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Scripture Reading: John 1:1, 14; Matt. 1:23; 2 Cor. 3:18; 4:16-17; Rom. 8:29-30; Col. 1:12, 14-19; 2:9; 3:4, 10-11
God's answer to the book of Job is the completed divine revelation in the entire Scriptures concerning God's relationship with man. In a previous message we saw this relationship in the Old Testament. Now we will cover this matter in the New Testament.
God's relationship with man in the New Testament begins with the first coming of Christ and consummates with the New Jerusalem in the new heaven and new earth.
The New Testament reveals that God came to be conceived in a human virgin to be born of her to be a man, thus bringing divinity into humanity and causing God and man to be mingled as one entity but not as a third substance (John 1:1, 14; Matt. 1:20, 23; 1 Tim. 3:16). This is the first step God took in order to give Himself to Job by the way of dispensing.
Jesus Christ, as the incarnated God and as the embodiment of the Triune God (Col. 2:9), died in His humanity a vicarious and all-inclusive death to terminate all the negative things and to release the divine life from within Him for us.
Christ overcame death and entered into the all-producing resurrection and was begotten to be God's firstborn Son, bringing humanity into divinity (Acts 13:33). In resurrection Christ also became the life-giving Spirit for the producing and the constituting of the Body of Christ (1 Cor. 15:45).
Next, Christ accomplished the all-transcending ascension to the heavens and was made Lord, Christ, Leader, and Savior (Acts 2:36; 5:31) for His propagation and for the building up of the church as His kingdom.
In His death, resurrection, and ascension Christ made all His believers one with Him. Thus, His death, resurrection, and ascension have become theirs (Rom. 6:5-6; Eph. 2:5-6); hence, His experiences have become their history.
God redeemed us in Christ, forgave our sins, washed us, justified us, and reconciled us to Him (Eph. 1:7; 1 Cor. 6:11; Rom. 3:22; 5:10).
God has put us into Christ and has made Him our righteousness, sanctification, and redemption (1 Cor. 1:30). By Christ as our righteousness (for our past) we have been justified by God, that we might be reborn in our spirit to receive the divine life. By Christ as our sanctification (for our present) we are being sanctified in our soul, that is, transformed in our mind, emotion, and will, with the divine life. By Christ as our redemption, (for our future), that is, the redemption of our body (Rom. 8:23) we will be transfigured in our body with the divine life to have His glorious likeness (Phil. 3:21).
God has regenerated us through the resurrection of Christ (1 Pet. 1:3), and now He renews us, transforms us, and conforms us to His image of glory, and ultimately He will glorify us in His glory (Titus 3:5; Rom. 12:2; Eph. 4:23; 2 Cor. 4:16; 3:18; Rom. 8:29-30).
In His renewing and transforming, God consumes us, putting us into Christ's death for our fellowship of His sufferings, which work out for us an eternal weight of glory, that we may experience Him in His resurrection and gain Him in His unsearchable riches (10, 2 Cor. 4:16-17; 8, Phil. 3:10; Eph. 3:8).
John 14:16-20 reveals that God the Father is embodied in God the Son, that God the Son is realized as God the Spirit, and that God the Spirit comes to indwell us to be the reality of the Triune God. This is the gift that God intended to give Job, that is, Himself in His Divine Trinity embodied in the Son and realized as the Spirit.
Concerning the mystery of the Triune God being the reality in the believers, Christ had many things to tell His disciples, but they could not bear them until the Spirit of reality came to reveal these things to them (John 16:12-15). This was done by the Spirit of reality mainly with the apostle Paul, who completed the word of God, that is, the divine revelation (Col. 1:25-27) regarding Christ as the mystery of God (Col. 2:2b) and the church as the mystery of Christ (Eph. 3:4).
Ephesians 4:4-6 reveals that the Father, the Son, and the Spirit as the Triune God have become the source, the element, and the essence of the church as the Body of Christ. God the Father is the source, God the Son is the element, and God the Spirit is the essence.
Christ as the divine portion allotted to the saints by God and as life to the believers has become all the members of the new man, which is His organic Body (Col. 1:12; 3:4a, 10-11; 1 Cor. 12:12-13).
In Colossians 1:15-19 we see that God wants to make Christ, the embodiment of God, everything to us, the believers of Christ.
God in Christ will carry out His transforming work on us until His transformation consummates in the New Jerusalem, firstly with the overcomers in the millennial kingdom (Rev. 2:7) and consummately with all the saints in the new heaven and new earth, making all His chosen and redeemed people His corporate expression, manifesting Himself, not any kind of merely human virtues, to the fullest extent in eternity (Rev. 21:1—22:5).
Job and his friends were devoid of all the above divine revelations. God's dealing with Job in all the disasters and His stripping him of all that he was, were to take away his contentment in his godly attainments and obtainments and to remove all the barriers and coverings so that he could be emptied for some further seeking after God and could realize that he was very short of something in his human life. At the end of the book of Job, after all, God came in, indicating that what Job was short of in his human life was God Himself. But up to the age of Job, there was not a revelation like what is positively, clearly, and fully unveiled in the New Testament. For this reason, the book of Job does not actually have a completed ending, which should be God fully gained in Christ by Job to make him one with God that he might enjoy God as his portion in Christ. Such a revelation can be fully found only in the New Testament.
