We now come to the third major step of Christ: His resurrection. After His death, Christ was resurrected. What was the divine thought in this? God had planned that all creation should both be created through Christ and subsist in Him (Col. 1:16-17). Christ must be the means of creating and the center of the creation. Then, at a certain point, God's thought was to bring all things to an end by putting them to death in Christ. But that is not the end, because God in Christ could never be conquered by death. Death can never hold Christ (Acts 2:24), for He is the fountain of life. He went into death willingly, and He stepped out of death boldly. Even as all things were created through Christ and brought to death in Christ, so now all things are resurrected in Christ. This is the divine thought: to create all things in Christ, to bring all things to death in Christ, and then to resurrect all things in Christ.
We, as believers, must pass through all these processes. We know we have been created and, by the mercy of God, put to death. Now we must realize that we have also been resurrected in Christ. Unbelievers may know only the first step of the process. They were created, but as they have never experienced the death of Christ, they likewise have no share in His resurrection. We, however, share both His death and His resurrection. We were dead in Christ, and we were raised up in Him too. Christ's history is our experience. He was in death, and we were in Him. Now He is in resurrection, and praise the Lord, so are we! We are in this resurrection because we are in Him.
Perhaps you ask, Why did God put all things to death in Christ and then later bring all things to resurrection in Him? The answer is foreign to our thinking. At creation, nothing of God Himself was mingled with the creature. If we search the Scriptures, we must conclude that at the time of creation man did not receive the life of God. Nothing of God was mingled with man. But through the death and resurrection of Christ, God mingled Himself with man!
How did God mingle Himself with man? This is beyond our natural conception. Christ was incarnated as a man, and within this man is God, the source of life itself. This man, Christ, likened Himself to a grain of wheat (John 12:24). Life, we know, is in the grain of wheat. But the life needs to be released; it is limited within the grain. How can this life be released? It is released through death. If we plant the grain into the earth and it dies, the life in it will be released to grow and bear fruit. It will produce many grains, the result of the release of life. The grain is the man, Jesus; the life in this grain is the divine life of God Himself; the many grains are all those who are regenerated (1 Pet. 1:3). We are the many grains with the divine life of God. Formerly we had nothing of God mingled with us, but now, through the death and resurrection of Christ, God Himself is mingled with us in life. We have the life of God. We have God Himself in us as life. We have been recreated. Christ, who is now our life, is the very embodiment of God in us. To be a Christian is much more than being forgiven, redeemed, and saved. It is also that we are mingled with God in Christ through His Spirit. We are one with God; He lives in us! Christ created us, brought us into death, and also brought us into resurrection. We are joined to Christ. His experiences are our experiences: when He died, we died; when He was resurrected, we were resurrected. To be dead is to be released; to be resurrected is to be joined to someone else. By death we were freed from everything of Adam. The fall of Adam put us into prison, but the death of Christ opened this prison, and now we are free! But this is not the end, because by resurrection we are joined to everything of Christ. We are dead to everything of Adam and raised up to everything of Christ, because we are joined to God in Christ through the Holy Spirit.
I have been traveling for a number of years and have met quite a number of Christians of various backgrounds and teachings; yet I find very few who understand the resurrection of Christ. The Apostle Paul said that he wanted to know Christ and the power of His resurrection. There is something here which is mysterious and beyond human conception. You may say, "Brother, I understand the resurrection of Christ." But I would ask you, What does it mean? I have spent considerable time collecting hymns on the resurrection of Christ; yet there is hardly one that is really useful! These hymns merely relate the history of the resurrection of Christ. "Christ is risen, Hallelujah!"—that's all. You can hardly find a hymn telling you that the resurrection is to be inwardly experienced by you, that it has brought Christ into you and that you are one with Him in it!