Most of the saints among us really love the Lord, but the problem is with their seeing of the divine vision. In the recovery we need not merely the knowing but the seeing of a revelation, which has to become a vision to us. The apostle John was the first one who saw the New Jerusalem. In our life-study we pointed out that all the predicates in the book of Revelation are in the past tense. John said, “I saw” (1:12; 17:3; 21:1-2). He used the past tense because he received visions of accomplished facts. In the eyes of God, the New Jerusalem has been consummated. We know that it has been consummated because John saw it. Year after year in our ministry, we have insisted that we need to see the vision, not just to know it. The problem today among us is that thousands of saints, lovers of Christ, have come into the recovery but they are short of sight. There is no seeing. We talk about the Body, but we have never seen it.
Brother Nee began to speak about the Body from 1939. That was right after he came back from a long visit to Europe. He went there in 1937. Then he came back in 1939. Right after coming back he called an urgent conference. I was traveling in the north, and he cabled me to come to this conference, which began in September 1939. He spoke on the Body of Christ and continued to minister on this subject until 1942.
In 1940 Brother Nee began a training in Shanghai, which I attended. There were just a little over forty trainees in his training. In addition to this training he held a conference about every two months on the Body of Christ. In the training he did not speak much. Instead, he tested the trainees by asking them to give testimonies about their seeing of the Body of Christ. After someone gave a testimony, Brother Nee would criticize it, telling the person that he had never seen the Body. He would tell those who testified that they may have thought that they had seen the Body, but based upon what they said he would show that they had not seen the Body. He told them that what they had received was mere “head knowledge,” instead of a real seeing of the Body of Christ. Through all of those criticisms, I was helped to see a lot.
The Body of Christ is very abstract. Where is the Body of Christ and what is the Body of Christ? How can we see it? It is difficult to find many in church history who really saw the Body.
We also need to point out that the Lord Jesus did not touch the Body of Christ in His earthly ministry. This is because the disciples at His time could not bear it. In John 16 the Lord told His disciples that He had many things to say to them which they could not bear, but when the Spirit of reality would come, He would disclose and declare these things to them (vv. 12-13). To whom did the Spirit of reality disclose the Body of Christ? It was to Paul. Among the several writers who wrote parts of the New Testament, only one used the term the Body of Christ—the apostle Paul. Peter, John, James, and Jude did not touch the Body.
Paul, however, touched it not just by chapters but by books. The first book in which he touched the Body of Christ is Romans. It is not until chapter twelve of this book that he speaks directly of the Body of Christ. In verse 5 he says, “So we who are many are one body in Christ, and individually members one of another.” He spoke more about the Body in 1 Corinthians. Chapters twelve and fourteen of this book are two long chapters concerning the Body of Christ in detail. He did not say anything about the Body of Christ in 2 Corinthians, nor did he touch it in Galatians. But he was on the Body of Christ once again in Ephesians.
In chapter four of Ephesians the Body of Christ is disclosed in a marvelous, wonderful way. Verses 4 through 6 speak of one Body, one Spirit, one Lord, and one God and Father. This is a divine and human, organic constitution. The believers are the Body, the frame. Within this frame there is the Triune God as the very essence, element, and source for His divine constitution with humanity. The Triune God—the Spirit, the Lord, and God the Father—has been constituted organically with His chosen people in their humanity. This divine-human constitution becomes the universal Body of Christ. Verses 7 through 16 of Ephesians 4 go on to reveal the functioning of the gifts to perfect the saints to do the work of the ministry, that is, to build up the Body of Christ, and they unveil the growth and building up of the Body of Christ.
The human body is a picture of the Body of Christ. It is hard for us to know what the Body of Christ is, but it is easier, in a sense, to know our physical body. Medical doctors can tell us that in the whole universe among God’s creation, the most wonderful, marvelous, and excellent thing is the human body. The human body is an organism. It is not something organized but something constituted with life. One top medical doctor told me in 1938 that the human body was so complete and complex that no one could understand it thoroughly. Our human body is a marvelous organism, a picture of the Body of Christ as the organism of the Triune God.
When we use the terms organism or organic, we come to the matter of life. In the Greek text of the New Testament, there are three kinds of life. Bios refers to our physical life, and psuche refers to our soulish life. Then there is the Greek word zoe. The New Testament uses this word to denote the divine life. We did not have zoe before we were saved, but we had bios and psuche, the physical life and the psychological life. The Body of Christ is an organism constituted with the divine life, the life of the processed and consummated Triune God.
Some Christian teachers said that our human body is real and that the Body of Christ is just a figure of speech. They were wrong. Actually, our body is a picture, a figure, and a type of the real body, which is Christ’s Body (Rom. 12:4-5). For us to understand what the Body of Christ is, God created a human body. The human body is a figure. It is not the real body. The real body is Christ’s Body. The Body of Christ is not a figure or a type but a reality. Since our human body is a mystery, how much more is the Body of Christ a mystery! No one can fully explain it. The five problems among us which we have covered in the previous message are due to the shortage of sight concerning the Body of Christ.