Christ, the expression of God, and the church constitute the central thought of God. The central thought of God in this universe and in eternity is to have Christ as His expression through the church. If you apply this thought and realization to all the Scriptures you read, the Scriptures will be opened to you. You will have the insight to understand the Word of God. Without this kind of realization concerning the central thought of God, it is hard for anyone to understand the holy Bible, the divine record of God’s thought. If you desire to know the real meaning of the divine Word, you have to know the central thought of this Word, which is Christ as the expression of God through the church. The entire Bible is full of this thought.
The apostle Paul told us that Christ and the church are the great mystery (Eph. 5:32). Christ as the expression of God and the church as the Body of Christ constitute the central thought of God. This is the greatest mystery in the whole universe. If you do not understand this mystery, you do not know the meaning of the universe and the meaning of your human life.
If we want to understand the thought, the meaning, of any book, we have to realize what it speaks of at the beginning and at the conclusion. It is exactly the same with the Bible. In this divine book, at the very beginning, there are two chapters revealing to us the principles and the outline with the main points of God’s eternal purpose. In the very beginning of the holy Scriptures, in the first two chapters of Genesis, we have the outline of God’s central thought, the blueprint of God’s plan.
At the end of this divine book are the last two chapters, chapters twenty-one and twenty-two of the book of Revelation. In those two chapters we can see a picture of the consummation of God’s plan, a picture of the issue of what God has been doing through all the generations, and a picture of the realization of the central thought of God. We must carefully consider these four chapters-the first two chapters of Genesis at the beginning of the Bible and the last two chapters of Revelation at the end of the Bible.
First, we need to see Christ as the expression of God and the church as the Body of Christ in the first chapter of the Bible. Christ is everywhere and Christ is everything in the Scriptures. Christ can be seen in every day of the six days of creation. In the first chapter of Genesis we can also see the church and the believers, the saints. Genesis 1 reveals Christ as the expression of God and us as the members of the Lord’s Body, which is the church. The record of the divine thought in Genesis 1 and 2 was written in a figurative way. We have to see this record figuratively to get the right meaning.
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