GOD IN CHRIST AS THE SPIRIT ENTERING
THE BELIEVERS IN CHRIST TO BE THEIR LIFE
THROUGH REGENERATING THEM
After God came in incarnation that we may have Him as life, God in Christ as the Spirit enters the believers in Christ to be their life through regenerating them (John 3:5-6; 1:13). The phrase God in Christ as the Spirit indicates the Triune God. God refers to God the Father, Christ to God the Son, and the Spirit to God the Spirit. The Triune God enters into the believers as the Spirit because the Spirit today is the consummation of the Triune God. Thus, when the Spirit comes, all Three of the divine Trinity come. The Triune God enters the believers in Christ. In order for the Triune God to enter into us, we must be people who are in Christ. Outside of Christ, there is no possibility for God to enter into us. In Christ, we are rightly positioned and qualified for God to enter into us to be our life.
God enters into us to be our life because our first need is life. If He entered us first to be our food, this would not be right. Food is the life supply. However, our first need is life. As the embodiment of God and the life-giving Spirit, Christ enters us by regenerating us. His regenerating of us is more meaningful and significant than His being our life supply. The processed and consummated Triune God enters us to regenerate us. Thus we have a new birth. This new birth is not a small thing. Every life depends on a birth. If there is no birth, there is no beginning of life. We had a beginning in Adam, but we now have a new beginning in Christ. Our first birth, our human birth, was somewhat poor, but our second birth, our divine birth, was wonderful.
After being consummated, the Triune God comes into us to be the generating factor and element. God has regenerated us. Regeneration is more than having a new life put into us. Regeneration means that a life has come into us to germinate, to generate, in order to change our being and to give us a new start. In other words, a life has come into us that has given us a new beginning of a different kind of being. Formerly, we were one kind of being. Now, through regeneration we have the beginning of a new being. This is the way God enters into us.
Through the Living Word of God
God enters into us to regenerate us through the living word of God (1 Pet. 1:23; James 1:18). First Peter 1:23 says that we were "regenerated, not of corruptible seed, but of incorruptible, through the living and abiding word of God." When I read this verse as a young man, I was bothered because my experience of regeneration did not seem to match what it reveals. It seemed that at the time of my regeneration I did not receive any word or verse from the Bible at all. I had only heard a message concerning God based on the record in the book of Exodus. Since my regeneration, I have checked with many other believers, and only a few have had the experience of being regenerated through a particular verse from the Bible. One such person was a young man who got saved through the help of a brother who used John 3:16. The brother helped the young man to read John 3:16. First, they read it together as it was in the New Testament. Then the brother asked the young man to read it by substituting "me" for "the world." So he read, "For God so loved me." Through this kind of reading, the young man was saved. However, most of us were saved in a general way by listening to a message.
In 1 Peter 1:23, the living word of God refers to the gospel message that we heard at the time we were saved. The central thought of the gospel of God is that God became a man by the name of Jesus Christ, that He died for our sins and for us, that He resurrected from among the dead, and that He became our living Savior. Hearing such a gospel, we believed and were regenerated. This gospel is the living word through which we were regenerated.
On the day of Pentecost, Peter stood up and spoke a message to more than three thousand people (Acts 2:1, 14, 41). In his message, he spoke of Christ’s incarnation, His death, His resurrection, and His ascension. His message was the living word of God, and through it three thousand were regenerated. The center and reality of Peter’s message was the resurrected Christ in all of His steps from incarnation to becoming the life-giving Spirit. That was the living word of God.
(The Triune God to Be Life to the Tripartite Man, Chapter 3, by Witness Lee)
