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These chapters deal with the basics of God’s economy and its mark. We are not touching here upon some unimportant teachings, but upon the basic things of God’s economy — not merely in the way of doctrine but in the way of experience. God in His economy intends to dispense Himself into us, which He has already accomplished in the human spirit. The Triune God has been dispensed into us. It is for this purpose that God created us in three parts — body, soul, and spirit. This tripartite being is God’s temple. God’s temple consists of three parts — the outer court, the Holy Place, and the Holy of Holies, the very place where God’s shekinah glory and God’s Christ dwelt. The three parts of our being correspond exactly with the three parts of the temple — the body with the outer court, the soul with the Holy Place, and the spirit with the Holy of Holies. Today God in Christ is dwelling in our spirit, the Holy of Holies.
God’s economy is to dispense Himself into our spirit as His abode and to take His residence in our spirit as a base to spread Himself through our whole being. Our spirit is His home, His dwelling place, His habitation, the very place from which He spreads Himself through our whole being. By spreading Himself through us, He saturates every part of our being with Himself. First, He thoroughly mingles Himself with our spirit, then with the soul, and last with the body. He comes into our spirit to start the mingling by regenerating our spirit. Regeneration is the mingling of God Himself with our spirit. After regeneration, if we cooperate with Him, offering ourselves to Him and giving Him the opportunity, He will spread Himself from our spirit into our soul to renew all the parts of our soul. This is His transforming work. Through transformation the very essence of the Triune God is mingled with our soul, our very self. When our soul is transformed into the image of the Lord, our thoughts, our desires, and our decisions will always express the Lord.
God’s first step, therefore, is to regenerate our spirit; His second step is to transform our soul; and finally, the last step is to transfigure, or change, our body at the second coming of the Lord. The Lord will then permeate our body, and His glory will saturate our whole being. This transfiguration is the ultimate consummation of His mingling with our being to the uttermost. At that time God’s economy of dispensing Himself into us will be fully accomplished. We must remember these three steps by which God mingles Himself with us in every way. This hymn expresses the final consummation.
Christ is the hope of glory, my very life is He,
He has regenerated and saturated me;
He comes to change my body by His subduing might
Like to His glorious body in glory bright!
He comes, He comes, Christ comes to glorify me!
My body He’ll transfigure, like His own it then will be.
He comes, He comes, redemption to apply!
As Hope of glory He will come, His saints to glorify.
Christ is the hope of glory, He is God’s mystery;
He shares with me God’s fulness and brings God into me.
He comes to make me blended with God in every way,
That I may share His glory with Him for aye.
Christ is the hope of glory, redemption full is He:
Redemption to my body, from death to set it free.
He comes to make my body a glorious one to be
And swallow death forever in victory.
Christ is the hope of glory, He is my history:
His life is my experience, for He is one with me;
He comes to bring me into His glorious liberty,
That one with Him completely I’ll ever be.
(Hymns, #949)
We all know the sad story. Before the glorious God came into the spirit, Satan, the enemy of God, came into us first. The devil came into the human body through Adam when he ate the fruit of the tree of knowledge. Consequently, sin, personified as a person, is dwelling in the members of our body and rules as an illegal master, forcing us to do things that we dislike. This is the sin mentioned in Romans 6, 7, and 8. It is none other than the evil, sinful one of the whole universe. He is the enemy of God. When he came into our body, our body was transmuted, or changed in nature, and thus became the flesh. The flesh is the corrupted, ruined, and damaged body, with the evil one dwelling in it. This flesh, therefore, threatens to dominate the soul.
As the human spirit becomes a base from which God can spread Himself, so the same principle is true with this corrupted body. The flesh, possessed by Satan, becomes the base from which he can do his devilish work. Satan takes his place in the flesh to influence the soul and then through the soul to deaden the spirit. The direction of all satanic work always begins from the outside and works toward the inside. But the divine work always starts from the center and spreads toward the circumference. We may illustrate it in this way:
The soul cannot stand against Satan, who is much stronger than the human soul. Our condition before we were saved is that the soul was poisoned by Satan through the flesh. When we heard the gospel and were enlightened in the mind and in the conscience, we became contrite and broken in spirit, repented, and opened ourselves to the Lord, whereupon He gloriously came into our spirit to be our life in the Holy Spirit. Although Satan, the enemy, has taken the flesh as a base from which to fight inwardly toward the spirit, the glorious Lord uses the spirit as a base from which to fight outwardly toward the flesh.
