Outline

«　WEEK 5　DAY 4　»

　　1 Tim. 6:11 But you, O man of God,…pursue righteousness, godliness, faith, love, endurance, meekness.

　　2 Tim. 3:17 That the man of God may be complete, fully equipped for every good work.

　　On the one hand, Job recognized that he was something rotten, something that would waste away [Job 13:28]. On the other hand, Job continued to feel that he was not wrong in anything. Realizing that God had watched his paths and had set limits for him (v. 27), Job wanted God to explain the situation to him.

　　We need to see the eternal economy of God, which is God’s eternal intention with His heart’s desire to dispense Himself in His Divine Trinity as the Father in the Son by the Spirit into His chosen people to be their life and nature that they may be the same as He is for His fullness, His expression.

　　God’s economy is God’s plan, God’s arrangement, for God to dispense Himself in His element, life, nature, and attributes, and all that He has achieved and attained into His chosen people that they may be rebuilt by being constituted with the divine essence in the divine element of the divine source to be something divine. Before receiving God’s dispensing, we were merely human. After God’s rebuilding with the divine constitution, we, like the Lord Jesus, become divinely human and humanly divine…Having been regenerated by Christ, we have become a part of Him, and now we are the same as He is—divinely human and humanly divine. (Life-study of Job, pp. 55-56)

　　The regenerated ones, who are divinely human and humanly divine, spontaneously become an organism, the Body of Christ, which is the church of God as the new man in God’s new creation to carry out God’s new “career,” that is, to build up the Body of Christ for the fullness, the expression, of the Triune God. This fullness as the organism of the Triune God will consummate in the New Jerusalem. The Bible begins with God in His creation as the initiation and ends with the New Jerusalem, which is the mingling of the Triune God and all His chosen, redeemed, regenerated, transformed, conformed, and glorified tripartite people. The New Jerusalem is thus a constitution of God with man to express God for eternity.

　　Christ is not only the center of the Bible but also the centrality and universality of God’s economy. It was in this economy that Christ became incarnated, that He went to the cross to pass through crucifixion, that He came out from death and entered into resurrection, and that in resurrection He was begotten of God to be God’s firstborn Son and as the last Adam became the life-giving Spirit to regenerate all His believers to make them the same as He is in life and nature that they might become His brothers and the sons of God. These sons plus the Firstborn all become a new man, with Him as the Head and with the church as His Body, to carry out God’s eternal purpose to consummate in the New Jerusalem.

　　If we see this revelation concerning God’s economy, then we will be able to understand the book of Job. Job suffered God’s stripping and consuming, but he did not understand what was happening to him…He knew that God had a purpose, but he did not know what God’s purpose was.

　　The main contents of the New Testament are that the Triune God has an eternal economy according to His good pleasure to dispense Himself into His chosen and redeemed people in His life and in His nature, to make all of them the same as He is in life and nature, to make them His duplication that they may express Him. This corporate expression will consummate in the New Jerusalem. Thus, the New Jerusalem is simply the enlarged, the increased, incarnation consummated in full, that is, the fullness of the Triune God for Him to express Himself in His divinity mingled with humanity. These are the contents of the New Testament, and this is the answer that Job needed. This is God’s answer concerning the purpose of Job’s suffering. (Life-study of Job, pp. 56-57, 62)

　　Further Reading: Life-study of Job, msg. 12