THE ACCOMPLISHMENT OF THE DIVINE ECONOMY
The Divine Dispensing of the Divine Trinity
The accomplishment of the divine economy is by the divine dispensing of the Divine Trinity. God is divine, and He is also triune. He is triune in order to complete the steps for the dispensing of Himself into us. To dispense Himself into us, He has taken three steps: the Father’s choosing and predestinating, the Son’s redeeming, and the Spirit’s sealing. These three steps are for God’s divine dispensing.
Through the Father’s Choosing and Predestinating
The first step of the divine dispensing of the Divine Trinity was the Father’s choosing and predestinating (Eph. 1:4-5). The Father chose us in Christ before the foundation of the world that we should be holy. How can we common human beings be holy? We cannot be made holy by our outward actions. Neither can we be holy by being washed. To be washed makes us clean, but to be clean is not to be holy. The only way we can be holy is by a holy element being dispensed into our being. Medical doctors know that our physical bodies need many minerals. If our blood is short of iron, the only way iron can get into our blood is by the food that we eat or drink. In the same way, we become holy by receiving the holy God with His holy nature into our being. His holy element then becomes our element. The Father chose us in Christ before the foundation of the world that we, the chosen ones, may have the Father’s holy nature and thus may be sanctified through the dispensing of the Father’s holy nature into us, His chosen ones.
The Father’s predestinating through Christ is so that the predestinated ones may have His life for their sonship through the dispensing of the Father’s divine life into us (Eph. 1:5). To have the sonship implies that we must have God’s life. The divine life generates us to be God’s sons. As God’s sons we have God’s life, so we have God’s sonship. God the Father imparts Himself into our being as our holy nature to make us holy and as our divine life to make us His sons so that we may have sonship. To be made holy and to receive the sonship are a matter of receiving the divine dispensing. The divine way for us to be made holy and to receive the sonship is by God dispensing Himself into us.
Through the Son’s Redeeming
The accomplishment of the divine economy by the divine dispensing of the Divine Trinity is not only through the Father’s choosing and predestinating but also through the Son’s redeeming (Eph. 1:7). The Son’s redeeming is not just outward and objective. It is not just a matter of Christ shedding His blood in order to redeem us and to cleanse us from our sins. The Son’s redeeming is much deeper than this. Through the Son’s redeeming, the redeemed are put into Christ. We were put in Christ so that we could be made an inheritance of God with Christ as the element and realm of the divine inheritance (Eph. 1:11). We were put in Christ and made an inheritance of God through the dispensing of Christ. It is as if God said, "I have redeemed you and put you into Christ. This Christ will become your element for you to be My inheritance. I do not have any intention to inherit you in your natural being. You are just a sinner. Even though you are redeemed, you are just cleansed. I want to inherit My Son in you. Now you have My Son in you as the element to constitute you into something precious. This will be counted as My inheritance." In order for God to gain such an inheritance, He had to dispense Himself in Christ into our being.
(The Divine Dispensing for the Divine Economy, Chapter 1, by Witness Lee)