We are so complicated because we have become a battlefield. We are the universal battlefield for the universal battle. Satan and God, God and Satan, are fighting one another within us day by day. Satan is fighting toward the center, and God is fighting toward the circumference. What is our attitude? We cannot be neutral; we have to take sides. In the outward part of man is the enemy of God, and in the inward part is God Himself. Between the two, in the middle, is the soul. Satan is in the corrupted body, God is in the regenerated spirit, and we are between in the human soul. We are a very important person. We can change the whole situation. If we take sides with Satan, God, in a sense, will be defeated. Of course, God can never be defeated, but by our taking sides with Satan, it seems that God is temporarily defeated. But if we take sides with God, it will be glorious, and Satan will be utterly defeated.
With whom will you take sides? This is the problem. Listen to the Lord: “If anyone wants to come after Me, let him deny himself” (Matt. 16:24). We must deny the self. In other words, we must put the soul to death on the cross, for the soul is the self. We must always deny the self, always put the self to death, always cross out the self. What will happen when the soul has been crossed out? When the soul has been put to death, only God and Satan are left. By crossing out the soul, we have burned the bridge for the enemy.
Satan is in the flesh, because he is sin incarnated in the flesh, and self is in the soul. Both sin and self are illegally married to each other; in fact, they had their wedding day long ago. All the trouble within us is due to the fact that self is married to sin, and they have become one. But when we were saved, God, Christ, and the Holy Spirit came into our spirit as the divine life. In the flesh, the corrupted body, there is sin; in the soul, the threatened soul, there is the self; and in the regenerated human spirit is the divine life, the eternal life, which is the regulating life and power. To live and walk by the soulish life means to live and walk by our self, which involves us in marriage with Satan. This marriage means that we are not a free person but under the bondage of the evil one, sin. The evil one in the flesh will rise up to snatch and defeat us and bring us under his captivity, making us a most wretched person. If, however, we deny the soul, the self, and live and walk by the spirit, Christ as life will regulate and saturate our whole being.
After we have been regenerated, we should not live and walk and do things by our self anymore. As long as we live by our self, we will be under the bondage of Satan. Perhaps you may say, “I don’t think that I live or do things by my self.” Here is the need to discern the spirit from the soul; then you will see how much you are in the soul. You say that you are not living or doing things by your self, but I would ask, By what are you living? By the flesh? Probably you will answer, “No, no, I am not living by the flesh.” Then, are you living by the spirit? You say, “Well, I doubt it.” If you are living neither by the flesh nor by the spirit, by what are you living? The answer is that you are living merely by the soul. You say, “I don’t like to commit any sin; I don’t like to be fleshly; I don’t like to cooperate with Satan. I love God. I like to follow the Lord and walk in the Lord’s way. I like, I like, I like...” You are still in the soul. Tell the Lord where you are. You yourself doubt very much that you are in the spirit. If you are not in the flesh or in the spirit, you are in the soul. Praise the Lord, you are not in Egypt, for you have experienced the Passover. You have been delivered out of Egypt, but you have not yet entered into the good land of Canaan. You are still wandering in the wilderness of the soul.
Now we come to this issue: How can we discern the spirit from the soul? How can we know when we are in the spirit or in the soul, and how can we divide the spirit from the soul? We must look into the Word of the Lord.
He who loves father or mother above Me is not worthy of Me; and he who loves son or daughter above Me is not worthy of me; and he who does not take his cross and follow after Me is not worthy of Me. He who finds his soul-life shall lose it, and he who loses his soul-life for My sake shall find it. (Matt. 10:37-39)
Soul-life here in the Greek text is the same word as that for soul. The taking up of the cross in these verses refers to our human love for our dear ones. Human love is something in our soul, and it must be dealt with by the cross. How much do we love our dear ones? If we want to know how to discern the spirit and the soul, we should check our love. How do we love our children, our mother, or our father? How do we love our brother or our sister? This is not man’s word but the Word of the Lord. Discernment of the spirit from the soul is only reached when we have checked our human and natural love. Our natural love has to be dealt with by the cross. In the New Testament Epistles the Holy Spirit tells us that husbands must love their wives, wives must submit to their husbands, parents must take care of their children, and children must honor and respect their parents. But all this must be in the resurrection life. Natural affection, natural love, and natural relationships have to be cut off by the cross. After being dealt with by the cross, we will be in the spirit, which means that we will be in the resurrection life. We will live in the resurrection life — not in the natural life but in the spiritual life. One test of how much our soul has been broken is how much the cross has dealt with our natural love and affection. When the natural love has been cut off by the cross, we will lose our soul.
