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Scripture Reading: Eph. 1:10; 3:9; John 1:14, 29; 3:14; 24, 12:31; 44, 1 Cor. 15:45; 11, Rom. 8:16; John 3:5-6; Rom. 12:2; 2 Cor. 3:17-18; Rom. 8:17, 23; Phil. 3:21; 1 John 3:2; Rom. 8:2, 6, 10b, 13, 4
Prayer: Lord, we worship You. We look to You as the wonderful One to open up Your mysterious word to us. Lead every one of us into Yourself. May we learn to experience You and Your dispensing, and may we experience all the riches that are in this dispensing so that these riches can become our element within and our expression without. Lord, we look to You for the cleansing of Your blood and the anointing of Your holy ointment once again. May we have Your flow within and Your word without so that we can have the proper expression and the utterance to speak You forth. Lord, water us. Apart from You, we are just dead people. Although we can plant, water, and speak, we cannot give others life, much less give others the growth. Lord, the One who can give people life and growth is You, the Lord of life and the all-inclusive Christ. We look to You to come down among us from heaven. We feel that the heaven above us is open, that our spirits are shining, and that Your word is clear. Lord, grant us a deep impression. May we touch You and gain You. You are the One whom we can never exhaust in our experience. You are also the One whom we will always remember in eternity. Amen.
In the previous chapter we saw that there are three layers in the divine revelation of the Bible. The first layer is God’s gospel and salvation, the second is God’s blessing and prosperity, and the third is God’s economy and dispensing. Before a person believes in the Lord, he is dead in trespasses and sins. He lives according to the lusts of the flesh and carries out the desires of the flesh and of the thoughts (Eph. 2:1-3). After he hears the gospel and receives God’s salvation, he is made alive, and he enters into the first layer of the divine revelation. Later, he may experience the Lord’s blessing and prosperity and may enter into the second layer of the divine revelation. Perhaps after a long time, he will begin to realize that his experience is too low. I myself have had this kind of experience. It was a long time after I began to serve the Lord that I realized that there is a third layer, which is God’s economy and dispensing. This layer is not related to salvation or to blessing and peace. Rather, it concerns God’s economy and dispensing. God is the unique noble One in the universe. Can such a noble and great One be without any endeavor? Did God save us, the sinners, just to make us happy and peaceful so that we would behave properly and would one day be brought to heaven to pass through the pearly gates, walk on the golden streets, and enjoy eternal bliss forever?
If we have not seen God’s economy and dispensing, even if we were to abandon everything of the world for the Lord, He would still ask us one day, “For what purpose do you want Me?” Perhaps we would say that we want Him because we want to enjoy Him. But if we remain in the first two layers, we may enjoy the Lord, but the Lord cannot have His enjoyment. If we remain only in the first two layers, even if we love the Lord, enjoy Him, are revived every morning, and overcome every day, and even if we love the church and are for the church, when the crucial moment comes, we will be exposed and will be shown to be only for ourselves and not for the Lord or His church. If we see God’s economy and dispensing, we will not care for our own achievements and gains. God’s economy is not for our achievement but for us, the chosen and regenerated ones, to be filled by the Spirit to the extent that the Lord becomes everything in us so that we may be delivered from the old man and may be built up with all the saints to be God’s habitation (Hymns, #501). This is a matter of God’s habitation; it has nothing to do with our personal gain or loss. In the church we must have the discernment and the insight to see God’s economy and dispensing. Never listen to or talk about right and wrong. All rights and wrongs are based on personal profit and loss. Those things that are profitable to a person will be considered by him as right, and the things that are disadvantageous to a person will be considered by him as wrong. How terrible this is!
Here we need to see God’s economy and dispensing. What is the goal of God’s economy? The goal of God’s economy is a corporate expression. For this reason, in the Old Testament God created man in His image and according to His likeness (Gen. 1:26) so that He might put Himself into man and be man’s life, that man might become one with Him and express and represent Him. In Genesis, first God gained one man, Jacob. After being dealt with and transformed by the Lord, Jacob became God’s Israel. By the end of Exodus, God had gained the descendants of Jacob as the nation of Israel, and the tabernacle was erected to be God’s moving habitation on earth for the expression of His glory. At the time of David and Solomon, the temple was built as God’s permanent and expanded habitation on earth to express His glory in a full way. Later, because of the fall of the Israelites, the temple was destroyed. At the end of the Old Testament, the temple was rebuilt and continued to be God’s habitation on earth for the expression of His glory. This lasted until the beginning of the New Testament.
In the New Testament the Lord Jesus, who is God Himself, came as a man to be God’s tabernacle on earth so that God might dwell on earth and express Himself (John 1:14, 18). The Lord Jesus lived a human life for thirty-three and a half years. Then He passed through death and resurrection to become the life-giving Spirit, and He entered into His believers (20:22). This tabernacle expanded to become the church, becoming God’s habitation on earth as God’s full expression. Finally, the New Jerusalem will be the ultimate consummation of Christ and the church. As such, it will be the tabernacle for God’s dwelling and the temple for the saints’ dwelling in eternity (Rev. 21:3, 22). The New Jerusalem will be the eternal and corporate expression of God.
This is what God is after. God saves us for this. He regenerates us, transforms us, makes us spiritual, and causes us to be seeking, all for this. We are not saved, regenerated, transformed, spiritual, or seeking, for ourselves. Rather, we become such in order that we may be delivered from the natural life and the self so that we can be built up with all the saints into God’s habitation. This is God’s economy and dispensing. It is not a matter of right or wrong, gain or loss.
