The content of this message is much more difficult than that of the foregoing ones. Many in the past have used the term the great commission to describe the Lord's charge to His disciples before He ascended. But in this message we want to pick up a deeper understanding and application of this term. The great commission of Christ is in resurrection. In resurrection is a critical phrase. Christ's commission is found nowhere else except in resurrection. Outside of His resurrection He has no commission. The Christ who gave the great commission is the One in resurrection. He is not only in resurrection; He Himself is resurrection. In John 11:25 the Lord Jesus said, "I am the resurrection and the life."
In order to see what resurrection is, we need to see that the Lord's ministry in its history has three stages. This is new light to us from the Lord. We call these three stages the three i's: incarnation, inclusion, and intensification. The first stage is the stage of incarnation, from His human birth to His death. In that stage the Lord was in the flesh, but He worked and moved by the leading of the Spirit. First, He was conceived in Mary's womb by and with the Spirit (Matt. 1:18, 20). Then Matthew 4:1 says that Christ was led by the Spirit to the wilderness to be tempted by Satan. Matthew 12:28 reveals that He cast out demons by the Spirit of God. Hebrews 9:14 says that He offered Himself to God on the cross through the eternal Spirit. This shows that when Christ was in the flesh, He was also in resurrection.
Christ did everything in resurrection. In John 5:19 and30 He said that He did not do anything from Himself. Instead, He lived by the One who sent Him (John 6:57a). This is resurrection. In John 14:10 the Lord Jesus said, "The words that I say to you I do not speak from Myself, but the Father who abides in Me does His works." The One who works when the Son speaks is resurrection. In our crystallization-study of John we pointed out that not only His resurrecting of Lazarus but also everything that Christ did was the exercise of Himself as resurrection. When He was in the flesh, He had a human part of His being which was not resurrection. Whatever is human is not resurrection, but whatever is divine is resurrection. He was in the flesh, and at the same time He was also in resurrection. He lived in the flesh but He did not live by the flesh. He lived by another factor, another source, that is, by the One who sent Him. The One who sent Him was the Father, who is divine. That Divine One is resurrection.
Then when Christ passed through death and entered into resurrection, He uplifted His human part into divinity. Romans 1:3 through 4 says that Christ as the seed of David in the flesh was designated the Son of God in resurrection. To designate is to uplift His human part into divinity. In resurrection He was born to be the firstborn Son of God; as the seed of David He was designated to be the Son of God. Also, through His resurrection we were regenerated, begotten of God, to be the many sons of God (1 Pet. 1:3; Rom. 8:29). In regeneration God begets gods, who are His children in His life and nature but not in His Godhead (John 1:12-13). This is because our humanity has been uplifted, resurrected. Ephesians 2:5 and 6 reveal that we were made alive and resurrected together with Christ. Resurrection means to uplift our humanity into divinity, from the level of humanity to the level of divinity.
Resurrection means divinity. Incarnation means humanity. Christ becoming a man was His entering into the stage of incarnation by bringing divinity into humanity. This is to bring God into man, making God and man one, as one entity, one person, one God-man. This was unprecedented in human history. There was no one before Christ who was one entity of divinity and humanity.
Christ lived in humanity to express God, especially to express the attributes of God in His human virtues. Although He was in humanity, He did not express humanity. He expressed divinity. He especially expressed the attributes of God. God's attributes are what God is. God is love, light, holiness, and righteousness. When these attributes were expressed in Christ's humanity, they became His human virtues.