GOD’S RECOVERY
Fourth, God is a God with an eternal purpose. He is a purposeful God, and once He has made up His mind to do something, nothing can change His mind, and nothing can stop Him. Apparently some things may frustrate Him a little, but nothing can stop Him. So after Satan’s destruction, God came in to redo the things that He had done before. This redoing is His recovery. This is to bring back whatever has been lost and destroyed by His enemy, Satan.
A MODEL IN THE OLD TESTAMENT
The Bible has two Testaments, the Old and the New. God is wise, and in His wisdom He foreknew that what He wanted to accomplish with His creature, man, would not be so simple. So first He had the Old Testament as a pretype, a prefigure, of the real thing. Before He came in to do the real thing in the New Testament, He took the time to make a model in the Old Testament. Today in architecture before a building is constructed, the blueprints are drawn, and then a model of the building is built according to the blueprints. What God did in the Old Testament was just a model of what He would do in the New Testament. What God did and accomplished in the Old Testament was not the real thing. It was just a model. If you have a clear view of the Bible you could see that the model in the Old Testament was the same as the real thing in the New Testament. The two Testaments actually reveal the same thing. One is a model, and the other is the real thing. For example, in the Old Testament you could see God’s predestination, God’s selection, God’s calling, God’s redemption, God’s justification, God’s salvation. All the crucial things in the New Testament were present in the Old Testament. In the Old Testament there were the types of regeneration and transformation. There was also the gathering of God’s people and the building up of God’s people to be God’s dwelling place. In terms and in words the church is not mentioned in the Old Testament, but the model of the church is there. The temple typified the church, and the people of Israel typified the church. Other things in the Old Testament also typified the church. The complete model of the church in the Old Testament was the temple. When the temple was fully built up, the glory of God came down. This means that God Himself came down as the glory to cover the temple and to fill the temple up. That was the picture of the full accomplishment of God’s purpose.
But then Satan came in first to ruin and corrupt the people. The temple was built up during the glorious reign of Solomon the king. But Solomon himself took the lead to become rotten and corrupt. He was corrupted by the pagan concubines. The concubines brought in the idols, and this ruined the people. The entire nation of Israel was ruined, so God had no way to dwell among them. He had to give them up. Then the Babylonian army came to destroy the temple and the Holy City and to capture the people away to Babylon. The first forefather of the children of Israel was Abraham, who was called out of Babel, which later became Babylon. Satan came in to bring all of Abraham’s descendants back to the very place Abraham was called out of. So whatever God accomplished was gone.
(Concerning the Lord's Recovery, Chapter 1, by Witness Lee)
