The enjoyment of the Father in His love, of the Son in His grace, and of the Spirit in His fellowship is a matter of God’s dispensing (2 Cor. 13:14). The enjoyment of the processed Triune God in love, grace, and fellowship is for transformation, and transformation results in conformation. Transformation is a matter of essence, whereas conformation is a matter of form. Christ has a form, an image, and we need to be conformed to His form.
The believers enjoy the dispensing of the divine Trinity in the divine transformation for the divine conformation by being transformed. Second Corinthians 3:18 says, “We all with unveiled face, beholding and reflecting as a mirror the glory of the Lord, are being transformed into the same image from glory to glory, even as from the Lord Spirit.” To be transformed is to have Christ added into our being to replace what we are so that Christ may increase and our natural life may decrease. As the process of transformation takes place within us, the old element of our natural being is carried away, and the glory, the resurrected Christ as the life-giving Spirit, is added into us to replace the natural element. The process of transformation is both organic and metabolic. It is organic because it is related to life, and it is metabolic because it is related to a process in which an old element is discharged and a new element is added.
There is a difference between change and transformation. Transformation involves the process of metabolism. However, something may change in an outward way without any inward metabolic transformation. In the process of metabolism a new element is supplied to an organism. This new element replaces the old element and causes it to be discharged. Therefore, as the process of metabolism takes place within a living organism, something new is added to it to replace the old element, which is carried away. Metabolism thus includes three matters:
first, the supplying of a new element; second, the replacing of the old element with this new element; and third, the discharge or the removal of the old element so that something new may be produced.
Transformation is a metabolic process, a metabolic change. The Spirit’s work in transforming us involves a change in our whole being-in life, nature, essence, element, form, and appearance. Transformation is not outward change, correction, or adjustment; transformation is altogether an inward, metabolic change of our being. Therefore, we may define transformation as a divine, spiritual metabolism wherein a new element is added to the old to discharge the old and to produce something new.
As those who are being transformed, we have been freed from the bondage of the law by the Spirit of the Lord. “The Lord is the Spirit, and where the Spirit of the Lord is, there is freedom” (2 Cor. 3:17). According to the context of 2 Corinthians 3, this freedom is the freedom from the bondage of the letters of the Old Testament law, that is, the written code of the Old Testament. At Paul’s time the Judaizers and those influenced by them were bound by the traditional code of the law. But the Lord Jesus came to release His followers from this bondage, in particular from the Judaic fold that was formed according to the code of the law in the Old Testament. All those who followed the Lord Jesus were freed from that bondage. Later, the Lord appeared to one of the strongest Judaizers, Saul of Tarsus, called him, and brought him out of the bondage of the law. Therefore, in 2 Corinthians 3:17 Paul could say that we have been freed from this bondage by the Spirit of the Lord.
We know that we are freed by the Spirit because where the Spirit of the Lord is, there is liberty. Now the Spirit of the Lord is with us, and we have full liberty, full freedom, from the bondage of the Old Testament code of the law.
The Lord being the Spirit is to free us from regulations, rituals, religious teachings, and traditional doctrines. At Paul’s time the Jews were under the bondage of circumcision, the bondage of dietary regulations, and the bondage of the Sabbath and other Old Testament regulations. Today, however, is not the age of the law of letters but the age of the Lord Jesus being the pneumatic Christ, the Spirit. Moses, with the letter of the law, put the people under bondage-the bondage of keeping the Sabbath, the bondage of circumcision, the bondage of dietary regulations, the bondage of not contacting Gentiles, and many other bondages. But the Lord being the Spirit is freedom to us. With Him there is no bondage, no Sabbath, no circumcision, and no dietary regulations. Rather, with Him there is full freedom. The Lord is the Spirit, and He is our freedom. When the heart turns to the Lord, the veil is taken away, and then the Lord as the Spirit gives us freedom. Because the Lord is the Spirit who gives freedom, when the heart turns to Him, the heart is freed from the bondage of the letter of the law.
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