The Lord’s surpassing prayer and His unveiling teaching in Matthew 11:25-30 are regarding four major items: regarding God’s eternal economy, regarding God’s pleasant will, regarding the first God-man as the Head of the Body, the prototype, and the model, and regarding His believers as the members of His Body, His mass production, and His duplication. The mass production is from the prototype, and the duplication is from the model.
God’s eternal economy is seen in Matthew 11:27, where the Lord says, “All things have been delivered to Me by My Father, and no one fully knows the Son except the Father; neither does anyone fully know the Father except the Son and him to whom the Son wills to reveal Him.”
The Father has delivered all His elect to the Son for the building up of the Son’s Body (v. 27a; John 6:37, 44, 65; 17:6b; 18:9). God the Father has given all His chosen ones to the Son, not for them to go to heaven or merely for their salvation but for the building up of the Body of Christ. The Son needs a Body and the Triune God needs an organism. The Body of Christ is the Triune God’s organism for His expression and enlargement. Physically speaking, our body is our enlargement. The Body of Christ as the organism is the enlargement of Christ as the Head. All the elect given to the Son by the Father are the enlargement of Christ and the organism of the Triune God to express Him.
Only the Father knows the Son as the centrality and universality of His economy (Matt. 11:27b; cf. Col. 2:2; Matt. 16:15-17; Gal. 1:15-16; Eph. 3:4; Phil. 3:10). Christ the Son is the mystery of God. God has His person and His purpose. God’s person is triune. His Trinity is His person. The content of the New Testament is the Triune God. Every chapter of Ephesians reveals the Triune God (see note 1 of 2 Corinthians 13:14—Recovery Version). Chapter one reveals that God has blessed us in a threefold way. In the Father, He has chosen us; in the Son, He has redeemed us; and in the Spirit, He seals us and is our guarantee. The economy of the Triune God is for Him to dispense Himself into His chosen and redeemed people to make them His expression.
The Triune God’s economy was made according to His purpose for His good pleasure, and His good pleasure comes out of His heart’s desire. God is a living person, full of feeling. He has His heart’s desire. Out of God’s heart’s desire is God’s good pleasure. Out of this pleasure is God’s purpose, and out of this purpose is His economy. The entire Bible is the contents of God’s economy.
Christ as God came to be a man for God’s economy. He is the centrality and universality of God. In January 1934 Brother Watchman Nee gave a conference on Christ being the centrality and universality of God. He is the hub, the rim, and the spokes—the entire content—of God’s economy. The first conference I gave in the United States was on the all-inclusive Christ typified by the good land from only three verses—Deuteronomy 8:7-9. To know Christ, as Paul said in Philippians 3:10, is not a small thing, because He is everything. To know any other person is simple because that person is not all-inclusive.
Christ was God becoming a man, and this man who was in the flesh, as the last Adam, became a life-giving Spirit (1 Cor. 15:45b). This life-giving Spirit is compounded with the Divine Trinity, divinity, humanity, Christ’s death with its effectiveness, and His resurrection with its power. All these items are compounded into the compound Spirit typified by the anointing ointment in Exodus 30. Also, this compounded, life-giving Spirit became intensified sevenfold (Rev. 1:4; 4:5; 5:6). The New Testament reveals Christ in the flesh in the Gospels, Christ as the life-giving Spirit in the Epistles, and Christ as the sevenfold intensified life-giving Spirit in Revelation. No one can know Christ the Son in an exhaustive way except the Father. The Son is the Father’s word, explanation, definition, and expression.
Only the Son knows the Father as the source and Maker of His economy (Matt. 11:27c). No one fully knows the Father except the Son and those believers to whom the Son wills to reveal the Father. The four Gospels show us God the Father. No other book reveals the Father as much as the Gospel of John does. We have seen that the Lord Jesus extolled the Father as the Lord of heaven and earth (v. 25). He praised the Father with acknowledgment.
The Son reveals the Father to His believers for the formation of His Body (v. 27d; John 17:6a). God’s economy is for the expression of the Father through the Son with His organism, the Body of Christ. The New Testament teaches that the Father as the source has a desire to have an organism through the Son, and the Son came to call God’s elect to come to Him so that He can regenerate, sanctify, and transform them, making them His Body to be the organism of the Triune God.
The New Testament teaches us, the members of the Body of Christ, to do everything with God, in God, by God, and through God. It does not teach us to love people in an ethical way with our natural love. We have to love others by and with God, in a divine and mystical way. His love is divine, but the outward lover is a mystical human. The Bible teaches us to live as divine and mystical persons.