There are two great things in the Bible—the divine dispensing and the divine economy. In this message we will cover these two matters.
The word economy is an anglicized form of the Greek word oikonomia, which means "household law" or "household management" or "household administration" and derivatively "administrative dispensation," "plan," "economy." The divine economy is God's eternal plan to dispense Christ into His chosen people to produce, constitute, and build up the organic Body of Christ (Eph. 1:10; 3:8-10; 1 Tim. 1:4). Since Christ is the embodiment of the Triune God, for God to dispense Christ into His chosen people actually means that God dispenses Himself in Christ into His chosen people. In brief, God's economy is to gain a Body for Christ. This Body is the enlargement of the Triune God for His expression that He may be satisfied.
The divine dispensing is to impart Christ as life and the life supply into His believers (Gal. 1:15-16; Col. 3:4a).
This dispensing of Christ as the embodiment of the Triune God is first in God's redemption (John 12:24; 19:34). The central point, the goal, of God's redemption is not merely to redeem us from our sins and from the condemnation of sin (eternal perdition), but to release, that is, to dispense, God Himself as the divine life into His redeemed ones. John 12:24 says that Christ in His incarnation as a grain of wheat fell into the ground and died. Just as there is life in a grain of wheat, within the human shell of Christ's physical body there was the divine life. When He was on earth in the flesh, the divine life within Him was concealed in the shell of His human body. He went to the cross and died, and the death of the cross broke this human shell and released the divine life to produce many grains. This is to release the divine life into all these grains. Also, John 19:34 says that when Christ died on the cross, two elements, blood and water, flowed out of Him. Blood is for redemption, and water is for the releasing of the divine life. Thus, the redeeming death of Christ becomes the life-releasing death.