In this series of messages, we want to fellowship concerning the Triune God’s revelation and His move. This fellowship will be the release of the crystallization of the entire Bible. The first verse of the Bible, Genesis 1:1, says, “In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth.” Then Revelation 22:21, the last verse, says, “The grace of the Lord Jesus be with all the saints. Amen.” This concluding verse is based upon the revelation of the New Jerusalem. At the beginning of the Bible, God is revealed. At the end of the Scripture, the New Jerusalem is revealed as the consummation of God’s move. This is the whole Bible. The summarized content of the whole Scripture is God at the beginning and the New Jerusalem at the end. We need to be impressed with these two things: God and the New Jerusalem.
The Bible has been studied, taught, and interpreted for nearly twenty centuries by thousands of teachers. We thank God for this. What they have seen we inherit, so today we are standing on the shoulders of all the foregoing teachers of the Bible. In this sense, we can “touch the heavens” easier than they could. Today the Bible is open to us, from the first page to the last page. It is as clear as crystal. I am burdened and trying to release what we have seen in the past seventy years in a brief and crystallized way.
God’s revelation and God’s move cover the entire Bible. In this first message we want to stress five things: the Triune God, His word, His revelation, His vision, and His move.
The Triune God is the source of the divine revelation. With Him there is no beginning, but He is the beginning of all things. The Triune God is self-existing and ever-existing.
This self-existing and ever-existing God is revealed as the Triune God. This was a great discovery of the church fathers. Although the Bible does not use the word triune, the church fathers saw the fact that God is triune in the divine revelation throughout the whole Scriptures. In Matthew 28:19 the Lord Jesus said, “Go therefore and disciple all the nations, baptizing them into the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit.” After the Lord’s speaking in many books, from Genesis to Matthew, He suddenly spoke of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. If we had been there, we would have been shocked. We might have asked, “Lord, I never heard about these three. Who is the Father? Who is the Son? Who is the Spirit?” They are the composition of the Triune God. God is triune; He is three, yet one.
The first verse of Genesis says that in the beginning God created. The word for God here is in the plural. Then in Genesis 1:26 God said something to Himself. He said, “Let us make man in our image, after our likeness.” At the end of chapter three God said, “The man is become as one of us” (v. 22). The word us shows that God is plural. He is one, but three; He is triune. The Lord told us at the end of Matthew that we are to baptize people into the name (singular) of the three (plural). There is one name for the Triune God.
This Triune God is so great and purposeful. He has His purpose and His desire. According to His desire, He made a plan, an eternal economy. In the New Testament, especially in the Epistles of Paul, this economy is strongly stressed. Paul in 1 Timothy 1:3-4 told Timothy to charge certain ones not to teach other things, only the economy of God. There is an economy of God in the whole universe. In order to carry out His economy, God has to speak.
The Triune God is a speaking God (Heb. 1:1-2). What if there were no speaking of God in the universe? If God had not spoken, we would not exist. The Bible says that every created thing came out of the word of God. In Hebrews 1:1-2 Paul said that our God is a speaking God. He has been speaking through the prophets in different ways, and now He is still speaking through His Son. His Son, Jesus Christ, is the Word of God. When someone is ministering the word of God in the Spirit, apparently it is he who is speaking, but actually it is Christ, the Son of God, speaking. This minister of the word is nothing, but out of his lips something comes from One who is everything. God is still speaking today.
Second Timothy 3:16 says that all Scripture is God’s breathing. God is breathing, exhaling. His spoken word was taken down to be the written word, which is the holy Scripture. God’s word was not only spoken but also written. Thank God that for nearly twenty centuries this spoken and written word has also been interpreted, taught, to God’s people.
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