When this God-man became thirty years old, He began His ministry. The Spirit descended upon Him as a dove to empower Him for His ministry. Then He died on the cross to clear up every negative thing in the universe so that He, as the embodiment of the Triune God, could dispense Himself into us. He entered into resurrection, which was the second step for Him to become something. As the last Adam, He became a life-giving Spirit.

The crucial point that traditional theology has missed is this matter of Christ becoming a life-giving Spirit. We need to see why the Lord Jesus as the very God needed to take these two steps. First, He needed to accomplish redemption, to clear up the universe, to sweep away all the negative things. For this He needed to take the first step, to become a man. If He were not a man, He could not accomplish redemption. Thus, He became a typical man with human blood and flesh (Heb. 2:14). His death on the cross accomplished an all-inclusive redemption to take away all the negative things and clear up the universe for the divine dispensing. He did a marvelous job to take away all the negative things, to sweep away all the hindrances, to make the entire universe so clean and so clear for God to come in to dispense Himself into His chosen people.

I feel very sorry that many Jews would not believe that God became a man by the name of Jesus. They believe in God and respect and regard the Old Testament, but they would not take in the New Testament thought that their God has become a man by the name of Jesus. When Jesus was with them and indicated that He was God, they said that He was blaspheming (Matt. 9:3; John 10:33). It was preposterous to them that a man from Nazareth could be God. They did not have the understanding that for God to save them, to redeem them, He needed to become a man. They overlooked Isaiah 7:14: "Therefore the Lord himself shall give you a sign; Behold, a virgin shall conceive, and bear a son, and shall call his name Immanuel." Immanuel means "God with us" (Matt. 1:23). The Son born of a virgin is God with man—Jesus.

On the negative side, Jesus as the God-man cleared up the entire universe to accomplish an all-inclusive redemption. On the positive side, as the last Adam, He became a life-giving Spirit. In His incarnation He had a physical body of flesh and blood with bones and skin. After being resurrected, His body was transfigured into another form. First Corinthians 15 tells us that this is a spiritual body (v. 44). Philippians 3:21 refers to "the body of His glory." This is Christ's resurrected body, saturated by the Spirit and with God's glory (Luke 24:26) and transcendent over corruption and death (Rom. 6:9). In 1 Corinthians 15 Paul tells us that a seed has a form when it is sown into the earth, but when it dies and grows it is in another form (vv. 35-38). A seed sown into the earth dies and is made alive; this is resurrection. The resurrected body of the seed is in a different shape and on a higher level. The body of Jesus crucified on the cross was a physical body, but His resurrected body is a spiritual body. After His resurrection, He still possesses a body, a spiritual body.