God’s intention is to be our enjoyment in Christ as the Holy Spirit. Immediately after the creation of man, God presented Himself to man as the tree of life to be his enjoyment in the form of food (Gen. 2:9). Later the Bible reveals that God came to us in the person of Christ the Son. Now as the Holy Spirit He becomes our life and life supply. He is our life-food, life-drink, life-breath, and everything we need to exist spiritually (John 6:55; 7:37; 20:22; 10:10b).
The New Testament can be divided into two parts. In the first part—the four Gospels—Christ is the embodiment of God as the Word for us to “read” that we may understand who He is and His purpose to be everything to us. As the Word, Christ is the expression, definition, and explanation of God. By this Word, who is the very embodiment of God, we can realize what God is to us. Then the second part of the New Testament—from Acts and the Epistles to Revelation—shows us that Christ was transfigured to be the Spirit through His death and resurrection. He is now the Spirit who gives life to us, and we are enjoying Christ as the life-giving Spirit (1 Cor. 15:45b; 2 Cor. 3:6, 17). He is not only the Word for us to read, understand, and know, but He is the Spirit within us for us to realize, touch, enjoy, and experience. He has become one with us, and we are one with Him, as 1 Corinthians 6:17 says, “He who is joined to the Lord is one spirit.” Our experience testifies that this oneness is a practical fact.
Today we know Christ as the Word, and we experience Him as the Spirit. If He were only the Word, we could understand Him only outwardly; we could not experience Him inwardly. Praise Him, He is not only the Word but also the Spirit within us for us to realize, experience, taste, and enjoy. Therefore, we are able not only to understand Him but to enjoy Him and experience Him day by day. There is first the need to know and understand Him, but this knowing is not merely for knowing; this knowing and understanding are for enjoying, tasting, and experiencing Him.
We all must know Christ as the Word and the Spirit. This is why we have to spend time to receive the written and living Word. Then by this reading and knowing, we need to experience Him as the life-giving Spirit.
At the beginning of the book of Romans, Paul introduces Christ in a unique way. Romans 1:3 and 4 say, “Concerning His Son, who came out of the seed of David according to the flesh, who was designated the Son of God in power according to the Spirit of holiness out of the resurrection of the dead, Jesus Christ our Lord.” Among his fourteen Epistles, it is only in Romans that Paul introduces Christ as the seed of David designated the Son of God. This is because Romans deals with the need for the sons of Adam to be transformed and conformed to the image of the Son of God (12:2; 8:29). This book is not mainly a book on justification by faith, as taught by Luther. Justification by faith is only a minor part of this book, not the major part. The main emphasis of this book is the divine sonship, that we, the human beings, sons of Adam, can be transformed to be the sons of God.
We can see the principle of the divine sonship in chapter eight. Verse 14 of this chapter says, “For as many as are led by the Spirit of God, these are sons of God.” Then the following verses speak of the work of the Holy Spirit within us to transform us and conform us to the image of the Son of God, that the only begotten Son of God would be the Firstborn among many brothers. This means that God will realize His sonship in all of us. Originally we were only the sons of men, but through transformation we are being designated sons of God. Christ is the example of this sonship, being the seed of David designated the Son of God through resurrection, in which His humanity was sanctified, uplifted, and transformed to be brought into the divine sonship.