At this juncture her Beloved calls her to live in His ascension, as He had called her to remain in His cross. In 2:14 He called her to be with Him in the clefts of the rock and in the covert of the precipice. Now He calls her again to be with Him in His ascension instead of remaining on the mountain of myrrh and on the hill of frankincense.
Song of Songs 4:8 says, “Come with me from Lebanon, my bride; / With me from Lebanon come. / Look from the top of Amana, / From the top of Senir and Hermon, / From the lions’ dens, / From the leopards’ mountains.” Lebanon signifies ascension. In Christ’s ascension there are the positive peaks of reality, victory, and the destruction of the enemy. Amana means truth, reality. This is the truth, the reality, of the consummated Triune God, the all-inclusive Christ with His complete redemption, and the all-inclusive, compound, life-giving, sevenfold intensified Spirit. These realities are the three of the Triune God. Senir means soft armor, signifying that the war is over and victory has been gained. We do not need to wear the hard armor to fight. Satan is the defeated foe. We do not need to fight, because he has been defeated already (Heb. 2:14; Col. 2:15). We are now wearing the soft armor to enjoy our victory in Christ. Hermon means destruction. In ascension the enemy is destroyed.
With Christ Satan is a defeated foe, but with us he is still a troublesome one. Therefore, Ephesians 6 tells us that we need to wrestle with the evil one. Christ calls us to look from the heavenlies (v. 12), signified by the lions’ dens and the leopards’ mountains (S.S. 4:8b). Here are Satan and his subordinates (Eph. 6:12; 2:2). Here the believers fight with Satan and his power of darkness (6:12) by being empowered in the Lord and in the might of His strength (v. 10), by putting on the whole armor of God (vv. 11a, 13a), by standing against the stratagems of the devil (v. 11b), by receiving the helmet of salvation and the sword of the Spirit, the word of God (v. 17), and by praying always in spirit (v. 18a) for the building up of the Body of Christ and the spreading of the gospel (vv. 18b-20). This is the reality of living in the ascension of Christ.
For us to experience Christ, we must see that the death, resurrection, ascension, and Spirit of Christ are one group. When I was a young Christian, I read some books which said that I had to be crucified with Christ, but I did not know how I could crucify myself. One day Brother Nee said that death by crucifixion can never be carried out by ourselves as suicide. There must be others who do the crucifying. Romans 8:13 says, “If by the Spirit you put to death the practices of the body, you will live.” According to this verse, we put to death the activities of the body, not by ourselves but by the Spirit. Thus, it is by the Spirit that we crucify ourselves. Today, according to the New Testament the Spirit is in our spirit (Rom. 8:16).
To know Christ in His death, His resurrection, His ascension, and His bountiful Spirit, we need to see that these four things are one. Death is a condition in which Christ died for us and with us, and resurrection is a condition in which Christ was resurrected by God from the dead to release the divine life. If we have Christ in these conditions, we enjoy Him. It is the same with ascension and the Spirit. We cannot separate Christ from His ascension or from the life-giving Spirit. Christ is the life-giving Spirit. If He were separate from the life-giving Spirit, He would no longer be pneumatic. We can live in ascension by living in the pneumatic Christ, the Christ who is the Spirit in our spirit.
In the Lord’s recovery our reading and studying of the Bible are unique. When we come to the Bible, we exercise our spirit to contact the Lord Himself in His Word by both reading and praying. We pray-read the Bible to receive life, light, and revelation from the Spirit in our spirit. This is our way of studying the Bible. If we practice this way of studying, every verse will become meaningful. Because of this, what we have learned of the Lord over these many years is altogether new.