In the lampstand there is the crucial and vital concept that the Triune God is being wrought into His redeemed (Rom. 8:9-11). In the last chapter we saw that the lampstand is the embodiment of the Triune God which means the Triune God has been wrought into His redeemed. Without such an explanation, we cannot understand the lampstand thoroughly. We are now looking at the lampstand from another angle, another perspective. The lampstand signifies that the Triune God has been wrought into His redeemed, but now we need to ask how this takes place. We have already seen that in order for the Triune God to be wrought into us we all need to eat (John 6:57), drink (John 4:14; 1 Cor. 12:13), and breathe (John 20:22) of the Lord. We want to see how this takes place, though, from another perspective.
First, the Triune God is wrought into His redeemed by the divine birth (1 John 3:9; 5:1-4). At the time I believed in the Lord Jesus I was very clear that I was born of God. I was taught by the Brethren that he who has been begotten of God does not practice sin (1 John 3:9), and that he who is born of God overcomes the world and Satan (1 John 5:4). For years, however, I was not clear that by the divine birth something divine had been born into my being. We all need to have the deep realization that through the divine birth, at the time we believed in the Lord Jesus, the divine element was born into us. Birth is not something vain, but always brings some element into the one born. A Chinese boy who is born of a Chinese father has the Chinese life and the Chinese nature. His eyes, nose, hair, face, color, and blood are all Chinese. The Chinese element has been born into that little baby. The more the little baby boy grows, the more the Chinese things come out. Everything that is Chinese is in the Chinese gene. In the Scandinavian countries most of the people have blonde hair. A Danish boy does not need to worry about having black hair. Someone who is born black does not need to worry about having blonde hair. The black birth brings the black hair genes into the baby’s being.
Since we have been born of God, we must realize that everything of God has been born into us. In “God’s gene” there are holiness, righteousness, love, and the highest morality. Through our growth in life, everything in the gene which we have received will come out. When we grow, eventually the divine holiness, the divine righteousness, and the divine love grow out of us. What a wonderful thing that we all have been born of God! What birth can exceed this birth? No birth is so high or so supreme as the birth of God. We have received a supreme birth, the birth of God, and by this birth something divine has been born in us, into our being.
Many of the teachings in today’s Christianity turn people away from the divine gene to endeavoring and striving for self improvement. These teachings are off from God’s economy. We all must realize that we have been born of God and all the divine attributes have been born into our being. In this divine gene are included all the divine attributes. We do not need teachings concerning self improvement or concerning how to be a better Christian. We need the scientific teaching of the divine life to find out how to water this life and nourish this life to cause this life to grow. We do not need the teaching which teaches people to improve their behavior and to try, endeavor, strive, and struggle to do good. This teaching is the same as the teaching of Confucius.
In the fall of 1964 I came to Dallas, Texas for the ministry of the Word. In one of these meetings I shared that today we do not need the teachings, but our desperate need is for the living Christ. After this meeting a group of people surrounded me and contended with me that we do need the teachings. They used 2 Timothy 3:16 as their basis in saying that all Scripture is profitable for teaching. The teaching Paul was talking about here, of course, was the healthy teaching (1 Tim. 1:10). Healthy implies the matter of life. Anything that is healthy refers to the health of life. The sound teaching of the apostles, which is according to the gospel of the glory of God, ministers healthy teaching as the supply of life to people, either nourishing them or healing them. Any teaching that distracts people from the center and goal of God’s New Testament economy is not healthy. When these ones surrounded me after the meeting and told me this, I still insisted that they did not need teachings but the living Christ. Many Christians today have received many teachings, yet they are still so poor because the teachings they received were not the healthy teaching. Teachings which are not healthy do not help us. We need the watering and the “fertilizing” which help us to grow in life. We need the kind of teaching which teaches us how to fertilize and water for the growth in life. I have been teaching this way in the United States for the last twenty-two years. Our burden in the ministry is to minister the Lord as the healthy food to all His children. Many of us can testify that when we read the Life-study messages, we do not get mere teachings but we enjoy the Lord Himself as our food, our nourishment.
We all must see the tremendous significance of the divine birth. The divine gene has been born into us! We need to be those who are taking care of the divine gene within us, and our minds need to be renewed to have such a proper understanding of the divine birth. Even though I am older than many of you, I am actually very young because I have the divine gene within me. We need to tell our relatives, friends, neighbors, and colleagues that the divine gene, which includes the divine life and the divine nature, has been born into us. This is our capital and there is no mathematical figure adequate to describe it. God Himself has been born into us. Even if someone has been recently saved we need to tell him that God has been born into him and that he has God in him (1 John 4:15). The new birth is that God has been born into me and into you. The Triune God has been wrought into our being by the way of being born into us. We need the scientific teaching, the scientific study, of the Bible concerning God being in us. We need to find out how God is in us and what He is doing in us.
Paul did this kind of scientific teaching in Romans 8:9-11: “But you are not in the flesh, but in the spirit, if indeed the Spirit of God dwells in you. But if anyone has not the Spirit of Christ, he is not of Him. And if Christ is in you, though the body is dead because of sin, yet the spirit is life because of righteousness. But if the Spirit of Him who raised Jesus from among the dead dwells in you, He who raised Christ Jesus from among the dead will also give life to your mortal bodies through His Spirit who indwells you.” In these verses, Paul talks about Christ being in us and indwelling us in a very scientific, thorough, and detailed way. We all need this kind of scientific study and teaching concerning the very God who has been born into our being. We need this teaching to tell us how this God is living in us and working in us.