THE ISSUE OF GOD THE SPIRIT’S
IMPARTATION OF THE DIVINE ESSENCE
INTO GOD THE FATHER’S INHERITANCE
REDEEMED BY GOD THE SON
The church as the Body of Christ is the issue of God the Spirit’s impartation of the divine essence into God the Father’s inheritance redeemed by God the Son. Following the redemption of the Son, the Spirit of God comes to seal us (Eph. 1:13). When someone buys a book, he may put his seal upon it to indicate that the book is his. The seal has the sealing ink. When you put the seal upon a piece of paper, the sealing ink saturates and permeates the paper. To saturate is something vertical, and to permeate is something horizontal. Because we have been redeemed into Christ, Christ is the element in which we have been made God’s treasure, God’s inheritance, God’s possession. Since we are God’s inheritance, He put His Holy Spirit into us as a seal to mark us out, indicating that we belong to Him. God put a mark on us, and this mark, this seal, is the inking, saturating, and permeating Spirit.
While the word is being ministered in the meetings, the sealing Spirit is saturating us vertically and permeating us horizontally to make us full of the imparting God. When a brother returns home after attending a weekend conference, his relatives may say that he is different. He is different because in the conference he was permeated, saturated, and sealed thoroughly with the Spirit for the entire weekend. This sealing produces a mark to indicate ownership. The seal also impresses its image on the object being sealed. The sealing of the Spirit causes us to bear the image of God.
The sealing of the Spirit, the saturating and permeating of the Spirit, takes place continually in us. This sealing will go on until the redemption of our body, the transfiguration of our body (1:14; 4:30). Today the sealing within us is going on vertically and horizontally to transform and transfigure us. As God’s inheritance, we are sealed that we may be saturated with the divine essence as the impress to be a mark and the image of God to be His expression.
While this sealing Spirit is saturating us, He remains with us as a pledge (1:14). This pledge is a guarantee that God will be our inheritance. The Spirit as the pledge of our inheritance is a foretaste of what we shall inherit of God, affording us a taste beforehand of the full inheritance. The Lord within us can be tasted, and His taste is sweet, pleasant, and good (1 Pet. 2:3; Psa. 34:8), but this is just a foretaste. The full taste is coming. When we are enjoying the foretaste, we realize this foretaste guarantees that God is coming to be our full taste. The Spirit as the pledge of God as His redeemed people’s inheritance for their foretaste of Him, guarantees their full taste of Him, unto the redemption of His acquired possession, His redeemed inheritance. This is to the praise of God’s glory, God’s expression (Eph. 1:14).
(The Intrinsic View of the Body of Christ, Chapter 1, by Witness Lee)
