The Triune God took several crucial steps in being processed to be the life-giving Spirit. First, He was incarnated. As God, He entered into the womb of a human virgin and stayed within that womb for nine months. In this way He took on humanity as His shelter, His dwelling place. His incarnation surely was a process. Second, He lived and walked on this earth, passing through the long "tunnel" of human living for thirty-three and a half years. This also was a process. Third, He entered into death and passed through death, which included the grave and Hades. Fourth, after three days, He walked out of death and Hades and entered into resurrection. His death and resurrection also were a process. After His death and in resurrection, He came to visit His disciples (John 20:19; Luke 24:36). His disciples thought that they were seeing a ghost (Luke 24:37), and they could not understand how He could come into the room without the doors being opened. Three days earlier, the Lord Jesus had taken bread with them in His body of flesh (Luke 22:19), but when He came into the room that night, He came in His resurrected body. The Lord Jesus told them to look at His hands and feet and to handle Him, saying, "A spirit does not have flesh and bones as you behold Me having" (Luke 24:39). How could these things be? In responding to such questions, it is wise to say that we do not know the answer.
After the Lord's resurrection, He stayed with the disciples for forty days (Acts 1:3), during which time He made His presence both visible and invisible to them. Then He led them to Jerusalem and then ascended to the third heavens from the Mount of Olives (Acts 1:12, 9). Through His ascension, the Lord Jesus completed His process. His ascension was the final step in the consummating of the Triune God. All Three—the Father, the Son, and the Spirit—were fully consummated in the Lord's ascension.
The word consummation indicates that a work or a process has been completed, or finished. This may be illustrated by the cooking of food. Before the process of cooking begins, all the groceries are raw. After cooking for two hours, the groceries are consummated into a feast. Before His incarnation, God was "raw," having the divine nature but not the human nature. Through incarnation, human living, crucifixion, resurrection, and ascension, God was processed and consummated. Now, He is no longer the "raw" God; He is the consummated and completed Triune God with divinity, humanity, human living, the all-inclusive death, the powerful resurrection, and the transcendent ascension. All these are elements, or ingredients, in the processed and consummated Triune God.
The Triune God was incarnated to partake of humanity (John 1:14; Heb. 2:14a). After being incarnated, God was different from what He was before His incarnation. Before being incarnated, He was merely God, but after being incarnated, He was God within a human shell. The babe who was laid in a manger at the inn in Bethlehem (Luke 2:7) was the mighty God (Isa. 9:6). Many of the Jews at that time, like many Jewish scholars today, could not believe that the little babe in the manger was Jehovah God. Yet we believe that He was the very God. After His birth, He lived on this earth for a number of years. One day He told His disciples that He was going to Jerusalem to be crucified (Matt. 16:21). Do not think that He was simply arrested by the soldiers and the deputies of the chief priests and Pharisees. Actually, He delivered Himself to them (John 10:15, 18; 18:3-8). When they came to arrest Him, the Lord asked the soldiers to tell Him whom they were seeking. They told Him that they were seeking Jesus the Nazarene. When the Lord replied by saying, "I am," the meaning of the name Jehovah (Exo. 3:14-15), they fell backward to the ground (John 18:6). It was impossible for them to arrest Jehovah. The Lord Jesus delivered Himself to them in order that He could be processed through death and resurrection.