First Corinthians 3:12 says that silver is the second of the precious materials, but in Genesis 2:12 and Revelation 21:21 the second material is not silver but pearl, or bdellium. Pearl signifies regeneration. It is something produced, not created but generated. When a small grain of sand wounds an oyster and stays in the wound, a pearl is “regenerated” by the secretion from the oyster. In this way a grain of sand becomes a pearl. We are the grains of sand that wounded Christ and stayed in His wound. The divine life-juice of Christ continually secretes on us, causing us to become pearls.
With pearls there is no thought of redemption but only regeneration, which is the original thought of God. The original, eternal thought of God was not related to redemption. It was that we as created beings would be regenerated. In the process, however, sin came in and we became fallen. Now we need to be not only regenerated but also redeemed. The Lord Jesus needed to die not only so that we may have His life but in order to redeem us from sins. Therefore, at the time the Epistles were written, there was the need of redemption. That is why in 1 Corinthians 3 there is silver instead of pearl. Eventually, we are not only redeemed but also regenerated through redemption; that is, we have the silver, but we eventually become pearl. After we are redeemed, God accomplishes His eternal thought by regenerating us in His redemption.
The material with which we build up the believers and the church is the Triune God-God the Father, God the Son, and God the Spirit. God’s intention is to make Himself everything to us, to become our very nature to make us the embodiment of God Himself. The entire city of New Jerusalem is gold, signifying that it is full of God. Within the church, within the believers, there should be nothing but God Himself. God works Himself into each one of us as our everything. In this way we have the nature of God as the gold. We are regenerated in the redemption of Christ and transformed by the transforming work of the Holy Spirit to have the nature of God as the gold, the work and person of Christ as the pearl, and the work of the Holy Spirit as the precious stones. In this way we are built up with the Triune God-with God the Father, God the Son, and God the Spirit.
Any teaching in the church which is not in this line and for this very purpose, regardless of how scriptural it is, is a wind of teaching blowing people away from Christ and His Body (Eph. 4:14). The proper teaching for the building up of the church brings people into the Triune God to build the Triune God into people. According to Ephesians 4:13-16, the proper way to build up the Body is to realize the Head, Christ, and to have the Body life, the church life. In this way all the members are built up with the Triune God to function in, through, and with the Triune God. Then the whole church becomes a mingling, a building, of the Triune God with the saved and redeemed persons.
We should read all the Epistles again. In principle, all the Epistles without exception speak of building the believers as the church with the Triune God as the material. To build the believers is not merely to bring them back to the Lord, to make them right with the Lord. This is not good enough. To build up the believers is to impart and minister Christ into the believers, to work Christ more and more into them.
This can be seen in Colossians 2:19. Such a verse could not have come from the human mind. It says, “Holding the Head, out from whom all the Body, being richly supplied and knit together by means of the joints and sinews, grows with the growth of God.” The Head is Christ, the second of the Triune God, the redeeming One; the joints are for the rich supply; and the sinews are for knitting together. We should pay our full attention to the phrase “grows with the growth of God.” When we hold Christ, the whole Body grows with the growth of God. Day by day continually God must grow within us. The element, the essence, of God must increase within us.
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