THE DIVINE DISPENSING OF THE DIVINE TRINITY
How does God dispense Himself into us? In order to dispense Himself into us, God has to be triune. The Triune God dispenses Himself through His Divine Trinity—the Father, the Son, and the Spirit. Ephesians is a book on the divine dispensing. From chapter one Paul begins to speak about this dispensing: first is the Father’s selection, then the Son’s redemption, and then the Spirit’s application. The Father is the source, and all the riches are in Him. The Son is the embodiment of the Father, and all that the Father is, has, and can do are embodied in the Son. Furthermore, the Son is realized as the Spirit. Hence, the Son comes as the Father, and the Spirit comes into us as the Son. In this way, when we have the Spirit, we also have the Son and the Father. The Divine Trinity—the Father, the Son, and the Spirit—is the means by which God dispenses Himself into us.
It is by the Divine Trinity that God is able to dispense Himself into all His chosen, created, called, redeemed, and regenerated people. Hence, if we want to understand God’s economy, we must know the Divine Trinity for the divine dispensing. We cannot know the divine dispensing without knowing the Divine Trinity. Therefore, at the end of 2 Corinthians Paul drew a conclusion, saying, “The grace of the Lord Jesus Christ and the love of God and the fellowship of the Holy Spirit be with you all” (13:14). This is God dispensing Himself into us through His Divine Trinity.
The Divine Trinity carries out His divine dispensing through the divine Spirit. Today we all must be filled with this Spirit. When we are filled with this Spirit, we are filled with the Triune God. There is a good portrait of this in the Old Testament: the totality of three generations of men—Abraham, Issac, and Jacob. This is, in fact, the best illustration of this matter. In Exodus 3:15 God said, “Jehovah…the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob.…This is My name.” This means that God is God the Father, God the Son, and God the Spirit. As God the Father, He is the source—He is the One who plans, chooses, decides, and arranges. As God the Son, He is the course—He is the One who accomplishes the Father’s plan. Whatever we need, He has accomplished for us. We need to deal with sin, the world, the flesh, the corrupted self, Satan, and all our problems before God, yet He has already accomplished everything for us. God the Son went to the cross with seven statuses: the Lamb, a man in the flesh, the last Adam, the Firstborn of all creation, the bronze serpent, the Peacemaker, and a grain of wheat. In this way He accomplished an all-inclusive death and dealt with all our problems. Then, with the riches of all that He is and has, He has been realized as the Spirit and has come into us that we may partake of all the fullness of the Triune God.
The chorus of Hymns, #608 says, “The Triune God has now become our all!” This hymn clearly explains how the Triune God has become our blessed portion and how He is dispensing Himself into us. In Ephesians 3:8 the apostle Paul said, “To me…was this grace given to announce to the Gentiles the unsearchable riches of Christ as the gospel.” Here to announce means not only “to preach” but also “to transmit.” This means that Paul received a commission from God to transfuse the unsearchable riches of Christ into the Gentiles so that they all would have the Triune God in them. In this way they could become the members of Christ and, aggregately, the Body of Christ (v. 6). The revelation in Ephesians concerning the Body of Christ and the members of Christ is very complete and thorough.
The riches of the Lord are boundless. He is “without father, without mother, without genealogy; having neither beginning of days nor end of life” (Heb. 7:3). He is the unlimited and immeasurable One, and we can never exhaust our speaking of Him. Since He is such a rich God, His economy is also unsearchable. His desire is to dispense Himself into His chosen, created, called, redeemed, and regenerated people, and He is doing this through His Divine Trinity. The Divine Trinity is just God Himself. God Himself became the means through which this matter is accomplished. Today the Triune God has already been consummated as the life-giving Spirit to be dispensed into us (1 Cor. 15:45b). We must contact Him daily and exercise our spirit constantly to contact Him, commune with Him, and fellowship with Him as the Spirit. In this way all the divine riches of the Divine Trinity will be continually transfused into us to constitute us into the Body of Christ. In the millennial kingdom we will be constituted into the New Jerusalem in its initial stage, and eventually in the new heaven and new earth we will be constituted into the New Jerusalem in its consummate stage for eternity. This is the accomplishment of God’s economy.
(The Economy of God and the Mystery of the Transmission of the Divine Trinity, Chapter 2, by Witness Lee)
