Some Christians would say in general that the four Gospels tell us the detailed history of Christ, including His being born of a virgin, His death on the cross, and His resurrection. Others may say that the Gospels reveal Christ in a fourfold way: in Matthew as a king, in Mark as a slave, in Luke as a man, and in John as God. Although this thought is very high, we want to go further to see the central, intrinsic revelation of the four Gospels. This revelation from Matthew to John is that the Triune God has been processed and consummated to be the all-inclusive life-giving Spirit. The Triune God has been processed through incarnation, human living, death, and resurrection. He was also consummated to be a life-giving Spirit. At the end of the four Gospels, on the day of His resurrection, He came back to His disciples, breathed into them, and said, “Receive the Holy Spirit” (John 20:22). After His resurrection, Christ is in us as the Spirit. In 1 Corinthians 15:45, Paul said that the last Adam, the embodied God, God embodied in a man, became the life-giving Spirit. Some opposers have argued that this does not mean that Jesus Christ is the Spirit. They said that 1 Corinthians 15:45 says that the last Adam became a life-giving Spirit, not the life-giving Spirit. But whether the article is definite or indefinite does not matter. If I say, “Here is a man,” or, “Here is the man,” a man is still a man. There is no difference. There is not another Spirit who gives life besides the Holy Spirit.
The Triune God has been processed through His incarnation to become the God-man, through His human living to live the God-man’s life, through His all-inclusive death to redeem His lost creation and to release His divine life, and through His resurrection to dispense Himself into His redeemed chosen people as their life and everything. Thus, the processed, consummated Triune God as the all-inclusive life-giving Spirit is dispensed into His chosen, redeemed people to be their life and everything. The general teaching in today’s Christianity says only that Christ is the Redeemer, not that Christ is our life and everything.
Acts unveils the all-inclusive life-giving Spirit spreading Himself as the reality of Christ, who is the embodiment of God, for the producing of the churches of God. When we believed in the Lord Jesus, we received Him into us as the Spirit. Actually that Spirit is Christ, the reality of Christ.
Now we come to the last section of the New Testament, the twenty-two Epistles from Romans to Revelation.
In the four Gospels the church is mentioned only twice, in Matthew 16:18 and 18:17, but the Body of Christ is not mentioned. Acts speaks of the churches, but also does not mention the Body of Christ. The Body of Christ is mentioned only in the Epistles. Actually, the first twenty-one Epistles unveil the Body of Christ, whereas Revelation reveals the New Jerusalem as the consummation of the Body of Christ. Romans 12:5 is the first verse in the entire New Testament that mentions the Body of Christ. This indicates that all the Epistles are for the Body of Christ. Other Epistles that speak of the Body of Christ are 1 Corinthians, Ephesians, and Colossians. These four books-Romans, 1 Corinthians, Ephesians, and Colossians-are the master books of the New Testament. If these books were taken away, the New Testament would become empty.
Romans to Revelation unveil the all-inclusive life-giving Spirit building up the churches into the organism of the consummated Triune God as the Body of Christ, by transforming them into the image of Christ as the firstborn Son of God, which will consummate in the New Jerusalem as the eternal enlargement and expression of the consummated Triune God.
When we tell people what the New Testament unveils we should tell them what we have spoken of above concerning its three sections as the practical fulfillment of God’s eternal economy. It would be very good if we were able to recite the three definitions of these three sections.
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