The secret of having the five major steps of God’s economy as our experience lies with the life-giving Spirit. After He accomplished redemption in the flesh, Christ was resurrected. After His resurrection, He was qualified to ascend to heaven. For the sake of His disciples, however, He did not ascend to heaven publicly on the day of His resurrection. Rather, in the evening of His resurrection He came back to be with His disciples, and He appeared to them through a period of forty days and spoke the things concerning the kingdom of God (John 20:19; Acts 1:3) to give them some “private tutoring.” Then after forty days He ascended to heaven openly before their eyes.
Christ was the Spirit when He ascended to heaven; He had a body, but that body was a spiritual body. This is something our limited mind cannot comprehend. In the evening of His resurrection, while the doors were shut where the disciples were for fear of the Jews, the Lord entered with His resurrected body and stood in their midst, and He even showed them His hands and His side (John 20:19-20). This cannot be explained scientifically or physically, but it is indeed the divine revelation! He came in resurrection with a spiritual body. The primary thing which He did in His coming was that He breathed into His disciples and said, “Receive the Holy Spirit” (v. 22). This was the Spirit referred to in John 7:39 and the Spirit of reality (14:17) promised in chapters fourteen through sixteen. The Lord imparted Himself into His disciples as life and everything by breathing the Holy Spirit into them.
From that day on, Peter changed. Formerly, Peter always spoke nonsensically and wrongly, and every time he spoke, he was rebuked. The best speaking he had was in Matthew 16, where the Lord asked the disciples, “Who do you say that I am?” Peter answered, “You are the Christ, the Son of the living God.” Right away the Lord praised him, saying, “Blessed are you...because flesh and blood has not revealed this to you, but My Father who is in the heavens” (vv. 15-17). Peter spoke a word with revelation, yet after that he spoke nonsense again. As a result, the Lord rebuked him as “Satan” (v. 23).
Peter spoke a wrong word again at the Lord’s transfiguration in Matthew 17. He said, “Lord, it is good for us to be here; if You are willing, I will make three tents here, one for You and one for Moses and for Elijah” (v. 4). Moses represents the law, and Elijah, the prophets; the two equal the Old Testament. Immediately after Peter spoke that word, a voice out of the cloud said, “This is My Son, the Beloved, in whom I have found My delight. Hear Him!” (v. 5). God finds His delight only in His Son, not Moses or Elijah. After hearing this word, Peter arose and looked around, but neither Moses nor Elijah was there. He lifted up his eyes and saw Jesus Himself alone (v. 8). That was a great correction to him.
On the night of His betrayal the Lord Jesus told His disciples, “You will all be stumbled because of Me this night, for it is written, ‘I will smite the Shepherd, and the sheep of the flock will be scattered.’” Peter answered and said to Him, “If all will be stumbled because of You, I will never be stumbled.” The Lord said to him, “This night, before a rooster crows, you will deny Me three times.” Peter said, “Even if I must die with You, I will by no means deny You” (Matt. 26:31-35). Peter was such a person who spoke foolishly, but in Acts 2 when he stood up, he spoke rightly from the moment he opened his mouth. He could expound the holy Scriptures and explain the Old Testament (vv. 14-21) because the Lord had entered into him as the Spirit.
Therefore, from then on the Lord worked among the disciples but not in the flesh; He was altogether a Spirit. In 2 Timothy 4:22 Paul said to Timothy, “The Lord be with your spirit.” This Lord is the One who became flesh, died, and resurrected to become the life-giving Spirit, and therefore He can be with our spirit. This shows us that after His resurrection, all the works which the Lord carried out among them and in them were a matter of the divine Spirit with the human spirit.