CONFIRMATION BY ANDREW MURRAY
It was about eighteen or twenty years ago when we began to see this matter in John 7:37-39. At that time we began to minister these things according to what we had seen and experienced. I was always a little hesitant, however, to say that today the Spirit of Jesus contains not only the divine element but also the human essence. To say this is not a small thing. We realized that some might accuse us of teaching heresy when we said that the human essence is in the Holy Spirit. How could the Holy Spirit have any human element? However, according to the light we received from the Lord and the experiences we had had in the past, we saw that this is absolutely the truth. The Spirit of Jesus today contains the human element.
Then one day I was reading again chapter five of The Spirit of Christ by Andrew Murray. There I received the strongest confirmation. Chapter five has been in this book for years, but in the concept of many it is entirely new. Listen to what Andrew Murray says:
We know how the Son, who had from eternity been with the Father, entered upon a new stage of existence when He became flesh. When He returned to Heaven, He was still the same only begotten Son of God, and yet not altogether the same. For He was now also, as Son of Man, the first-begotten from the dead, clothed with that glorified humanity which He had perfected and sanctified for Himself. And just so the Spirit of God as poured out at Pentecost was indeed something new. When poured out at Pentecost, He came as the Spirit of the glorified Jesus, the Spirit of the incarnate, crucified, and exalted Christ, the bearer and communicator to us, not of the life of God as such, but of that life as it had been interwoven into human nature in the person of Christ Jesus.
Christ came not only to deliver man from the law and its curse, but to bring human nature itself again into the fellowship of the Divine life, to make us partakers of the Divine nature. He could do this, not by an exercise of Divine Power on man, but only in the path of a free, moral, and most real human development. In His own person, having become flesh, He had to sanctify the flesh. Then from His nature, as it was glorified in the resurrection and ascension, His Spirit came forth as the Spirit of His human life, glorified into the union with the Divine, to make us partakers of all that He had personally wrought out and acquired, of Himself and His glorified life. In virtue of His atonement, man now had a right and title to the fulness of the Divine Spirit, and to His indwelling, as never before. And in virtue of His having perfected in Himself a new holy human nature on our behalf, He could now communicate what previously had no existence—a life at once human and Divine.
Christ had entered with our human nature, in our flesh, into the Holiest of all. There, in our place, and on our behalf, as man and the Head of man, He was admitted into the full glory of the Divine, and His human nature constituted the receptacle and the dispenser of the Divine Spirit. And the Holy Spirit could come down as the Spirit of the God-man—most really the Spirit of God, and yet as truly the spirit of man. He could come down as the Spirit of the glorified Jesus to be in each one who believes in Jesus, the Spirit of His personal life and His personal presence, and at the same time the Spirit of the personal life of the believer. Just as in Jesus the perfect union of God and man had been effected and finally completed when He sat down upon the throne and He so entered on a new stage of existence, a glory hitherto unknown, so too, now, a new era has commenced in the life and work of the Spirit. He can now come down to witness of the perfect union of the Divine and the human, and in becoming our life, to make us partakers of it. There is now the Spirit of the glorified Jesus: He hath poured Him forth; we have received Him to stream into us, to stream through us, and to stream forth from us in rivers of blessing.
We must seek to know the New Life, the Life of Glory and Power Divine in human nature, of which the Spirit of the glorified Jesus is meant to be the Witness and the Bearer. We have the most intense personal interest in knowing and understanding what it means that Jesus is glorified, that human nature shares the life and glory of God, that the Spirit was not yet, as long as Jesus was not glorified. This is it of which Jesus says, never thirst, but shall have rivers of waters flowing out of him. This alone it is that satisfies the soul’s thirst and makes it a fountain to quicken others; the Personal Indwelling of the Holy Spirit, revealing the Presence of the glorified Jesus.
(Christ as the Reality, Chapter 12, by Witness Lee)