If it were a matter of right and wrong, then even Paul could be condemned by the Corinthians. They accused Paul of being crafty and taking them by guile, saying that he indemnified himself by sending Titus to receive the collection for the poor Jewish saints (2 Cor. 12:16). But Paul said that he would not examine himself by the standard of right and wrong. He said that though he was conscious of nothing against himself, he was not justified in this. He would not judge anything before the time but would wait until the Lord comes, who will both bring to light the hidden things of darkness and make manifest the counsels of the hearts, and then there will be praise to each from God (1 Cor. 4:3-5). Paul did not care if others judged him as right or wrong; he was a person who was for God’s economy. He suffered his whole life and was even martyred. In Colossians 1:24 he says, “I...fill up on my part that which is lacking of the afflictions of Christ in my flesh for His Body, which is the church.”
When the Lord Jesus was on earth, He too was condemned and criticized. The Pharisees, the Sadducees, and the scribes criticized Him much. No matter what the Lord Jesus did, and no matter where He went, they voiced their objections. It seemed to them that the Lord Jesus was wrong in everything and that only they were right. Hence, today in the church we should not speak of right and wrong. Rather, we should know what God’s economy is and what His dispensing is. Even our taking the new way must be with a goal, which is to arrive at and enter into God’s economy. We should not merely pursue after spirituality. We should pursue spirituality for the sake of God’s economy. When we truly pursue spirituality for the sake of God’s economy, we will be delivered from right and wrong and from any personal gain or loss.
God’s economy, that is, His plan and arrangement, is God’s goal (Eph. 1:10; 3:9). God’s dispensing, that is, His apportioning and distributing, is His means. In order to accomplish the economy of working Himself into man, God has to pass through the means of dispensing. Hence, God’s dispensing is for God’s economy.
In order to dispense Himself to man, the first step God took was to become flesh to be a man (John 1:14). When He was in the flesh, on the one hand, He was the Lamb of God who took away man’s sin (v. 29). On the other hand, He was the bronze serpent, which shows that He became flesh, that is, He was sent in the likeness of the flesh of sin (Rom. 8:3). As the bronze serpent, He had only the form of a serpent; He did not have a serpent’s poison. While the Lord was in the flesh, He was lifted up on the cross and destroyed Satan, the old serpent (John 3:14; 12:31). Furthermore, He was also a grain of wheat that fell into the ground and died. Through His death He released God’s life (v. 24).
The second step God took in order to dispense Himself to man was to become the life-giving Spirit (1 Cor. 15:45b). These two steps contain two “becomes.” The Lord first became flesh, and then He became the life-giving Spirit. His becoming flesh was for the accomplishing of redemption and the releasing of God’s life. His becoming the life-giving Spirit was for the dispensing of Himself as the Spirit into man to be man’s life.
Christ became the life-giving Spirit in resurrection (v. 45). As such a Spirit, He is prepared to be received by those who believe into Him. As soon as we believe into Him, the Spirit of life in resurrection enters into our spirit (Rom. 8:16) and abides in our spirit (v. 11).
As the life-giving Spirit, Christ first regenerated our spirit (John 3:5-6) so that, in addition to our natural life, we might receive the eternal life of God as the new source and the new element of the new man. After this, Christ as the life-giving Spirit spreads out from our spirit to transform our soul. If we set our mind, the main part of our soul, on the spirit and cooperate with the operation and work of the Lord Spirit within us, our mind will be renewed (Rom. 12:2). When our mind is renewed, our will and our emotion as the other parts of our soul will spontaneously be renewed also. In this way God’s life and nature will be added into us, and we will be metabolically transformed into His image to express Him (2 Cor. 3:17-18).
Finally, He will transfigure our body so that our body may be redeemed to enter into His glory, and our entire being may be like Him in every way (Rom. 8:17, 23; Phil. 3:21; 1 John 3:2). This is the ultimate consummation of God’s salvation. In His salvation God first regenerated our spirit. Now He is transforming our soul. In the end He will transfigure our body so that our three parts will be saturated with the Spirit and will be like Christ in every way. All these steps are part of the divine dispensing in us.
The Triune God, who has been processed and is dispensed into us, has Himself become the law of the Spirit of life (Rom. 8:2). This law of the Spirit of life is the automatic and spontaneous capacity of the Triune God as life in the believers. In nature there are the physical laws. Moreover, every life has its own law. A law denotes a natural power with certain inclinations and activities. As living beings, we exist by definite laws. For example, we breathe because we are living. Our breathing is not a conscious activity. Rather, there is a law of breathing. It is an unconscious law that operates in our body spontaneously. As long as we have life, the law of life will enable us to breathe. We may take digestion as another example. After we eat, we do not need to make a conscious effort to digest the food we have eaten. Digestion is a law. As long as we eat the food, a biological law will function to digest the food.
Praise the Lord, another law has been put into us. This law is the Triune God as the law of the Spirit of life. The processed Triune God has been put into us; He is now operating in us according to a law and not according to an activity. Today He is a law operating within us. He is not operating in us merely as the almighty God, but He is operating in us spontaneously as a law that is transforming us. Our need today is to cooperate with the life function of the Triune God in our spirit.
Our experience of the dispensing of the Divine Trinity begins with regeneration in our spirit. Regeneration makes our spirit life (v. 10). Next, our experience continues by our setting our mind on the spirit; this makes the mind in our soul life (v. 6b). Then, by the indwelling Spirit we put to death the practices of the body, making our mortal body also life (vv. 13, 11). Furthermore, we walk only according to the spirit (v. 4). In this way our whole being will be saturated by the Spirit, and we will fully experience the dispensing of the Divine Trinity in our tripartite being. We will daily experience the increase of the Triune God in us. This is the growth in life, which continues until we are mature in life. At that time we will enjoy all the blessings of God’s presence.
