Search
In the previous chapter we saw the facts concerning the Triune God’s revelation and His move in the New Testament. In this chapter we want to see the revelations concerning these facts.
The Triune God’s incarnation was to bring God into man, mingling God with man to make God one with man both in the divine life and divine nature (but not in the Godhead) and in the human life and human nature (John 1:14; 1 Tim. 3:16).
The human living of the man Jesus on earth was to express God in man through His divine attributes expressed in the human virtues of Jesus. This is the real revelation of Jesus as a man living on this earth. The phrases through His divine attributes and expressed in the human virtues of Jesus are priceless. The reality is the divine attributes, and the expression is the human virtues. God has many attributes, and all these attributes are the items of what God is. God is love and light. Love and light are two of God’s attributes. With God they are the attributes. With man they are the virtues. Christ lived out God’s attributes expressed in His human virtues.
The crucifixion of Jesus Christ was to terminate the old creation with all its involvements—Satan, the world, sin, the old man, and the law with its ordinances (Heb. 2:14; John 12:31; 1:29; Rom. 6:6; Eph. 2:15). From my youth I was told only that Jesus was crucified and died for my sins. But according to the New Testament revelation, the crucifixion of Jesus Christ implies many things. The entire old creation with all its involvements was crucified on the cross.
The crucifixion of Jesus Christ was also to release the divine life from Jesus’ human shell for the dispensing of the divine life into the believers of Christ (John 12:24). Jesus said that He was like a grain of wheat, and God’s divine life was contained within the shell of this grain, the shell of Christ’s humanity. The cross broke this shell to release the divine life so that this divine life could be dispensed into Christ’s believers.
Christ’s resurrection from among the dead after His crucifixion was to designate (uplift) His humanity into the divine sonship, producing Him to be the firstborn Son of God (Rom. 1:4; Acts 13:33). We have to learn to speak this kind of language when we go out to preach the gospel.
Christ’s resurrection was to make Him, the last Adam, the life-giving Spirit (1 Cor. 15:45b).
Christ’s resurrection was to regenerate all the people chosen by God, making them the children (sons) of God, members of Christ for the constitution of the organic Body of Christ (1 Pet. 1:3; John 1:12; Rom. 8:16; 12:4-5). According to 1 Peter 1:3, we were regenerated when Christ was resurrected.
Christ, as the embodiment of the consummated Triune God, in the evening of His resurrection, breathed Himself as the pneumatic Christ into His believers as the gentle breath. This indicates that the entire consummated Triune God as the consummated all-inclusive Spirit has been wrought into the believers of Christ as their life and everything. After Christ resurrected from the dead, in the evening He came back to His disciples. He did not teach them anything. Instead, He breathed into them, and this breath was the Holy Spirit. In resurrection He is not the Christ in the flesh but the pneumatic Christ. Through resurrection He became the Spirit (2 Cor. 3:17). After He breathed Himself as the Spirit into the disciples, they had the consummated Triune God in them. This is the consummating step of Christ’s ministry on the earth, that is, to have the consummated Triune God as the all-inclusive Spirit of life join together with the believers’ spirit as one wonderful mingling spirit (1 Cor. 6:17); the divine Spirit indwells the human spirit (2 Tim. 4:22), and the two work together as one spirit (Rom. 8:16).
The New Testament as the biography of Christ unveils to us that Christ as the Christ of God, the Messiah of God (John 1:41), the anointed One of God (Dan. 9:26, lit.), the appointed One of God, fulfills God’s commission to Him with a threefold ministry.
The threefold ministry of Christ is in three stages. In the first stage it is His earthly ministry, which begins in His incarnation and ends in His breathing of Himself into His believers as the Spirit of life to bring His believers into an organic union with the processed and consummated Triune God (Matt. 28:19).
In the second stage it is His heavenly ministry, which begins with His outpouring, in ascension, of the processed and consummated Triune God, embodied in Himself, as the Spirit of power to form the churches and ends with the building up of His organic Body. This has produced the overcomers and will consummate in the New Jerusalem.
In the third stage it is His kingdom ministry, which begins with His judgment of the believers at His judgment seat and ends with His judgment of all the dead at the great white throne. The kingdom ministry clears up the negative things in the universe. In His kingdom ministry Christ gets rid of all the opposers of God, including Satan, to establish a kingdom on this earth with all His overcomers as His co-kings to reign over the nations on this earth.
All the ministries of Christ in the three stages consummate God’s eternal economy in the New Jerusalem as the center of the new heaven and new earth.
