THE DIVINE TRINITY FOR THE DIVINE DISPENSING
The divine Trinity is for His divine dispensing. John 1:14 says that the Word who became flesh was full of grace and reality. Verse 16 says, "For of His fullness we all received, and grace upon grace." The incarnated One was full of grace and reality. Thus, the fullness is the totality of grace and reality. God came through incarnation full of grace and reality for the purpose of dispensing. When we have a love feast in the church, many sisters come full of all different types of food for the purpose of distributing, dispensing, this food for feeding others. Feeding is dispensing.
The incarnation of the Triune God was for dispensing. We know this because John 1:14 says that the Word became flesh, full of grace and reality. His incarnation was for distributing Himself as grace and reality to His chosen people. Incarnation was the first step of God’s dispensing. God came down from the heavens to the earth in a particular way. He entered into the womb of a virgin, being incarnated, for the purpose of dispensing Himself to His chosen people as grace and reality.
Furthermore, we have received of His fullness, that is, grace upon grace. In 1 Corinthians 15:10 Paul said, "I labored more abundantly than all of them, yet not I, but the grace of God with me." Grace in 1 Corinthians 15 is the very resurrected Christ becoming the life-giving Spirit (v. 45) to bring the processed God in resurrection into us to be our life and life supply that we may live in resurrection. The resurrected, pneumatic Christ as the life-giving Spirit living in Paul was the grace with which Paul labored more abundantly than all the apostles. Grace is a person for dispensing.
John 3:16 says that God gave His only begotten Son for the dispensing of His Son to His believers as eternal life. The incarnation in 1:14 is for the dispensing of God Himself as grace and reality; this was the first step. The giving of the Son in 3:16 is for the dispensing of the Son to His believers as the eternal life; this was the second step.
The third step was the Son’s passing through death to release the divine life within Him. As the one grain of wheat, He became many grains through the dispensing of His divine life into His believers (John 12:24). Then in the fourth step He resurrected from the dead. In His wonderful resurrection, He was transfigured into another form. First, He was God becoming a man. Then as the last Adam, He became a life-giving Spirit through resurrection (1 Cor. 15:45b). Soon after that resurrection, on the evening of the same day, He came back to His disciples. He had left them through death and entered into resurrection. He appeared to the disciples in His resurrection and breathed Himself into them, saying, "Receive the Holy Spirit," the Holy Pneuma, the Holy Breath (John 20:22).
The Word passed through these four steps: the step of incarnation, the step of the giving of the Son, the step of death, and the step of resurrection. After passing through these four steps, the Word mentioned in John 1:1 became a life-giving Spirit. This life-giving Spirit is the consummation, the totality, the aggregate, of the above four steps. The very God who was the Word in the beginning, the God who became a man in the flesh, the Son of God given to His believers, the crucified One who took away sin and released the divine life, the resurrected One, is now the all-inclusive, life-giving Spirit. He was incarnated into the form of a man and resurrected into another form, the form of the Spirit. All the elements of His person, process, and work are compounded in the Spirit. He is the Word who is God, the incarnated God, the Savior, the Redeemer, the crucified One, and the resurrected One. Now He is the life-giving Spirit. Life giving is life dispensing. This Spirit, the consummation of the Triune God, is the totality of the Triune God being life to us. He dispenses Himself as grace, as reality, and as eternal life, and all these are compounded in the consummated Spirit.
(Messages to the Trainees in Fall 1990, Chapter 5, by Witness Lee)
