Christ, the embodiment of the processed Triune God, with His unsearchable riches, is the life of the church. Colossians 3:4 speaks of “Christ our life.” Christ is not only our objective Savior; He is also our subjective life. The fact that Christ is our life indicates that we need to experience Christ in our daily living. Christ, not our self, our soul, should be our life.
Christ is God and also life (1 John 5:12). The life which is God, the life that God is, is in Christ (John 1:4). Hence, the Lord Jesus said that He is life (John 14:6; 11:25). Therefore, He who has Christ has life (1 John 5:12).
If Christ is not our life in our practical experience, then all that He is as the embodiment of the processed Triune God with His unsearchable riches will remain objective to us. Paul’s use of the expression “our life” indicates that we and Christ have one life. Day by day we need to experience Christ as life, having one life and one living with Him.
For Christ to be our life, the life of the church, means that He is subjective to us to the uttermost. Nothing is more subjective to us than our life. Our life is actually we ourselves. It is impossible to separate a person from the life of that person, for a person’s life is the person himself. If we did not have life, we would cease to exist. To say that Christ has become our life means that Christ has become us. Since our life cannot be separated from us and since Christ is our life, He cannot be separated from us. Because our life is our self and because Christ is our life, we may say that, in this sense, Christ has become us. In a very subjective sense, Christ is the life of the church.
As the intrinsic constituent of the church, Christ is not only the life of the church but also the nature of the church. Second Peter 1:4 indicates that the believers, as members of the church, the Body of Christ, have become “partakers of the divine nature.” The divine nature refers to the riches of what God is; it denotes the constituents of God’s being. Whatever God is, is in His nature. To partake of God’s nature is to enjoy it and to participate in it. Therefore, when we partake of the divine nature, we partake of the divine riches.
Because we, the believers in Christ, are children of God born of Him, we possess God’s life and also His nature for our enjoyment. Although we definitely can never participate in the Godhead or become an object of worship, in life and in nature we, the children of God, are the same as God. In this sense, as those who have been born of God, we are divine. Having received the divine life at the time of our regeneration, we now must go on to enjoy what God is in His nature, continually partaking of the divine nature, which is the nature of the church.
The Christ who is the embodiment of the processed Triune God is also the consummated, all-inclusive Spirit (Phil. 1:19). The Spirit of God in Genesis 1 was not yet consummated. Likewise, the Spirit of Jehovah in the Old Testament was not consummated. Not even the Holy Spirit, by whom Jesus was conceived and born, was the consummated Spirit. Concerning the consummated Spirit, John 7:39 says, “The Spirit was not yet, because Jesus was not yet glorified.” The Spirit of God was there from the beginning (Gen. 1:1-2), but the Spirit as the Spirit of Jesus Christ was “not yet” in John 7:39 because at that time the Lord Jesus had not yet been glorified. The Lord was glorified when He was resurrected (Luke 24:26). After His resurrection, the Spirit of God became the Spirit of Jesus Christ, the Spirit of the incarnated, crucified, and resurrected Christ. This is the consummated Spirit, the all-inclusive Spirit, including the Lord’s divinity, humanity, human living, all-inclusive death, and resurrection. The Spirit, the Spirit of Jesus Christ, is, therefore, the consummated, all-inclusive Spirit.
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