This week we’re getting into The Resurrection of Christ and the Believers’ Experience of Christ in His Resurrection Life, and I have been very impressed with what is the intrinsic significance of the resurrection of Christ.
Christ didn’t just “resurrect”, He was not just resuscitated / brought back to life – there are some amazing and wonderful things that happened / took place in His resurrection! He Himself prophesied about this in John 12:24
Unless the grain of wheat falls into the ground and dies, it abides alone; but if it dies, it bears much fruit.
Christ died an all-inclusive and all-terminating death on the cross, and after 3 days, He resurrected! On the one hand, as a man, Christ was raised up by God (Rom. 8:11), but on the other hand, as God, Christ raised Himself up from the dead (Rom. 14:9).
Very mysterious, yet very wonderful! Our Christ is the God-man, the One with both divinity and humanity, who passed through such a marvelous process to become the life-giving Spirit who now lives in our spirit! So here are some of the main things that took place in Christ’s resurrection:
- In His Resurrection, Christ was begotten as God’s Firstborn Son (Rom. 8:29) – Christ was designated the Son of God in power according to the Spirit of Holiness (Rom. 1:3-4). Christ was God’s Only Begotten Son from eternity, but by coming into the world and putting on humanity, His human part was not “the son of God” – He brought His humanity into His divinity through His resurrection. Now Christ is not only the Only Begotten Son of God, but He is the Firstborn Son of God – we being His many brothers, the many sons of God with His divine life and nature! Through incarnation, Christ brought God into man, and through death and resurrection, He brought man into God. As such a Christ, He is the Prototype / the Model for the mass reproduction of God! We are all being conformed to the image of Christ, God’s Firstborn Son!
- In His Resurrection, Christ became the life-giving Spirit – He was transfigured into the Spirit that gives life (1 Cor. 15:45). Before His resurrection, even before His incarnation, Christ as God was Spirit essentially, but in His resurrection He became the life-giving Spirit, the all-inclusive Spirit, “compounded” / being composed of not just divinity, but also humanity, human living, death, and resurrection. As such a Spirit now He comes into us (John 20:22) to be breathed in. When we receive the Lord Jesus, we actually receive the Spirit, since the Lord is now the Spirit (2 Cor. 3:17).
- In His Resurrection, Christ regenerated us, His believers, for His Body – Peter says that we were born/regenerated in Christ’s resurrection (1 Peter 1:3). Christ’s resurrection was a “mass delivery”, where Christ as the Firstborn and we all His believers as the many sons were “begotten”! This was a universal amazing event, that took place once and for all – and even though it was “in time”, it is an eternal event. Now, whenever we call on the name of the Lord, this begetting is being applied to us in time in our particular situation and environment; the reality of our being born again is that we ALL were born again at the same time, when Christ was resurrected!
Hallelujah for these three mysterious yet so glorious things that took place in Christ’s resurrection! Don’t you just love Him more, when you see how RICH His resurrection was, what happened in His resurrection?
Hallelujah for the begetting (Christ and us were begotten as God’s sons), the transfiguration (Christ was transfigured to be the life-giving Spirit), and the regeneration (we were regenerated in Christ’s resurrection) that took place in Christ’s resurrection!
Christ is the only God-man!
Amen, Tim, He is the first God-man; now as believers in Christ – born of God, having the divine life and nature – we also are God-men! Christ is and will be in the God-head, position to which we will never attain, but as the Bible says, we are children of God(John 1:12-13), God-men!