What is grace, and what is reality? Grace is God in the Son as our enjoyment, and reality is God in the Son realized by us. Therefore, grace and reality are both God Himself. However, we are not speaking merely about the Father; we are referring to something that has progressed from the Father to the Son. In the Father, God is hidden, but in the Son, God is expressed. Expression indicates progression; it is the fullness, the overflowing of the riches. The riches in the Father are hidden, but in the Son the riches are expressed. This expression is the fullness. In the Father the riches are a matter of existence; in the Son the riches are a matter of expression. Existence becomes expression, the fullness, in the Son.
God is rich. His riches consist of His attributes and all that He is. This is a matter of His existence. When the riches progress to the Son, there is an expression, an overflow; this is the fullness. The riches as a matter of existence are in the Father, but the fullness is not related to the Father. The fullness is in the Son. When the Son is expressed, the riches become the fullness. Therefore, in the Son the riches of grace, truth, and love become the fullness of grace, truth, and love. In 3:16 John was moved by the Spirit to write, “God so loved the world that He gave His only Begotten Son.” The words so and that show the overflow of the divine love, and the overflow causes those who believe into the Son not to perish but to have the eternal life of God.
We have become the children of God, possessing the divine life and nature. The fullness of the divine love fills us until we are filled to the brim. We enjoy the eternal God in the eternal life until He makes us exactly the same as He is. This is not only the riches of love but the fullness, the overflowing of love. The purpose of my explaining these truths is to demonstrate the proper principle of studying the Bible.
At the beginning of 1961 I was in Taiwan and wrote eighty-five hymns. One of these hymns says, “Christ is the one reality of all, / Of Godhead and of man and all things else; / No man without Him ever findeth God, / Without Him man and everything is false” (Hymns, #496). We cannot find a hymn with this kind of content in any hymnal in Christianity. Over the past two thousand years, thousands of teachers have expounded the Bible, but no one ever wrote a hymn on Christ being the reality of all. However, an old Chinese man who was born in a small town in Shantung and who has no degree in theology wrote such a hymn.
The title of the first conference we held in the United States was “The All-inclusive Christ.” In this conference I said that Christ is the food that we eat, He is the clothes that we wear, He is the house that we live in, and He is the chair that we sit on and the bed that we sleep in. Some of the people who attended the conference said that this was pantheism. Their criticism proved their ignorance of the Bible, because Colossians 2:16-17 says that eating, drinking, feasts, new moons, and Sabbaths are a shadow of Christ. Christ is our food, our drink, our feasts, our new moons, and our Sabbaths. Christ is the reality of all things. If what I said was pantheism, Paul was the first person to speak in this way.
The truth is the truth. We need to know our goods, to know the treasure we have. I hope that every saint will give his all for this treasure. Fifty years ago I made the decision to give my all for this treasure. After all these years, I am delighted to see that I made the right decision. In the matter of knowing the truth, we have much to learn.
The title of this chapter is “The Truth Being Our Freedom.” Is the truth concerning Christ as our life deeper than that of the truth as our freedom? After speaking on these two matters for the past fifty years, I can say that neither topic is easy. In a previous chapter I spoke concerning Christ as our life, but I did not cover it thoroughly, because the matter of Christ being our life is too profound, mysterious, and marvelous.