By the Lord’s mercy, after being immersed in the Bible for almost fifty years, in 1974 I was burdened to put my knowledge of the Bible into writing by holding two trainings every year, one in the summer and the other in the winter. In every training we covered a book in the Bible, but books that are more profound and difficult, such as Ephesians, were covered in two trainings.
Beginning from 1974, we have held twenty-one trainings in ten and a half years. These trainings were published as Life-study messages. There is only one book left for us to cover, and that is the book of Acts. We will finish the entire New Testament in the winter training of 1984. The Lord has enabled me to spend eleven years to write footnotes for every chapter of the twenty-seven books in the New Testament and to provide outlines and cross references for every book. In addition, there are about one thousand two hundred Life-study messages, and every message has approximately ten pages. This is a total of about twelve thousand pages. The Life-study messages of the New Testament are rich.
The goal of the life-study trainings is to release the mystery and truth in the Bible from the perspective of life. Life-study is a term that we invented. This term had not been used throughout the two thousand years of church history. We thank the Lord that the Life-study messages are now popular. A brother read a book concerning reading the Bible that was published by a seminary in Taiwan. The book says that the best way to read the Bible is to read it in the way of a life-study. This seminary not only accepts the term life-study but also says that it is the best way to read the Bible. We agree with this statement. Whenever we prayerfully read a Life-study message, we touch life and are enlivened and satisfied.
Another purpose in holding the life-study trainings is to open the Scriptures. The footnotes in the Recovery Version of the New Testament are the key to opening the Bible. If we read some verses and carefully study the footnotes for those verses, that chapter of the Bible will be opened to us.
My intention is also to help believers by explaining difficult portions that have been encountered by Bible readers for years. When I began reading the Bible, there were certain portions that I could not understand, even after I had done a considerable amount of research and study. An example of a difficult portion is 1 Peter 3:18, which says, “Christ also has suffered once for sins, the Righteous on behalf of the unrighteous,...on the one hand being put to death in the flesh, but on the other, made alive in the Spirit.” For over fifty years I did not understand this verse. It was not until the life-study training on 1 Peter that I received clear light concerning this verse. When the Lord Jesus was crucified, He was a grain of wheat that fell into the ground and died (John 12:24). When a grain of wheat falls into the ground and dies, the “death” it experiences operates on the shell of the grain. When water is added to the soil, the shell of the grain decays, but while the shell is decaying, the life within the grain begins to operate. This is the meaning in 1 Peter 3:18 of the Lord being put to death in the flesh but being made alive in the Spirit.
The Lord Jesus was the grain of wheat, and the shell of the grain was His flesh in which the divine life was concealed. If the Lord did not go to the cross, if His body did not die, He would not have been made alive. Hence, when He was on the cross, He was dying on one hand, and He was being made alive on the other. This is just as a grain of wheat. When the grain falls into the ground, on one hand, it is put to death, but on the other hand, it is made alive. After much study, I found this truth when I wrote the footnotes for the book of 1 Peter. Before then I had not seen the light so clearly concerning the Lord Jesus dying on the cross and being made alive in His Spirit. We do not hear people in Christianity say that when the Lord Jesus was crucified, He was made alive. The Lord’s light and truth are truly among us.
We are not here to exalt ourselves, but we are simply stating a fact. Since World War II, for thirty-nine years, there has not been one publication that is weighty concerning Bible exposition, the divine life, or the truth. However, in the Lord’s recovery, the twenty-seven books of the New Testament have been clearly expounded and published in about one thousand two hundred Life-study messages with twelve thousand pages.