The second pair is described in 1 Corinthians 10:3-4, where Christ is the spiritual rock, out of whom flows the living water, and also the spiritual food that comes down from heaven. Christ is the spiritual rock that follows us. Out of Him flows the living water, quenching our thirst and satisfying us. In addition, He is the daily spiritual food that comes down from heaven, becoming our life supply for our journeying. When we eat, drink, and enjoy Him every day, spontaneously, we will live by Him (John 6:57-58). In John 6:63 the Lord Jesus says: “It is the Spirit who gives life; the flesh profits nothing; the words which I have spoken unto you are spirit and are life.” The Lord is not giving the flesh of His physical body to us to eat. That flesh, the human flesh, profits nothing. What He gives to man is the life-giving Spirit, who is simply Himself in resurrection.
The whole Bible is full of this kind of thought, which is that God wants us to eat and to receive Him. Now in resurrection, He is the life-giving Spirit. This Spirit is embodied in His word. When we receive His word by exercising our spirit, we are eating and drinking the Lord. By this, we receive the Spirit who is life. Through this, Christ supplies us not only with the life-power for us to run God’s race, but with the divine element for God to grow.
The third pair is described in 2 Corinthians 1:21-22, where Christ as the compound Spirit is the anointing and the sealing. The holy ointment in Exodus 30 is a type of the compound Spirit of Christ. It is formed by one kind of oil mingled with four kinds of spices, typifying the fact that the Spirit of Christ is a compound Spirit. It includes divinity, humanity, death, the effectiveness of death, resurrection, the fragrance of resurrection, and other elements. When God joins us to Christ the Anointed One, we are anointed by God with Him; that is, we are anointed by the compound Spirit of Christ. This anointing is a dispensing, adding God’s divine elements into us. Furthermore, this anointing of the compound Spirit of Christ in us is a sealing, making the divine elements a seal in us, thus expressing the image of God.
Both the anointing and the sealing are a divine dispensing. This dispensing not only waters and saturates us, anointing and sealing us within and without with God’s divine element, but it transforms us in our nature metabolically with God’s divine element, so that our whole being has a divine transformation.
Finally, the fourth pair is found in 2 Corinthians 3:3 and 18. Here we have the inward inscribing by Christ into the believers with the life-giving Spirit as the ink and the outward “xeroxing” by Christ onto the believers as mirrors with His transforming Spirit. As those enjoying Christ, we are the letters of Christ, where the Spirit of the living God, as the living God Himself, and as the element of the inscribing ink, supplies us with Christ as the content, with the result that He is expressed in us, and He is known and read by all men. This is the inward aspect. But there is also the outward aspect, which is that we, the believers, are like a mirror. With unveiled face, we behold Christ. Christ is reflected on our face, and we are gradually transformed into the image of Christ.
Through this twofold divine dispensing, Christ will constitute us the ministers of the New Testament, and we will reflect His glorious image, thus fulfilling the New Testament ministry. As a result, not only will we become the very constitution of the life of Christ within, but we will become the glorious expression of Christ without.
This is God’s eternal economy, which is accomplished through the many-fold dispensing of the all-inclusive Christ. In conclusion, after the Triune God has been processed through death and resurrection to become the Spirit and has entered into us, He begins His dispensing. He dispenses the all-inclusive Christ to us as power, wisdom, righteousness, sanctification, and redemption. In addition, He also dispenses Christ to us as the Passover Lamb and the unleavened bread, as the spiritual rock out of which flows the living water, as the spiritual food from heaven, as the anointing and the sealing, as the inscribing of the inward ink, and as the xeroxing in the outward reflection. By this, we receive such a Christ for our supply, sustenance, feeding, watering, and transformation.
(A message given by Brother Witness Lee in Kuching, Malaysia on November 1, 1990)
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