Search
Prayer: Father, we worship You for Your word. Lord Jesus, we love You because You are the Word of God. We love You, and we thank You for tonight’s meeting. Strengthen us in the speaking and anoint us in the listening. Grant us a real revelation in every word. Amen.
We have covered one Bible—one revelation—and one God—one economy. Now we come to the third “one,” one Christ—the unsearchable One. Through the years, because of our testimony of the unsearchable riches of Christ, some Christians in the denominations have asked us, “What kind of Christ do you have? Is your Christ not the same as our Christ?” Millions of Christians have Christ, but to what extent have they experienced Christ? As we review the following items of Christ, we should ask, “Have I experienced Christ in this item?” To what extent have we experienced Christ?
The apostle Paul experienced the same Christ as millions of Christians, but the extent of his enjoyment of Christ reached the top. Christ in Himself is the same in nature, in essence, and in His being unlimited, unsearchable, and all-inclusive; but in the experiences of His believers, there are many different extents. This should help us all to realize that our Christ is totally all-inclusive. He is the complete God and the perfect man. Even the reality of the food we eat is Christ. He is also the living water. According to the New Testament, Christ is everything to us.
Christ is the eternal and only begotten Son of God, the second of the Divine Trinity (John 1:1-2, 18; Matt. 28:19). He is self-existing, ever-existing, and coinhering with the Father and the Spirit in eternity. He is, with the Father and the Spirit, the only God (John 1:1; Rom. 9:5; Heb. 1:8). In other words, He as the Son with the Father and the Spirit is one God.
He is the Creator (v. 10), and all things were created through Him (John 1:3; Col. 1:16a), cohere in Him (v. 17), and will be an inheritance unto Him as the Heir (v. 16b; Heb. 1:2; Rom. 11:34-36). On the one hand, Christ is the Creator, but on the other hand, He is the means through which all things were created. He is also the very center of creation because all things subsist, cohere, in Him. Eventually, all things will be an inheritance to Him as the Heir.
In time He became a man through His incarnation, a God-man having both divinity and humanity as His nature (John 1:1, 14; Heb. 2:14). In eternity Christ was merely God, but in time He became a man. He is also the Firstborn of all creation (Col. 1:15b). He is not only God and man but also the first item of the creation. As a man, He is a part of the creation, but how could He be the Firstborn? This is hard to answer. We need to see that with God there is only the fact without the time element. Christ was crucified about two thousand years ago, but the Bible says that He was crucified from the foundation of the world (Rev. 13:8). From the time that the earth was founded, He was crucified because the earth needs His crucifixion. We must learn to present this to people.
Just as light is the effulgence of electricity, Christ is the effulgence of God’s glory. He is also the impress of God’s substance (Heb. 1:3a). God is a kind of substance, and Christ is the impress. We may illustrate this with a seal. The seal is a kind of substance. When we put the seal on a paper, we have the impress. Christ is the embodiment of God (Col. 2:9) and the image of the invisible God (1:15a). God is invisible and untouchable, but one day God embodied Himself in Christ. God became visible and touchable.
Christ lived in His humanity on the earth to express God for thirty-three and a half years—He is God manifested in the flesh (1 Tim. 3:16). He is the faithful Witness of God (Rev. 1:5). He witnessed God.
He is also the tabernacle of God as God’s movable dwelling place among men (John 1:14). Most of the English versions say in John 1:14 that the Word became flesh and dwelt among men. This predicate, according to the Greek text, should be tabernacled. He is God’s dwelling place among men, but movable, like a tent, a tabernacle. Abraham brought his tent through many places. Christ was such a tent of God among men. Also, He is the temple of God as God’s established dwelling place on earth (2:19-21). Furthermore, Christ is the light of the world (8:12).
He died an all-inclusive death through which He crucified Satan—the old serpent (3:14; Heb. 2:14)—sin (Rom. 8:3; John 1:29), the world (12:31), the fallen man with his flesh (Rom. 6:6; Gal. 2:20), the old creation (represented by the old fallen man), and the law with its ordinances (Rom. 10:4; Col. 2:14; Eph. 2:15) for the accomplishment of God’s eternal redemption (Heb. 9:12). Through His death He also released His divine life from the shell of His humanity to be dispensed into His believers (John 12:24; 3:15). Christ’s death abolished all the negative things. On the positive side He released His divine life from His human shell. He was the one grain who died to release His life and become many grains. The negative side of Christ’s death was for God’s redemption; the positive side is for life dispensing.
He resurrected from among the dead (Matt. 28:6-7; 1 Cor. 15:4b), and through His resurrection He in His humanity was designated to be the firstborn Son of God (Rom. 1:4; 8:29; Acts 13:33), became the life-giving Spirit (1 Cor. 15:45), and regenerated with His resurrection life all the people chosen by God before the foundation of the world (1 Pet. 1:2-3; Eph. 1:4). We were regenerated in His resurrection.
Christ ascended to the heavens, and in His ascension He was crowned and enthroned to be the Lord of all men and all things to rule over the whole universe (Acts 10:36), the Christ—the Anointed of God—to accomplish God’s economy (2:36), and the Ruler of the kings of the earth (Rev. 1:5) to arrange the situations of the world and the environment of God’s chosen people that they may be saved by Him as the Savior who will be received by all His believers as their everything (Acts 5:31). Christ rules sovereignly over the earth with His authority that the environment might be fit for God’s chosen people to receive His salvation. He needs to be the Ruler of all situations to save us. A person may live in a remote place where there is no opportunity for him to hear the gospel, so the Lord arranges the situation to bring him to another place where he can hear the gospel and be saved. I hate imperialism, but I thank the Lord that He used imperialism to save me. Without imperialism the gospel could never have gone to China and to my hometown there.
In His ascension Christ is also the Head of the church to take care of the church as His Body (Eph. 1:22-23; 5:29-30), the Paraclete in heaven before God to take care of all the cases and needs of His members (1 John 2:1), and the One who is realized by His Spirit as the Paraclete in His members (John 14:16-20). He is the heavenly Minister to minister heaven into His believers to make them the heavenly citizens (Heb. 8:2; Phil. 3:20); the great High Priest in the heavens to take care of His believers’ needs, intercede for them, and save them to the uttermost (Heb. 4:14-15; 7:25-27); the Mediator of the new covenant, bequeathed by Him to His believers through His death, to execute it (8:6; 9:15); and the surety of the better covenant to be its guarantee (7:22). The above items are different aspects of Christ’s ministry in the heavens.