Furthermore, if we are going to lose our soul by dealing with the natural love, we need to learn how to hate.
If anyone comes to Me and does not hate his own father and mother and wife and children and brothers and sisters, and moreover, even his own soul-life, he cannot be My disciple. Whoever does not carry his own cross and come after Me cannot be My disciple. (Luke 14:26-27)
Soul-life here again in the Greek text is the same as that for soul. Besides the love for our dear ones, we also have self-love, that is, the love for self or for our soul. The taking up of the cross has much to do with this self-love. “If anyone comes to Me and does not hate...” Hate whom? Our enemies? We must love our enemies (6:27), but we must learn to hate our soul, our self. To hate our self has something to do with the losing of our soul. By hating our self, we can then cross out the self in our soul.
He said to them all, If anyone wants to come after Me, let him deny himself and take up his cross daily and follow Me. For whoever wants to save his soul-life shall lose it; but whoever loses his soul-life for My sake, this one shall save it. For what is a man profited if he gains the whole world but loses or forfeits himself? (9:23-25)
Remember Lot’s wife. Whoever seeks to preserve his soul-life shall lose it, but whoever loses it will preserve it alive. (17:32-33)
In all of these verses, soul-life again in the Greek text is the same word as that for soul. These passages show that the soul is much involved with the love of the world. To give up the love of the world and worldly things means that we have to deal with our soul. When the soul is cut off, the love of the world is given up. Therefore, these two things, the love of the world and the soul, are related to each other.
“Remember Lot’s wife.” This is a wife, not a husband, and it is the story of a wife who loved the worldly things. The Lord says to be careful. If we love the world, we will lose our soul. If we love the things of the world, we will lose our soul in the bad sense, but if we give up the love of the world, we will lose our soul in the good sense. Brothers and sisters, the love of the world is a proof of where our soul is.
Truly, truly, I say to you, Unless the grain of wheat falls into the ground and dies, it abides alone; but if it dies, it bears much fruit. He who loves his soul-life loses it; and he who hates his soul-life in this world shall keep it unto eternal life. (John 12:24-25)
Here soul-life again means “soul.” By reading and considering these two verses carefully and deeply, we will see that the soul has much to do with the natural life and the natural strength. Our natural life and strength have to be dealt with by losing the soul. When our natural life and strength are put to death, our soul will then be broken. How does one discern the spirit from the soul? It is simply by taking the cross to the self-life and by putting our self under death. The soul is deceived because it does not appear to be sinful. Therefore, we must always learn to check the soul by putting the cross on the self.
Suppose we are fellowshipping with a brother. How can we discern whether our fellowship is of the spirit or of the soul? By putting the cross on our self, we will clearly know whether we are in the spirit or in the soul. I should not say, “I am not doing something evil. I am doing something good when I fellowship with a brother.” Fellowship is good, but such a fellowship may be entirely in the soul. When the cross is applied to our self, we will immediately be clear whether our fellowship is in the spirit or in the soul. We should never check the soul or the spirit by the discernment of good or evil. This kind of checking will only put us in darkness. There is no other way to check the soul and spirit but by the cross. The only way to determine whether we are in the soul or in the spirit is by checking whether we are now on the cross. Do I have any element of my own interest, or am I self-centered in my activities? Has the cross been put on my self-interest and self-centeredness? We need to check ourselves in this way. All decisions and all activities must be checked by the cross, not by the standard of good and evil. In every subject of conversation, has the self been crossed out? Do not analyze by considering, “Am I in the spirit, or am I in the soul? Let me consider for a moment to see how deep my feeling is. If it is not so deep, I must be in the soul. But if it seems to be deep, I might be in the spirit.” If we analyze in this way, we will really be troubled. Simply by one check, we can be made very clear: Have we been put on the cross? In other words, have we denied the self, taken up the cross, and followed the Lord in the spirit? When we deny the self by taking up the cross, the Lord Christ will have the full ground in us, and it will be easy to go along with Him.
The New Testament teaching gives some place to chastisement, but the cross occupies a much greater place. Many times God’s chastisement works together with the cross. But do not wait for God’s chastisement. All the time we must learn to take up the cross, since we know that we have been crucified with Christ. Day by day we must learn the lesson to deny the self, to take up the cross and not to give any ground to the soul. If we do this, we will actually be one with the Lord in the spirit, and the Lord will take the ground to possess us and to saturate us with Himself.
