Now we come to the issue of God’s dispensing. In order for God to dispense Himself into us, Christ is many items. In the foregoing message we covered thirty-four of those items. Of those thirty-four items, one item is very significant, that is, Christ is the firstborn Son of God. I was a Christian for a number of years before I understood and paid attention to the fact that first Christ was the only begotten Son of God, and that He became the firstborn Son of God. The only begotten means the only Son, the only one, and the firstborn means the first one among many. Does God have one Son or many sons? This is a crucial point. If we could not see this point, we could not understand what is the issue of God’s dispensing.
Have you noticed that Jesus Christ, after living on this earth thirty-three and one-half years, was born? In Acts 13:33 Peter indicated to us that when the Lord Jesus was raised up in resurrection, He was begotten of God. Was He not the Son of God before resurrection? Surely He was! Since He was the Son of God before His resurrection, why did He still need to be born in resurrection to be the Son of God? This is not easy to explain. Before His incarnation He was God’s only begotten Son in eternity. He did not have any human nature with the blood and flesh. He was altogether divine. One day He became flesh. This means He took the human nature upon Him. He took blood and flesh upon Himself (Heb. 2:14) and became human. Within Him there was something divine. That was the Son of God. But His human nature was the Son of Man. It was human and not divine. The inward being of Jesus was the Son of God already, but the outward being, His humanity was the Son of Man. His outward being, His humanity, was not yet the Son of God. It was His outward being that needed to be born of God.
How could Christ’s humanity be born to be the Son of God? It was through death and resurrection. Christ’s death brought His humanity into resurrection. Through resurrection His humanity was born into the divine sonship. So the resurrection of Christ was the birth of His humanity into the sonship of God. This made Him, the only begotten Son of God, the firstborn Son of God.
Sometimes in human birth there are twins, that is, one delivery with two children or triplets, that is, one delivery with three children. In the resurrection of Christ, in that delivery, there were not only two or three children, but millions of children. There was one delivery, but many sons of God, many brothers of Christ were brought forth (Heb. 2:10-12; Rom. 8:29). Christ as the firstborn Son of God does not have any sisters. He only has brothers, sons of God. All the sisters are also brothers of Christ. In that one delivery many, many sons were born. Of the many who were born, the first was the man Jesus. Then all of us were born. I don’t know what number you are or what number I am, but when Christ was born, we were born too. When Christ was resurrected, we were resurrected. He was the only begotten Son of God before His resurrection, but through His resurrection the only begotten Son became the firstborn Son. The Firstborn is the leading one. He takes the lead, and we all follow. What He has gone through, we also should pass through. He went through death, and we also should go through the same process of death and resurrection.
Today we are in the process of death and resurrection so that we might be conformed to the image of the firstborn Son of God (Rom. 8:29). The many brothers are just the issue of God’s dispensing. At the resurrection of Christ, God infused and dispensed Himself into millions of Christ’s believers. This means at one juncture, even in one action, God the Father dispensed Himself into all of us. Christ’s resurrection was the dispensing of God into millions of Christians.
Every human birth is a dispensing of the father’s life into the child. Before a man becomes a father he is only one, but after the birth of his child, his life has been dispensed into another one. What is resurrection? It is the dispensing of God into His believers. What is regeneration? That also is the dispensing of God into the believers. This basic thought must be impressed into our being. Then we will be revolutionized in our thinking, and we will never try to improve our character. We need to forget about improving our character. That is not the biblical revelation, but mere human ethics.
We did have such a good beginning. God was dispensed into our being. So we all became sons of God. We became, not creatures of God, but sons of God. And we are sons, not by adoption, but by birth. We are the typical, genuine, and real sons of God. In our new birth our Father has dispensed Himself into our being. Actually our being comes out of this dispensing. Without such a divine dispensing, we don’t have our being. Our being comes out of our Father’s life. The issue of such a divine dispensing is the church. The church is not you and me and so many others added together. The entire church is the issue of the dispensing of our Father.
For example, consider Eve in Genesis 2. How did she come into existence? Adam was created by God out of the dust of the ground, but Eve was not created in that way. Eve came forth as the issue of life dispensing. Life in the form of a rib was dispensed out of Adam and issued in Eve. In other words, Eve was the increase of Adam. The church is not just an organization of human beings. The church is the increase of Christ. The increase of a person is surely the dispensing of his life. We have already mentioned that birth is a dispensing of life. The church is altogether a matter of the dispensing of life. The church is the total dispensing of God into His chosen people. God dispenses Himself into this one, into that one, and into so many others. We are the total dispensing of our Father. The church is just the family of God. A family is the total dispensing of the father. Likewise, the church is just the totality of the dispensing of God our Father into so many sons. The many sons of God which came forth in the resurrection of Christ are also the many brothers of Christ (Heb. 2:10-12; Rom. 8:29). The many brothers are the many members of Christ (Rom. 12:5; 1 Cor. 12:12), and these many members are just the Body of Christ (1 Cor. 12:13, 27; Col. 1:18; Eph. 4:4). The Body of Christ is the fullness of the One who fills all in all (Eph. 1:23), and this fullness is the house of God (1 Tim. 3:15; 1 Pet. 2:5). The house of God also is the temple of God (1 Cor. 3:16-17; Eph. 2:21-22). All these aspects of the church come from God’s dispensing.
The more I speak something about God’s dispensing and about Christ increased in us, the more my burden is stirred up. I can never exhaust this kind of speaking. If you give me the time I would tell you again and again concerning God’s dispensing from the first page of the Bible to the last. I would tell you again and again that God wants to be planted in you as the tree of life to grow into every part of your being and to infuse you with God’s dispensing.
In that one resurrection of Christ, that one delivery, millions of children were born. They are just the totality of God’s dispensing. And this totality becomes the church which is His Body (Eph. 1:22-23). This is also His fullness. Without the church, Christ has no fullness. This fullness of Christ is the house of God where God dwells. The fullness contains God, it is the temple of God. The temple is not only God’s house, but also our house. Not only does the Father live in this house, but all the children live in this house, too. Here in Stuttgart God has a temple as His own house which has become our house. We who are the children, the issue of His dispensing, and the Father, the source of this dispensing, dwell together in this house. This is the church life. Such a church life is the total issue of God’s continuous dispensing.