Our corporate experience of the dispensing of the Divine Trinity begins by our entering into the kingdom of God. The New Testament shows that repentance and regeneration through believing in the Lord are not primarily for salvation but for the kingdom; moreover, God’s salvation and the kingdom are mutually related. The believers have been regenerated into the kingdom of God. The kingdom of God is the reign of God. It is a divine realm for us to enter into, a realm that requires the divine life. Having received the divine life through regeneration, we can be in the divine realm and participate in the divine kingdom.
Furthermore, after we have entered into God’s kingdom through regeneration, we need to continue to enter richly into the eternal kingdom of our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. The initial entrance into the kingdom of God is through regeneration, but the rich entrance is by the full development of our experience in the divine life as revealed in 2 Peter 1:5-11. We can enter into the eternal kingdom of our Lord because we have received from God’s divine power all things related to life and godliness. We have also received the precious and exceedingly great promises for us to partake of and enjoy the nature of God. God’s nature denotes the riches of what God is, that is, what God is in His nature. Therefore, when we partake of the nature of God, we partake of the riches of God. Because of this, the apostle Peter urges us that along with receiving the precious and exceedingly great promises given to us by God, we should be diligent to cooperate with the enabling of the dynamic divine nature by supplying bountifully in our faith virtue, that is, by developing virtue in the exercise of faith. This faith may be compared to a seed, and this seed contains Christ as the word of life. This seed becomes our faith, which is the equally precious faith.
In our faith we need to develop virtue—all things that relate to the divine life, to godliness, and to partaking of the divine nature. In knowledge we need to develop self-control—the exercise of control and restraint over the self in its passions, desires, and habits. In self-control we need to develop endurance, which is related to others and to our circumstances. In endurance we need to develop godliness—a living that is like God and expresses God. In godliness we need to develop brotherly love—a brotherly affection, a love characterized by delight and pleasure. Finally, in brotherly love we need to develop love—referring to the divine love, which God is in His nature. In this way we can reach full development and maturity in the divine life. Thus, all these virtues become our possession and exist in us eternally. Moreover, these virtues will abound and multiply, constituting us neither idle nor unfruitful unto the full knowledge of our Lord Jesus Christ, making our calling and selection firm so that we shall by no means ever stumble. The result is that we will be richly and bountifully supplied an entrance into the eternal kingdom of our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ.