The two angels standing at the empty tomb announced to the perplexed women who came to care for the body of Jesus, “Why are you seeking the living One among the dead? He is not here but has been raised” (Luke 24:5-6). That astounding fact of Christ’s resurrection was the turning point in the history and purpose of all mankind.
The significance of Christ’s resurrection includes many facets. It is God’s vindication and approval of the person and work of the Son; it is also the evidence of the Son’s success, His victory over death, Satan, Hades, and the grave; and it is His entrance into glory.
Every believer needs to enter into these deeper truths in the Bible.
On the one hand, God raised Christ from among the dead, indicating that God justified, vindicated, and approved the Lord’s Person and His redemptive work accomplished through His all-inclusive death on the cross (Acts 2:32; 3:15). On the other hand, the Lord Jesus Himself, through His overcoming divine life, rose up from the dead as a proof of His success in all His achievements (Rom. 14:9; cf. John 10:17-18). Furthermore in His resurrection, the Lord destroyed the devil (Heb. 2:14), nullified death, and brought in life and incorruption (2 Tim. 1:10). Finally, the Lord’s resurrection was His glorification. All of these aspects relate to the objective fact of His resurrection.
On the subjective side, there are also several arresting features of His resurrection that are related directly to “us who believe” (Eph. 1:19): His transfiguration to become the life-giving Spirit; His coming as the Spirit to indwell His believers; and His producing of the church to be His Body.
First, Christ’s resurrection was His transfiguration into the life-giving Spirit with the view of entering into His believers (1 Cor. 15:45b; John 14:16-20). Through this process, Christ added the elements of His incarnation, human living, death, and resurrection to the Spirit. The Spirit now possesses the divine life of the Triune God plus the uplifted human life of the God-man Savior with all His accomplishments, particularly His human living, His all-inclusive death, and His all-powerful resurrection.
Second, this Spirit of resurrection has entered into the believers, making them a new creation, dispensing Himself into them as the very life of God, and thus, constituting them to be the many sons of God (2 Cor. 5:17; John 1:12-13; Rom. 8:29; Heb. 2:10). As the old creation, the believers did not have the divine life and nature, but as the new creation they are born again of God and have the divine life and nature through the operation of the indwelling Spirit (John 1:13; 3:15; 2 Pet. 1:4).
Finally, in resurrection He blended these many sons to be the many members of His own unique Body and thus produce the church as His fullness for the expanded expression of God for eternity (1 Cor. 12:12-13; 24-27; Eph. 1:19-23).
Every believer needs to enter into these deeper truths in the Bible to experience the resurrected Christ as the indwelling, life-giving Spirit.
For further reading on this subject, please see the footnotes for the above referenced verses in the New Testament Recovery Version and The Four Major Steps of Christ, by Witness Lee, both published by Living Stream Ministry.
From Issue No. 41, September 2001