In this message, I will review the major points of the previous messages on the experience and growth in life.
Life is God Himself, life is Christ, and life is the Spirit, but simply to say this is not adequate. Life is the processed Triune God. The God who is life to us is the processed Triune God. If God had never been processed in His Trinity, He would be life to Himself, but He could never be life to us. In order for God to be life to us, He had to be triune-the Father, the Son, and the Spirit.
As the Triune God, He was processed through several steps: incarnation, crucifixion, and resurrection. Without each of these steps, the Triune God could not be life to us. Incarnation is for the Father, with all His divine fullness, to be embodied in the Son (Col. 2:9) and through the Spirit (Luke 1:35) that He might have humanity added to His divinity. In incarnation the Son is the Father’s embodiment, and the Spirit is the divine essence of the Son’s incarnation. The Son is the embodiment of the Triune God with the Spirit as the essence.
The Son then went to the cross with the Father and through the Spirit. His going to die on the cross was not the Father’s crucifixion nor the Spirit’s crucifixion. It was the Son’s crucifixion, yet the Son was not alone. He was crucified with the Father and through the Spirit. On the cross, Christ offered Himself to God through the eternal Spirit (Heb. 9:14). The process of crucifixion is of the Son with the Father through the Spirit.
Resurrection is the Son’s resurrection to become the life-giving Spirit (1 Cor. 15:45b). In resurrection, the Son became the Spirit (2 Cor. 3:17). The Son, the last Adam, became a life-giving Spirit in resurrection. The Son who died through the cross resurrected in the Spirit and as the Spirit.
These are the processes the Triune God passed through in order to be life to us. This life is the processed Triune God, the Son as the embodiment of the Father and the consummated Spirit as the consummation of the processed Triune God. Such a life is now embodied in the word. When the word reaches us, it is spirit and life (John 6:63). Now we have life. We have the Father, embodied in the Son, consummated as the Spirit, and embodied in the word, reaching us to be our life.
The five crucial verses concerning life in Romans 8, verses 2, 10, 6, 11, and 13, unveil to us five crucial points, in the order of their significance, as follows:
Romans 8:2 says, “For the law of the Spirit of life in Christ Jesus has freed me from the law of sin and of death.” In this verse the phrase “the law of the Spirit of life” is composed of three elements. The order of these elements according to their significance is the Spirit, life, and the law. Without the Spirit, you cannot have life. Without life, the law is absent. The law comes out of life, and life is of the Spirit. In Romans 8 Paul did not say the Holy Spirit because “the Spirit” is understood to be the consummated Spirit. The Spirit in the New Testament denotes not only the Spirit of God and the Holy Spirit but also the consummated Spirit. The word consummated implies a process. Before something is consummated or processed, it may be raw. When food is uncooked, it remains raw, but once it is cooked, processed, or consummated, it is ready to be served at the dining table for people to eat. In the same way, the Triune God has been consummated. The Spirit who is life to us is the consummated Spirit, the consummation of the processed Triune God.
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