In the past ten years the Lord has shown us His economy. According to my study of church history and the biographies of many saints, I would say that before 1984 God’s eternal economy as the very reality and the center of the Bible was never seen by God’s people so fully as today among us. To my knowledge, no other book has pointed out that God’s eternal economy has Christ as its center and reality, with His Body, the organic Body of Christ, as the organism to the Triune God.
Today we have come to this high peak of God’s divine revelation. I would even say that we have probably reached the highest peak of the divine revelation in the entire Bible. This is the divine revelation discovered by the believers through the past twenty centuries. According to my knowledge, the first divine revelation discovered by the church fathers was the revelation of the Triune God. In the first part of the Bible, the Old Testament held by the Jews, it is difficult to find out anything concerning the Triune God. The Old Testament uses the divine titles Elohim (Gen. 1:1, 26), Jehovah (Gen. 2:4; Exo. 3:13-15), and Adonai (Gen. 15:2; Exo. 4:10) in referring to God. The Old Testament also mentions the Spirit of God (Gen. 1:2). Then in the New Testament there is One by the name of Jesus Christ (Matt. 1:1). Who is this One? Is He Jehovah? Is He God? If we say that Jesus Christ is God, the Jews will consider this blasphemy (John 10:33). How could a Nazarene be God? We may say that Jesus Christ is the Son of God. However, in the Old Testament we cannot find the divine title the Son of God. Although 2 Samuel 7:14 does say that God has a son, referring to Christ, the Jewish rabbis do not understand this word.
After the New Testament was written, the first group of Bible students after the apostles were the church fathers. They discovered that in the Bible there is such a thing as the Triune God, because in Matthew 28:19 the Lord Jesus told His disciples, “Go therefore and disciple all the nations, baptizing them into the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit.” The Lord Jesus did not tell His disciples to baptize people into the name of Elohim, or Jehovah, or Adonai, but into the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit. Before that time the Lord could not speak such a word, because before His resurrection the Spirit was not yet (John 7:39), that is, the Spirit was not yet consummated. The Lord spoke the word in Matthew 28:19 after His resurrection, while He stayed with His disciples for forty days prior to His ascension. Before the Lord’s resurrection, not only was the Spirit not yet, but even the firstborn Son of God was not yet (Acts 13:33; Rom. 8:29). Before His resurrection the Lord Jesus was the only begotten Son (John 1:18; 3:16). Even this the Jews did not know. They had Isaiah 7:14 and 9:6 and no doubt had read these verses again and again, but none of the Jews understood them. Isaiah 7:14 says, “Behold, the virgin will conceive and will bear a son, and she will call his name Immanuel,” and 9:6 says, “…a son is given to us;…and His name will be called…Mighty God, Eternal Father.” In Isaiah 9:6 both the Son and the Father are mentioned, but the Jews could not understand this. They could not put the pieces of the puzzle together. When the church fathers read all these things in the Scriptures, they considered them and eventually invented a word in Latin: triune. Tri means “three” and une means “one.” The phrase the Triune God means “the Three-one God.” God is the unique God (1 Cor. 8:4, 6; Rom. 3:30; 1 Tim. 2:5; Deut. 4:35, 39); thus, He is one. Yet He is the Father, the Son, and the Spirit; therefore, He is three. Hence, God is three-one, triune. The church fathers discovered this fact.
Centuries later Martin Luther made a further discovery. Luther saw the matter of justification by faith (Rom. 3:28). He discovered that salvation is not by works but by faith. After this, many other students of the Bible made further discoveries. However, before us, no one ever discovered God’s economy with Christ as its centrality and universality and all its reality. It was not until the last ten years that we put all these things together to have a full picture of God’s economy. This is the highest peak of the divine revelation.
(Living a Life According to the High Peak of God's Revelation, Chapter 5, by Witness Lee)