Another point about Christ which we must see is that He saved others, but He would not save Himself. “Likewise also the chief priests mocking him, with the scribes and elders, said, He saved others; himself he cannot save. If he be the King of Israel, let him now come down from the cross, and we will believe him” (Matt. 27:41-42). To be qualified for the church life we must have such a life. Never save yourself. When others put you on the cross, you must remain there. This is the right place for you to be. Let others say that you can do so many things to save others, but you cannot save yourself. You have to say, “Amen!” This is the cross-bearing life. We can save others, but we cannot save ourselves. This is the life that bears the cross all the time.
Many times God would allow circumstances to put us on the cross. We should not try to escape; we should stay there. This cross-bearing life is the life that is good for the church building. So many husbands are just the cross to the wives, and the wives are the emotional crosses to the husbands. Many times the husbands are crucified by the wives’ emotions. But thank the Lord we have so many crosses. The husbands are the crosses to the wives, and the wives are crosses to the husbands. We don’t need to buy a cross; the Lord has prepared a lot of crosses for us. Let others say that we can save others, but we cannot save ourselves. This is right. The life of Jesus is such a life. By His life we can save others, but we cannot save ourselves.
But, praise the Lord, the cross brings in the resurrection. Christ is on the other side of the cross, not on this side. If we stay on this side of the cross, we will miss Christ. If we would reach Christ, surely we must pass through the cross. On the other side of the cross, we have the resurrected Christ. This is wonderful.
To reach the resurrected Christ, we have traveled from chapter one to chapter twenty-eight of Matthew. Before the incarnation in chapter one, the promise of the seed of the woman traveled four thousand years from Genesis 3:15. Then the seed of woman came in chapter one and from chapter one to twenty-eight, He was fully processed to become the resurrected Christ. Now He is no longer just God, but the God who has traveled through incarnation, human living, crucifixion, burial, and resurrection. He is God, plus so many items. He is God, who after being made flesh took a further step by death and resurrection to become the life-giving Spirit (1 Cor. 15:45). This is the processed God. The resurrected Christ is the processed God. Before the incarnation He was the “raw” God, but now He has been fully processed. For God to be incarnated was a real process. For Him to live thirty-three and a half years on this earth, raised by a poor family, persecuted by religion, and finally crucified on a cross was also a real process. Then He passed through death and went into resurrection. By resurrection He was fully processed to become the life-giving Spirit.
After He had been fully processed, the Lord came to the disciples and said, “All authority is given unto me in heaven and in earth. Go ye therefore, and disciple all nations, baptizing them into the name of the Father, and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit” (Matt. 28:18-19, Gk.). Today we must preach the gospel with such an authorization. We have been authorized to disciple the nations. Then we must baptize them into the name of the Triune God. In Galatians 3:27, Paul says that as many of you as have been baptized into Christ have put on Christ. If we compare this verse with Matthew 28:19, we can see that to be baptized into the Triune God is to be baptized into Christ. This Christ into Whom we have been baptized is the life-giving Spirit, and the life-giving Spirit is just the processed God for us to participate in. We all have been baptized into such a Christ.
When I was young I tried to discover how I could get into Christ. The Bible told me that I was baptized into Christ and that I was in Christ. But I was also taught that after His resurrection, Christ ascended to the heavens. He was there, and I was here. How could I be in Him? I was told that it was through the Holy Spirit. But what does that mean? Then after years of studying the Word and experiencing Christ as life, we found the answer. Yes, Jesus is in the heavens, but both Ephesians 1:23 and 4:10 tell us that Christ today is filling all in all. The resurrected Christ fills the heavens and the surface of the earth. He is omnipresent. Now He is the all-inclusive, life-giving Spirit (2 Cor. 3:17). So we must be baptized into Him. This is why baptism should not be a formality, but a reality. When we baptize others, we must exercise our faith to realize that we are putting them into Christ, the life-giving Spirit, the Triune God.