will be very difficult to be joined to the Spirit. But if we pray unceasingly, we are joined to the Spirit even if we pray wrongly. Once they are saved, Christians immediately have the authority and the faculty to pray. But unfortunately, because of the work of the enemy, today’s Christianity has nearly annulled the prayer faculty of the believers. I hope that we all are people who pray unceasingly. Even at the last breath of our human life we would still pray. Thus, when our breathing stops, our spirit is still joined to the Lord. How good this is! Prayer enables us to be joined to the Spirit and to absorb the Spirit so that the divine element may spread within us.
In order to be renewed, the believers also need to walk according to the spirit in all things so that their inward parts may be renewed by being saturated with the Spirit until their entire being becomes a new creation that is fully organic (Rom. 8:4). To walk according to the spirit in all things requires us to pray unceasingly and to call on the name of the Lord constantly and in every place (1 Cor. 1:2). When you call, “O Lord Jesus!” the Lord will lead you in your daily walk and render great help to your family life and married life.
Therefore, the issue of being renewed is that the entire being of the believers is filled and saturated with the Spirit of life to be God’s spiritual new creation (Rom. 8:2). It is at this time that man is made God.
Following God the Father’s dispensing, there are Christ’s dispensing and the Spirit’s dispensing. Christ’s dispensing is in His redemption. Ephesians 1:7 says that in Christ we have redemption through His blood. Through His redemption Christ saves us into Himself so that in Him we may experience His dispensing. Let us use a pearl as an illustration. When an oyster is wounded by a grain of sand, it secretes its life-juice around the grain of sand and makes it into a pearl. Wounded by us in His death, Christ saves us into Himself so that by receiving the secretion of His life-juice we are made into precious pearls to constitute God’s precious inheritance (v. 11).
On one hand, God already loved us in eternity (v. 4), but on the other hand, we who were dead in our offenses and sins (2:1) were not worthy to be loved. A grain of sand is not worthy of love, but a treasure is worthy. We were unworthy to be loved, but by entering into Christ to receive His dispensing in redemption, we have become treasures worthy of God’s love and can be constituted as God’s precious inheritance. Hallelujah! This inheritance is a new man, a new creation.
Once we have become God’s precious inheritance, we take the lead in the whole universe to be headed up in Christ to restore the proper order in God’s creation (1:10). Because of man’s fall, the entire universe has become a heap of collapse, with all things in disarray. Furthermore, in the universe the authority of God is being opposed and rebelled against. However, we believers have been redeemed to be God’s inheritance through Christ’s dispensing and are taking the lead to be headed up in Christ. This will restore the order in the entire universe. Today rebellion is seen everywhere. Even a little mosquito is rebellious. Your dog often disobeys you, and your children even more. The grass does not listen to you but grows everywhere and has to be cut. In the schools, the students do not listen to the teachers. And even in the church, we often do not submit to the leadership of the elders. This is all due to a shortage of dispensing. The more we receive the dispensing, the more we can submit. As a result, the whole universe is gradually headed up. This is the goal of God’s economy.
After the dispensing of Christ the Son, there is the dispensing of the Spirit. The action and work of the Spirit’s dispensing in us is carried out through the Spirit’s sealing (v. 13) to strengthen the dispensing of God the Father and of Christ the Son. Sealing is a gentle and fine work of the Spirit. In the New Testament the Holy Spirit is likened to a gentle dove (Matt. 3:16). If you move a little, a dove will fly away. This indicates that the Holy Spirit is very gentle. In Luke 15 the Lord Jesus used the parable of a woman who sweeps the house and seeks carefully for a lost silver coin, to illustrate the Holy Spirit’s gentle and fine work in us. What the Holy Spirit does is to seal the believers in a gentle and fine way with the essence of the Triune God to saturate them until their body is redeemed (Eph. 4:30).
On one hand, the Holy Spirit is a seal in us to mark us out, and on the other hand, He is in us doing the work of anointing. The Spirit not only seals us but also anoints us. On one hand, the Spirit’s sealing with His anointing impresses the image of the Triune God upon us, and on the other hand, it soaks us and anoints all our inward parts with the essence of the Triune God as the ink. Hence, here we have the dispensing of the essence and the expression of the image. It is in this way that we experience the gentle and fine dispensing so that the essence of the Triune God, His attributes and virtues, His love, His light, His holiness, and His righteousness increase in us day by day. As a result, an image will be formed in us so that we may be the expression of God. This is what the new hymn says: “His attributes my virtues are; / His glorious image shines through me.” This sealing results in our being filled and saturated with the Spirit.
Not only so, the divine essence with which the believers are sealed becomes the pledge, the guarantee, and the foretaste of God as the believers’ inheritance (1:14). In the dispensing of Christ we become God’s inheritance, but in the Spirit’s sealing, God becomes our inheritance. We become God’s inheritance, and God becomes our inheritance. This is God becoming man and man becoming God. God becomes our inheritance through the Spirit as the pledge, the guarantee, and the foretaste in us. One day, at the completion of the sealing, our body will be redeemed. At that time our body will be exactly like God’s and will be completely filled with the divine essence. Today we are still in the process of being redeemed. Therefore, there is the need of a guarantee. This guarantee is the Spirit given to us by God. This Spirit is the guarantee and the foretaste. On that day we will have the full taste. Today we can have a foretaste of the redemption of our body through the sealing of the Spirit.
From Ephesians 4:25 Paul begins to speak concerning the details of the believers’ living. In verse 30 he mentions again the sealing of the Spirit, which he had mentioned previously in chapter 1, saying, “Do not grieve the Holy Spirit of God, in whom you were sealed unto the day of redemption.” This means that the gentle, detailed dispensing of the Holy Spirit takes place in the details of our daily life. Especially in our speaking and in our temper, we very much need to continuously experience the gentle, detailed dispensing of the Spirit in us. We have to admit that we often grieve the Spirit. With regard to our stubbornness and wrangling, the Holy Spirit does not fly away like a dove but remains in us grieving. Paul reminds us that we are those who have been sealed in Him. This means that we have God’s image in us and thus are like God. Moreover, we have the essence of God sealing us within. Hence, we should not grieve the Holy Spirit, so that He may freely carry out His sealing within us until our body is redeemed.
Therefore, the way for our entire being to be conformed to His glorious image is to not grieve the Holy Spirit of God and to be joined to the Spirit all the time and to live and walk in the Spirit. We have the seal of God in us, so we need to walk by the Spirit, especially in relation to our speaking and our temper. Thus the gentle dispensing of the Spirit will continually move in us and seal us so that there will truly be glory in every part of us and God will be in us everywhere. God will be not only in our mind, emotion, and will, but even in our speaking, our move, and our actions, from our head to our feet. Hallelujah! This is the dispensing of the processed Divine Trinity in the believers.
