CHRIST IN HIS EXCELLENCY
Furthermore, 10:4-9 reveals Christ in His excellency. Every part of Christ is excellent and precious. He is the excellent One in the whole universe. This excellent One is the centrality and universality of God’s economy.
CHRIST BECOMING
THE CENTRALITY AND UNIVERSALITY
OF GOD’S ELECT THROUGH THEIR ENVIRONMENT
The book of Daniel also reveals that it is through their environment that Christ becomes the centrality and universality of God’s elect. Through the nations as the environment, in the coming days God will eventually make Christ the centrality and universality of Israel. The principle is the same with us today. In this present age of mystery, which is not revealed in Daniel, God is using the environment to make Christ the centrality and universality to us.
We are not simple. On the one hand, we, the believers in Christ, are God’s elect; on the other hand, we are parts of the old creation, including such negative things as the beasts described in Daniel 7. As God’s elect, we need Christ to be wrought into us as our centrality and universality. However, the old creation in us is sometimes a beast and at other times a Nebuchadnezzar or an Antichrist seeking to defeat, capture, possess, and utilize God’s elect. Since we are complicated in this way, we also need to be a Daniel and open our windows toward Jerusalem and pray that Christ will come in to cut off, to terminate, everything in us that is natural and part of the old creation.
Christ becomes our centrality and universality by His appearing in two aspects. First, He has come to terminate us as the old creation and then to germinate us as the new creation. Second, He will come to clear away all the beasts. Depending on our culture and nationality, we all have our own beasts. Those from one part of the world have one kind of beast, and those from another part have a different kind of beast. We need Christ to receive the kingdom from God and come to crush all the beasts and then to become a great mountain that comprises us and that fills the whole earth to be the kingdom of God. By terminating and germinating us and by crushing all the beasts in us, Christ is wrought into our being to become our centrality and universality.
(Life-Study of Daniel, Chapter 12, by Witness Lee)
