Message Six

Empowered and Encouraged
by the Resurrection of Christ

Scripture Reading: S.S. 2:8-13

1. In order to empower and encourage His lover to rise up and get away from her down situation in her introspection of the self:
   1. Christ empowers her by showing her the power of His resurrection by the gazelle’s leaping upon the mountains and the young hart’s skipping upon the hills—2:8-9:
      1. It is by this power of Christ’s resurrection that we, the lovers of Christ, determine to take the cross by denying our self (Matt. 16:24).
      2. It is also by this power of Christ’s resurrection that we, the lovers of Christ, are enabled to be conformed to His death (Phil. 3:10), to be one with His cross as staying in the clefts of the rock, in the covert of the precipice (2:14).
   2. Christ encourages her by the flourishing riches of His resurrection—2:11-13:
      1. The dormant days (winter) are past and the trials (rain) are over and gone.
      2. The life in all appearances is blossoming.
      3. The time of praising—singing—has come.
      4. The fruit tree has ripened in its fruits.
      5. The vines are in blossom, giving forth their fragrance.
2. Christ, the embodiment of the Triune God, is resurrection (John 11:25) before His death, indicating that the entirety of the Triune God is resurrection in the universe:
   1. Christ as the God-man in His humanity was made the firstborn Son of God in resurrection (Acts 13:33; Rom. 1:3-4; 8:29).
   2. Christ as the last Adam became the life-giving Spirit in resurrection (1 Cor. 15:45).
   3. God regenerated many sons through the resurrection of Christ (1 Pet. 1:3), making them His new creation (2 Cor. 5:17; Gal. 6:15).
3. The resurrected Christ becoming the life-giving Spirit as the reality of His resurrection (John 11:25):
   1. The resurrection of Christ is linked with the Spirit who gives life.
   2. This life-giving Spirit indwells our spirit (Rom. 8:11; Eph. 2:22).
   3. Hence, our regenerated spirit indwelt by the life-giving Spirit becomes the Holiest of all as God’s dwelling place linked with the Holiest of all in the third heaven (Heb. 4:16).
   4. This Christ as the life-giving Spirit becomes the heavenly ladder that brings heaven to earth and joins the earth to heaven at Bethel—God’s dwelling place in the spirit of the believers on earth (Gen. 28:11-22; John 1:51).
   5. We have to discern our spirit from our soul:
      1. In our soul we are the old man (Eph. 4:22), the soulish man, the natural man (1 Cor. 2:14).
      2. In our spirit we are the new man (Eph. 4:24), the spiritual man (1 Cor. 2:14-15), that lives and walks in our spirit, as God’s Holiest of all, indwelt by and mingled with the life-giving Spirit, the pneumatic Christ.
      3. It is in such a mingled spirit that we participate in and experience the resurrection of Christ, the reality of which is the all-inclusive, life-giving, compound Spirit, the consummation of the processed and consummated Triune God.