«　WEEK 1　DAY 4　»

　　John 7:39 But this He said concerning the Spirit, whom those who believed into Him were about to receive; for the Spirit was not yet, because Jesus had not yet been glorified.

　　Acts 1:8 But you shall receive power when the Holy Spirit comes upon you, and you shall be My witnesses...

　　Rom. 12:5 So we who are many are one Body in Christ, and individually members one of another.

　　We have seen that the Old Testament is a figurative portrait. of God’s eternal economy. The New Testament is the practical fulfillment of God’s eternal economy... A portrait is a picture, a photo...The Old Testament is like a video. The New Testament is the real thing...The person in the fulfillment is exactly the same as his photo. There are twenty-seven books in the New Testament in three sections: the Gospels, Acts, and the Epistles. The Gospels are of four books, Acts is one book, and the Epistles are of twenty-two books. (CWWL, 1994-1997, vol. 3, “The Triune God’s Revelation and His Move,” p. 78)

　　We want 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 says that the last Adam, the embodied God, God embodied in a man, became the life-giving 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.

　　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.

　　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 unveils 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. (CWWL, 1994-1997, vol. 3, “The Triune God’s Revelation and His Move,” pp. 78-80)

　　Further Reading: CWWL, 1990, vol. 3, “The Economy and Dispensing of God,” chs. 1-2