The believers have been brought forth as a new child through Christ’s going and coming, that is, through His death and resurrection. When the disciples heard about the Lord’s going, they understood it in a natural way. They thought that the Lord’s going meant that He would leave them and stay away from them forever. However, according to the Gospel of John, the Lord’s going was to die an all-inclusive death to take away sin, terminate the old creation, judge the world, destroy Satan, abolish the law of commandments and ordinances, release the divine life, and prepare a place for the believers to enter into God.
Many readers of the Gospel of John think that the Lord’s coming in John 14 refers to His second advent. But by the word “coming” the Lord was referring to something that was to happen only a few days later-His resurrection. The Lord’s coming was His resurrection to germinate us in order to have a new creation to produce the church, which will consummate in the New Jerusalem. Therefore, in John 14, the Son’s coming signifies His coming as the Spirit in resurrection. His going was His death, and His coming was His resurrection. Death was a preparatory step for resurrection. The Lord Jesus died so that He might enter into resurrection. Actually, His going was His coming for He came by going.
When the disciples heard about the Lord’s going, they were disappointed, thinking that they would lose their dear Lord. However, He comforted them by indicating that He would go through death in order to come to them in resurrection and enter into them. The Lord said to them, “I am coming to you” (John 14:18). Then He went on to say, “In that day you shall know that I am in My Father, and you in Me, and I in you” (14:20). That day was the day of the Lord’s resurrection (John 20:19). On the day of His resurrection the Lord came back to the disciples to breathe Himself into them as the Spirit of the divine realities. This means that the One who entered into them was the Lord Himself as the pneumatic Christ. That was His coming back to enter into the disciples. Therefore, through Christ’s going and coming, through His death and resurrection, the new child was born.
The new child is the aggregate of all the children (John 1:12) or sons of God brought forth with Christ in His resurrection (Acts 13:33; 1 Pet. 1:3) as His many brothers (Rom. 8:29). This new child consists of Christ as the firstborn Son of God with all His brothers. All the believers, therefore, are parts, members, of this new child.
The new child as the aggregate of all the children of God was brought forth in Christ’s resurrection. According to 1 Peter 1:3, God regenerated us through the resurrection of Jesus Christ. When Christ was resurrected, we were regenerated to be children of God. The new child is the aggregate of all the children of God regenerated by God through the resurrection of Christ. Hence, the Lord’s resurrection was a universal delivery, the delivery not of a single child but of a corporate child including Christ as the Head and His many brothers as the Body. This was the birth of a new corporate child comprising Christ and the believers.
The new child brought forth with Christ in His resurrection is the new man as the Body of Christ (Eph. 2:15; Col. 3:10-11). The birth of the new child was actually the birth of the new man. The old man was created by God in Genesis 1 and 2, but the new man was born through the resurrection of Christ. We were born into the old man, but we were regenerated into the new man. This new man includes Christ as the Head and all the believers as the Body. The Head is the firstborn Son of God, and the Body is a composition of all the many sons of God, the many brothers of the Lord. This new man, this child, was brought forth through Christ’s death and resurrection.
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