The Ministry Of The Word Vol 28 No 02 Laboring On The All Inclusive Christ Typified By The Good Land For The Building Up Of The Church As The Body Of Christ For The Reality And The Manifestation Of The Kingdom And For The Bride To Make Herself Ready For The Lord S Coming

This issue of The Ministry of the Word contains a complete record of the twelve messages given during the December 2023 semiannual training, held in Anaheim, California. The Key Statements on the following page embody and summarize the crucial truths and main burdens covered in these twelve messages.

This book is intended as an aid to believers in developing a daily time of morning revival with the Lord in His word. At the same time, it provides a limited review of the semiannual training held December 25-30, 2023, in Anaheim, California, on “Laboring on the All-inclusive Christ Typified by the Good Land for the Building Up of the Church as the Body of Christ, for the Reality and the Manifestation of the Kingdom, and for the Bride to Make Herself Ready for the Lord’s Coming.” Through intimate contact with the Lord in His word, the believers can be constituted with life and truth and thereby equipped to prophesy in the meetings of the church unto the building up of the Body of Christ.

In The All-Inclusive Christ Witness Lee expounds portions of the book of Deuteronomy, showing that the land inherited by the children of Israel is a full type of the all-inclusive Christ, who is our New Testament inheritance. He presents a detailed study of some of the unsearchable riches of the good land, including its brooks and streams, its wheat and barley, its figs and vines, and even its iron stones. Each type is explained and applied to our experience as believers.

First published in 1700, The Christian¿s Reasonable Service (De Redelijke Godsdienst) ran through twenty Dutch editions in the eighteenth century alone! The title is derived from Romans 12:1, ¿I beseech you therefore, brethren, by the mercies of God, that you present your bodies a living sacrifice, holy, acceptable unto God, which is your reasonable service.¿ It expresses what God requires from man, and particularly from the Christian, that he serve Him in Spirit and in truth¿intelligently, rationally, and in harmony with and response to God¿s revelation of Himself, His Word. With a decidedly Puritan flavor and representing Reformed experiential religion at its best, Wilhelmus à Brakel systematically moves through the major doctrines of the Bible in hopes of seeing the minds of God¿s people renewed for the purpose of promoting godliness. Throughout his work, but particularly in the practical application of each doctrine, à Brakel strives unceasingly to exalt the name of Jesus as the name that the Father has given above every other name¿there being no other name given under heaven among men whereby we must be saved (Acts 4:12).

Reproduction of the original.

Written about the year 400. [Faustus was undoubtedly the acutest, most determined and most unscrupulous opponent of orthodox Christianity in the age of Augustin. The occasion of Augustin's great writing against him was the publication of Faustus' attack on the Old Testament Scriptures, and on the New Testament so far as it was at variance with Manichæan error. Faustus seems to have followed in the footsteps of Adimantus, against whom Augustin had written some years before, but to have gone considerably beyond Adimantus in the recklessness of his statements. The incarnation of Christ, involving his birth from a woman, is one of the main points of attack. He makes the variations in the genealogical records of the Gospels a ground for rejecting the whole as spurious. He supposed the Gospels, in their present form, to be not the works of the Apostles, but rather of later Judaizing falsifiers. The entire Old Testament system he treats with the utmost contempt, blaspheming the Patriarchs, Moses, the Prophets, etc., on the ground of their private lives and their teachings. Most of the objections to the morality of the Old Testament that are now current were already familiarly used in the time of Augustin. Augustin's answers are only partially satisfactory, owing to his imperfect view of the relation of the old dispensation to the new; but in the age in which they were written they were doubtless very effective. The writing is interesting from the point of view of Biblical criticism, as well as from that of polemics against Manichæism.--A.H.N.]