In this message we have come to one of the most mysterious matters in the Bible—the resurrection of Christ. First, God Himself is resurrection. This was why the Lord Jesus, when He was about to resurrect the dead Lazarus, told Martha that He is the resurrection (John 11:25). He is not only life but also resurrection. In the entire universe, apart from God, apart from Christ, there is no resurrection. God is resurrection. God is a mystery, and this mystery is resurrection. Then this mystery eventually became the consummated Spirit.
For many years I did not have much understanding of what resurrection is. I received much teaching concerning Christ's death, but I did not have a full realization of Christ's resurrection. But today I can tell you that resurrection is a threefold mystery. God, resurrection, and the Spirit are the constituents of this threefold mystery. Resurrection originates with God and is consummated in the all-inclusive, life-giving, compound Spirit.
The consummated Spirit is the reality of the resurrection of Christ. The resurrection of Christ can be realized and experienced only in the Spirit. Without the Spirit, we cannot know the resurrection. Resurrection is a person. Resurrection is God. God passed through the processes of incarnation, human living, crucifixion, and resurrection to become the life-giving Spirit (1 Cor. 15:45b). The Spirit is the consummation of God as the resurrection.
Today if the Spirit were taken away from us, we would no longer be Christians (Rom. 8:9b). Furthermore, if the Spirit were taken away from the Bible, the Bible would become a book just of dead letters. It would become merely a storybook with no reality. The reality of the Bible is the Spirit as the consummation of resurrection, and resurrection is the embodiment of the processed God.
In our Christian experience, we experience the Spirit daily, but due to the lack of adequate teaching among today's Christians, we do not realize that our experience of the Spirit is our experience of the resurrection of Christ. Today there are a number of people who talk about how to be filled with the Spirit. But if we do not realize that the Spirit is the resurrection, we cannot have the adequate experience of the Spirit. As long as we experience resurrection, that is the real experience of the Spirit, both essentially and economically.