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Scripture Reading: Heb. 2:10-12; Rom. 8:29; 12:5; 1 Cor. 12:12-13, 27; Col. 1:18; Eph. 4:4; 1:23; 1 Tim. 3:15; 1 Pet. 2:5; 1 Cor. 3:16-17; Eph. 2:15, 21-22; 4:22-24; Col. 3:10-11; Eph. 3:19; 1:10
Prayer: Lord, how we worship You as the speaking and dispensing God! We thank You that You have been speaking so much to us to dispense Yourself into us. Thank You that in these days we are under Your dispensing. Even in this message we are listening to Your word. We would like to receive Your dispensing. O Lord Jesus! Make these days full of dispensing. Dispense Yourself into us during these days so that all of us will be filled up with Your dispensing. Thank You, Lord, for Your cleansing blood, which opens up the way for You to come in to dispense and saturate us with Yourself. Thank You for Your speaking in this meeting. We trust in You. We have no trust in ourselves. Amen.
In the foregoing chapter we saw that whatever Christ is, is for the one purpose of dispensing God into us. This is the focus of the entire Bible. But it has not been seen by many Christians today. Christianity has made nearly everything religious, instead of making everything divine. We all have to rise up against anything religious. We should be altogether for something divine. To be regenerated is not something religious; it is something divine. Regeneration is not to have a religious life. It is to have a divine life in addition to our human life. Such a divine life with a divine birth makes us a divine child of God. This is the initial stage of God’s dispensing Himself into us. God first dispenses Himself into us by regeneration. This is our second birth, our spiritual and even divine birth. Birth is just a beginning of life. Without birth there is no life. Hallelujah! We have had the beginning of the divine life. This beginning is the divine birth, regeneration.
Many Christians seem to have forgotten about their regeneration. Although they are born again and had such a wonderful divine beginning, after their regeneration they were led astray from the divine things to the religious practices. After their regeneration they made nearly everything religious. For example, they talk about love and holiness apart from the divine life. They talk about being a good husband or a good wife apart from the divine life. They talk about being good children or good parents apart from the divine life. Even they talk about being a good Christian apart from the divine life.
In the Epistles of the New Testament, especially those of Paul, the phrase in Christ, or, in the Lord occurs frequently. This is a short and brief but very crucial phrase. For example, in Ephesians 6:1 Paul says, “Children, obey your parents in the Lord, for this is right.” Many Christians, however, in their understanding cut off this phrase in the Lord. This crucial phrase means a lot. If we are not in the Lord, there is no Christian life. Honoring our parents, loving our wife, or submitting to our husband must be in the Lord. If these things are not in the Lord, that is not the Christian life but an ethical life. Ethics teaches good morality, behavior, and character but altogether outside of Christ and apart from Christ. But we Christians are in Christ. We are not apart from Christ; we are part of Christ. We are in an organic union with Christ. He is the vine, and we are the branches (John 15:5). The branches of the vine are not simply joined to the vine; they are organically united to the vine. The branches and the vine have a common life. The branches could not have their being without the vine.
Now we come to the issue of God’s dispensing. In order for God to dispense Himself into us, Christ is many items. In the foregoing chapter we covered thirty-four of those items. Of those thirty-four items one item is very significant; that is, Christ is the firstborn Son of God. I was a Christian for a number of years before I understood and paid attention to the fact that first Christ was the only begotten Son of God and that He became the firstborn Son of God. The only begotten means the only Son, the only one, and the firstborn means the first one among many. Does God have one Son or many sons? This is a crucial point. If we do not see this point, we cannot understand what the issue of God’s dispensing is.
Have you noticed that after living on this earth for thirty-three and a half years, Jesus Christ was born? In Acts 13:33 Peter indicated that when the Lord Jesus was raised up in resurrection, He was begotten of God. Was He not the Son of God before resurrection? Surely He was. Since He was the Son of God before His resurrection, why did He still need to be born in resurrection to be the Son of God? This is not easy to explain. Before His incarnation He was God’s only begotten Son in eternity. He did not have any human nature with the blood and flesh. He was altogether divine. One day He became flesh. This means that He took the human nature upon Himself. He took blood and flesh upon Himself (Heb. 2:14) and became human. Within Him there was something divine. That was the Son of God. But His human nature was the Son of Man. It was human and not divine. The inward being of Jesus was the Son of God already, but the outward being, His humanity, was the Son of Man. His outward being, His humanity, was not yet the Son of God. It was His outward being that needed to be born of God.
How could Christ’s humanity be born to be the Son of God? It was through death and resurrection. Christ’s death brought His humanity into resurrection. Through resurrection His humanity was born into the divine sonship. So the resurrection of Christ was the birth of His humanity into the sonship of God. This made Him, the only begotten Son of God, the firstborn Son of God.
Sometimes in human birth there are twins, that is, one delivery with two children, or triplets, that is, one delivery with three children. In the resurrection of Christ, in that delivery, there were not only two or three children but millions of children. There was one delivery, but many sons of God, many brothers of Christ, were brought forth (Heb. 2:10-12; Rom. 8:29). Christ as the firstborn Son of God does not have any sisters. He only has brothers, sons of God. All the sisters are also brothers of Christ. In that one delivery many, many sons were born. Of the many who were born, the first was the man Jesus. Then all of us were born. I do not know what number you are or what number I am, but when Christ was born, we were born too. When Christ was resurrected, we were resurrected. He was the only begotten Son of God before His resurrection, but through His resurrection the only begotten Son became the firstborn Son. The Firstborn is the leading one. He takes the lead, and we all follow. What He has gone through, we also should pass through. He went through death, and we also should go through the same process of death and resurrection.
