«　WEEK 7　DAY 5　»

　　Acts 13:33 That God has fully fulfilled this promise to us their children in raising up Jesus, as it is also written in the second Psalm, “You are My Son; this day have I begotten You.”

　　5:31 This One God has exalted to His right hand as Leader and Savior, to give repentance to Israel and forgiveness of sins.

　　Jesus’ incarnation made Him a man, His human living on earth qualified Him to be man’s Savior, His crucifixion accomplished full redemption for man, His resurrection vindicated His redemptive work…(Heb. 2:10; 5:9). (Acts 5:31, footnote 1)

　　His sovereign ruling [as Leader and Savior] causes and leads God’s chosen people to repent, and His salvation, which is based on His redemption, affords them forgiveness of sins. (Acts 5:31, footnote 3)

　　Jesus Christ, as the incarnated God and as the embodiment of the Triune God (Col. 2:9), died in His humanity a vicarious and all-inclusive death to terminate all the negative things and to release the divine life from within Him for us.

　　Christ overcame death and entered into the all-producing resurrection and was begotten to be God’s firstborn Son, bringing humanity into divinity (Acts 13:33). In resurrection Christ also became the life-giving Spirit for the producing and the constituting of the Body of Christ (1 Cor. 15:45).

　　Next, Christ accomplished the all-transcending ascension to the heavens and was made Lord, Christ, Leader, and Savior (Acts 2:36; 5:31) for His propagation and for the building up of the church as His kingdom.

　　In His death, resurrection, and ascension Christ made all His believers one with Him…. His experiences have become their history.

　　God has put us into Christ and has made Him our righteousness, sanctification, and redemption (1 Cor. 1:30). By Christ as our righteousness (for our past) we have been justified by God that we might be reborn in our spirit to receive the divine life. By Christ as our sanctification (for our present) we are being sanctified in our soul, that is, transformed in our mind, emotion, and will, with the divine life. By Christ as our redemption (for our future), that is, the redemption of our body (Rom. 8:23), we will be transfigured in our body with the divine life to have His glorious likeness (Phil. 3:21).

　　God has regenerated us through the resurrection of Christ (1 Pet. 1:3), and now He renews us, transforms us, and conforms us to His image of glory, and ultimately He will glorify us in His glory (Titus 3:5;…Rom. 8:29-30).

　　In His renewing and transforming, God consumes us, putting us into Christ’s death for our fellowship of His sufferings, which work out for us an eternal weight of glory, that we may experience Him in His resurrection and gain Him in His unsearchable riches (2 Cor. 4:16-17, 10; Phil. 3:10, 8; Eph. 3:8).

　　As believers in Christ, we need to grow in the divine life of Christ that we may be transformed into what Christ is through the life-dispensing Spirit, that we may be built up with the saints to be the Body of Christ, the organism of the Triune God in Christ, and to be the new man as God’s new creation to carry out God’s eternal economy in the consummation of the New Jerusalem as the mingling of the processed Triune God with the glorified tripartite man, to be the corporate God-man’s manifestation in eternity.

　　Such a regenerated, transformed, and glorified saint in Christ has nothing to do with the natural man and does not need to build up himself with the natural human virtues. If Job and his friends had lived at the time to know this, they would have been saved from their time-wasting, pain-increasing, and vain debates in thirty-five chapters as a record of a group of blind persons groping in darkness. (Life-study of Job, pp. 182-183, 190)

　　Further Reading: Life-study of Job, msg. 35