THE GREAT COMMISSIONOF CHRIST IN RESURRECTION (1)
The content of this chapter is much more difficult than that of the foregoing ones. Many in the past have used the term the great commission to describe the Lord’s charge to His disciples before He ascended. But in this chapter we want to pick up a deeper understanding and application of this term. The great commission of Christ is in resurrection. In resurrection is a critical phrase. Christ’s commission is found nowhere else except in resurrection. Outside of His resurrection He has no commission.
In order to see what resurrection is, we need to see that the Lord’s ministry in its history has three stages. This is new light to us from the Lord. We call these three stages the three i’s: incarnation, inclusion, and intensification. The first stage is the stage of incarnation, from His human birth to His death. In that stage the Lord was in the flesh, but He worked and moved by the leading of the Spirit. First, He was conceived in Mary’s womb by and with the Spirit (Matt. 1:18, 20). Then Matthew 4:1 says that Christ was led by the Spirit to the wilderness to be tempted by Satan. Matthew 12:28 reveals that He cast out demons by the Spirit of God. Hebrews 9:14 says that He offered Himself to God on the cross through the eternal Spirit. This shows that when Christ was in the flesh, He was also in resurrection.
Christ did everything in resurrection. In John 5:19 and 30 He said that He did not do anything from Himself. Instead, He lived by the One who sent Him (6:57a). This is resurrection. In John 14:10 the Lord Jesus said, “The words that I say to you I do not speak from Myself, but the Father who abides in Me does His works.” The One who works when the Son speaks is resurrection….Whatever is human is not resurrection, but whatever is divine is resurrection. He was in the flesh, and at the same time He was also in resurrection.
Then when Christ passed through death and entered into resurrection, He uplifted His human part into divinity. Romans 1:3 and 4 say that Christ as the seed of David in the flesh was designated the Son of God in resurrection. To designate is to uplift His human part into divinity. In resurrection He was born to be the firstborn Son of God; as the seed of David, He was designated to be the Son of God. Also, through His resurrection we were regenerated, begotten of God, to be the many sons of God (1 Pet. 1:3; Rom. 8:29). In regeneration God begets gods, who are His children in His life and nature but not in His Godhead (John 1:12-13). This is because our humanity has been uplifted, resurrected. Ephesians 2:5 and 6 reveal that we were made alive and resurrected together with Christ. Resurrection means to uplift our humanity into divinity, from the level of humanity to the level of divinity. (The Collected Works of Witness Lee, 1994-1997, vol. 5, “The Vital Groups”, ch. 5, pp. 93-98)
The church in Zamboanga 