Tuesday

Related Verses
John 7:37-39
37 Now on the last day, the great day of the feast, Jesus stood and cried out, saying, If anyone thirsts, let him come to Me and drink.
38 He who believes into Me, as the Scripture said, out of his innermost being shall flow rivers of living water.
39 But this He said concerning the Spirit, whom those who believed into Him were about to receive; for the Spirit was not yet, because Jesus had not yet been glorified.

Rom. 8:9
9 But you are not in the flesh, but in the spirit, if indeed the Spirit of God dwells in you. Yet if anyone does not have the Spirit of Christ, he is not of Him.

Gen. 1:26
26 And God said, Let Us make man in Our image, according to Our likeness; and let them have dominion over the fish of the sea and over the birds of heaven and over the cattle and over all the earth and over every creeping thing that creeps upon the earth.

Ezek. 1:5
5 And from the midst of it there came the likeness of four living creatures. And this was their appearance: They had the likeness of a man.

Deut. 4:35
35 You were shown these things that you might know that it is Jehovah who is God; there is no other besides Him.

1 Tim. 2:5
5 For there is one God and one Mediator of God and men, the man Christ Jesus,

Lev. 2:4
4 And when you present an offering of a meal offering baked in the oven, it shall be of fine flour, unleavened cakes mingled with oil or unleavened wafers anointed with oil.

Related Reading
In the Bible the number four signifies God’s creation…In His incarnation the Lord Jesus was both God and man. The four spices signify the humanity of the Lord Jesus in God’s creation. Of course, some Christians do not like to hear the word creation used in the case of the Lord Jesus. This is due to the heretical teaching of Arius who taught that Christ was merely a created being and that He was not the eternal God.

The oil signifies divinity in the Godhead…The number one signifies God, the unique Creator.

In this compound ointment we have the numbers four and one, with the number four blended with the number one. This signifies humanity blended, mingled, with divinity. Concerning the compound ointment, we cannot avoid using the word mingled. The words compounded and blended actually mean “mingled.” The four spices were mingled with the oil. (Life-study of Exodus, pp. 1689-1690)

—

The five elements of the anointing oil—the four spices and the olive oil—all had to pass through a process that involved either pressure or cutting. For instance, if olives are not put into the press, they cannot give forth olive oil. Likewise, in order to have myrrh and cinnamon, some kind of incision must be made on the bark of a tree…When a tree flows out the resin of myrrh, this resin has the appearance of tears.

Cinnamon comes from the inner part of the bark of a tree, and cassia comes from the outer part of the bark. Cinnamon can be used to stimulate the heart, and cassia, to repel insects and snakes.

All the spices were prepared for use through suffering. This indicates that the Spirit of God could become the Spirit of Christ as the compound ointment only through Christ’s sufferings…It was through the sufferings of Christ that the spices were blended with the oil to form the compound Spirit.

The Lord Jesus suffered death throughout His life, not only during the six hours He was on the cross. As soon as He was born, He began to suffer. This suffering is signified by myrrh…A crucified life is a life of suffering…Daily He lived a life of crucifixion. This is the experience of myrrh dropping as tears from cuts made in the tree.

After the Lord Jesus was born, the magi expressed their appreciation of Him by offering Him gold, frankincense, and myrrh. At the time of His death, Nicodemus and Joseph of Arimathea also showed their appreciation of the Lord by putting myrrh upon His body when they buried Him. Therefore, at the beginning of the Lord’s life on earth and at the end, at His birth and at His death, there was myrrh. This indicates that the Lord’s life from birth to death was a life of suffering, a life of tears. He lived a crucified life, a life of myrrh.

We need to learn how to apply the myrrh in our experience. Where is the death of Christ today…? The death of Christ is in the Spirit. In our language the word spirit in a particular usage can mean the essence of a substance as extracted in liquid form, especially by distillation…The extract of the Lord’s death is an element in the Spirit of Christ.

If we would experience the death of Christ, we need the Spirit…The fact revealed in Romans 6 that our old man has been crucified with Christ can only be experienced through the Spirit in Romans 8…Apart from the Spirit we cannot experience the death of Christ. The fact of our identification with Christ in His death is in Romans 6, but the experience of this is in Romans 8. (Life-study of Exodus, pp. 1703-1705)

Further Reading: Life-study of Exodus, msg. 158