Paul told the Corinthians in 2 Corinthians 3:3 that they were a letter of Christ “ministered by us, inscribed not with ink, but with the Spirit of the living God.” This shows that the Spirit is for inscribing. The Spirit is not the person who inscribes, but the ink with which the apostles inscribed Christ into the believers. When we write with ink, the ink is applied to the paper and becomes one with the paper. The Spirit is the ink with which the servants of God are inscribing us. This means that the divine element is being added to our being. We are receiving more heavenly, divine ink every day.
I have the consciousness that while I am ministering to the saints, I am inscribing Christ in their hearts, and they are receiving more of the Spirit as the ink. When we receive the Spirit as the ink, all the things compounded in the Spirit— Christ’s divinity, humanity, human living, death, resurrection, and ascension—are added into our being. All of these elements are compounded in the divine ink, and the divine ink as the divine element is applied to us by the servants of the Lord.
According to 2 Corinthians 3:6 and 8, the Spirit has the function of ministering. This function is similar to the function of a waiter who ministers food to people. The Holy Spirit today is ministering the crucified, resurrected, and ascended Christ to us. He is the very food which the ministering Spirit ministers to us.
The ministering of Christ to us gives us life. The Spirit functions to give life. Second Corinthians 3:6b says, “The Spirit gives life.” First Corinthians 15:45b says, “The last Adam became a life-giving Spirit.” The last Adam is the person of the resurrected Christ to give life. The Spirit gives the divine life, the compounded Triune God as life, to us.
Second Corinthians 3:17 says, “The Lord is the Spirit, and where the Spirit of the Lord is, there is freedom.” The Spirit’s function is to be the Lord and also to free us from the veil, the covering, of the law. The veil of the law is the law itself. As long as we keep the law, the law is a veil that covers us from seeing Christ. The Spirit functions to free us from the covering of the law that we may have an unveiled face to behold Christ.
Second Corinthians 3:18 reveals that the Spirit is the transforming Spirit. The Spirit functions to free us from the covering of the law that we may have an unveiled face to look at the very Christ face-to-face so that we might be transformed into His image of glory. While the Spirit, who is the Lord Himself, is freeing us from the covering of the law to help us to have an unveiled face, He is also transforming us. The Spirit adds Himself to us, and this addition of the Spirit, through a divine and spiritual metabolism, transforms us into another form. When we were under the law, we were in our old being, an old and natural form. But the freeing Spirit adds the new element of the divine Being into our being, causing a divine metabolism within us. On the one hand, the new element of God is being added to us. On the other hand, the old element of our old being is being discharged from us. Then we are transformed into the glorious image of Christ, and this transformation is “from the Lord Spirit” (2 Cor. 3:18).
Second Corinthians 4:13 says that we have “the same spirit of faith.” This spirit is God’s Spirit mingled with our spirit. Therefore, another function of the Spirit is to mingle Himself with the human spirit. The thought of the mingled spirit is very strong here and in Romans 8. When Paul tells us to walk according to the spirit in Romans 8:4, he is referring to the mingled spirit. Both Dean Alford and M. R. Vincent point out that the spirit of faith in 2 Corinthians 4:13 is the mingling of the Holy Spirit with our human spirit. The compounded, consummated Spirit of God today has the function of mingling Himself with the human spirit.