Today we are in the process of death and resurrection so that we might be conformed to the image of the firstborn Son of God (v. 29). The many brothers are the issue of God’s dispensing. At the resurrection of Christ, God infused and dispensed Himself into millions of Christ’s believers. This means that at one juncture, even in one action, God the Father dispensed Himself into all of us. Christ’s resurrection was the dispensing of God into millions of Christians.
Every human birth is a dispensing of the father’s life into the child. Before a man becomes a father, he is only one, but after the birth of his child, his life has been dispensed into another one. What is resurrection? It is the dispensing of God into His believers. What is regeneration? That also is the dispensing of God into the believers. This basic thought must be impressed into our being. Then we will be revolutionized in our thinking, and we will never try to improve our character. We need to forget about improving our character. That is not the biblical revelation but mere human ethics.
We did have such a good beginning. God was dispensed into our being. So we all became sons of God. We became not creatures of God but sons of God, and we are sons not by adoption but by birth. We are the typical, genuine, and real sons of God. In our new birth our Father has dispensed Himself into our being. Actually, our being comes out of this dispensing. Without such a divine dispensing, we do not have our being. Our being comes out of our Father’s life. The issue of such a divine dispensing is the church. The church is not you and me and so many others added together. The entire church is the issue of the dispensing of our Father.
For example, consider Eve in Genesis 2. How did she come into existence? Adam was created by God from the dust of the ground, but Eve was not created in that way. Eve came forth as the issue of life dispensing. Life in the form of a rib was dispensed out of Adam and issued in Eve. In other words, Eve was the increase of Adam. The church is not just an organization of human beings. The church is the increase of Christ. The increase of a person is surely the dispensing of his life. We have already mentioned that birth is a dispensing of life. The church is altogether a matter of the dispensing of life. The church is the total dispensing of God into His chosen people. God dispenses Himself into this one, into that one, and into so many others. We are the total dispensing of our Father. The church is the family of God. A family is the total dispensing of the father. Likewise, the church is the totality of the dispensing of God our Father into so many sons. The many sons of God who came forth in the resurrection of Christ are also the many brothers of Christ (Heb. 2:10-12; Rom. 8:29). The many brothers are the many members of Christ (12:5; 1 Cor. 12:12), and these many members are the Body of Christ (vv. 13, 27; Col. 1:18; Eph. 4:4). The Body of Christ is the fullness of the One who fills all in all (1:23), and this fullness is the house of God (1 Tim. 3:15; 1 Pet. 2:5). The house of God is also the temple of God (1 Cor. 3:16-17; Eph. 2:21-22). All these aspects of the church come from God’s dispensing.
The more I speak something about God’s dispensing and about Christ increased in us, the more my burden is stirred up. I can never exhaust this kind of speaking. If you give me the time, I would tell you again and again concerning God’s dispensing from the first page of the Bible to the last. I would tell you again and again that God wants to be planted in you as the tree of life to grow into every part of your being and to infuse you with His dispensing.
In that one resurrection of Christ, that one delivery, millions of children were born. They are the totality of God’s dispensing. And this totality becomes the church, which is His Body (1:22-23). This is also His fullness. Without the church Christ has no fullness. This fullness of Christ is the house of God where God dwells. The fullness contains God; it is the temple of God. The temple is not only God’s house but also our house. Not only does the Father live in this house, but all the children live in this house too. In our locality God has a temple as His own house, which has become our house. We who are the children, the issue of His dispensing, and the Father, the source of this dispensing, dwell together in this house. This is the church life. Such a church life is the total issue of God’s continuous dispensing.
When Christ is ministered and the church is produced, they two become the corporate Christ. The ministered Christ with the church produced out of Him becomes the corporate Christ (1 Cor. 12:12). The church itself is the fullness of Christ, the expression of Christ (Eph. 1:23); whereas the corporate Christ, that is, the individual Christ with the church as His Body, is the fullness of God, the expression of God (3:19). First, the church is the fullness of Christ; then Christ and the church become the fullness of God. God is manifested in such a corporate Christ, who is the new man (2:15; 4:22-24; Col. 3:10-11). In the new man Christ is the Head, and the church is the Body, as a universal man for God’s expression and satisfaction. This will consummate in the New Jerusalem. God has been dispensing Himself throughout all the generations, and the ultimate issue will be the New Jerusalem in the new heaven and new earth. The New Jerusalem will be the fullness of the Triune God. Even as the church today is the fullness of Christ, so in the same principle, the New Jerusalem will be the fullness of the Triune God. Looking at the New Jerusalem, you can see that God is expressed in His fullness to the uttermost. It is the Triune God expressed in full in His dispensation. That will be the fulfillment of Ephesians 1:10. At the fullness of the times God will head up all things in Christ. Today God only heads up the church in Christ on a smaller scale. But when the new heaven and the new earth come, God will head up the entire universe in Christ. That will be the total expression of God through His dispensing of Himself into His chosen people throughout all the generations.
We all need to see this. We need a vision that will change our concepts and our view and revolutionize our entire being. Then we will hate the ethical things such as improving our behavior and character. Then we will aspire for the divine things. We will aspire for the divine dispensing of the divine life, the divine nature, and the divine glory to be increased in our being. This is the Christian life, and this is the church life. This is the life that God is after. God wants a group of people redeemed and regenerated and living by the dispensing God. We need to live by the divine dispensing. Day after day we all must be under this dispensing.
