Again we are looking into the spiritual reality of eating, especially eating rightly. As certainly as our natural body’s health is affected by our eating habits, this is equally true of the Body of Christ.
The Lord says very clearly in John 6:55 that His flesh is true food, and His body is true drink.When we look closely at this revelational declaration, the word true has directional and instructional truth. This is not the first time nor the last that Christ delineated by using this word true. I will simply reference John 15:1 where He calls Himself the true vine, but also He uses the words “truly, truly” repeatedly throughout this book to bring greater emphasis to Himself and the Father’s purpose. So “true” must be seen and understood, spiritually speaking, to carry a tremendous weight that is beyond even the value of all languages. The Lord is revealing Himself as true food, versus all others. So we are brought again to the absolute supremacy of Christ, or His coming to have first place in everything (Colossians 1:18). In speaking this way, it is notable to whom this is immediately spoken. This is to the Jews who were already grumbling about Him because He said He was the bread/manna that came down out of heaven (John 6:41). Their diet had been something other than the Lord, the Son, the True! Because of this spiritual fact, they simply could not see Him as to His eternal trueness. This is an internal, eternal, life-based, experience-based principle. We must taste/eat in order to see The Lord’s goodness. It will help us greatly to remember or be awakened to this reality: we will never truly know Him unless we are or become partakers of Him. To taste is to see, but to see without eating will almost always lead to spiritual blindness and misrepresentation of the True One that He is. Things become unbalanced, disjointed, misconfigured, and disconnected parts when Christ is not eaten as the True, the fullness, the wholeness, the supreme to which all the various aspects are only an unveiling of Him in His wholeness. We are not to see the various parts as complete within themselves; this will always lead us into error, no matter how prophetic it may seem. The Holy Spirit’s declaration through the prophetic or prophesy is entirely concerning Him, the testimony and witness of Jesus. He alone is the anchor for our souls and our human reasoning is bound to our souls. The need is for spiritual understanding which the soul cannot fathom, it is revelational and it is by the Spirit to our spirits.
It is this that the natural-minded Jews were unable to comprehend and were therefore grumbling about. But this is not simply a Jewish condition, this is an Adam creational issue. The natural man or soulical man cannot understand nor accept the things of the Spirit for they are spiritually examined (1 Corinthians 2:14). So what we are really seeing in this 6th chapter of John is the truth that God alone can and must make Himself and the fullness of His life and intention known. He must say by revelation, “Here I am,” to our spirit man, even though our natural soulical intellects find this truth offensive. However, it is His eternal joy to reveal Himself, to let us humble ourselves and intentionally ask for Him to reveal and remove the veils of our natural understanding.
Now for the Jews, their diet had been the law, the scriptures, tradition, and teaching from teachers who had never eaten of the person Himself, so to introduce an absolute, a must, was to disrupt all that they based their spiritual lives, purpose, and works upon. These things will not die naturally in any of us, it comes from internal disruption known as transformation which occurs when we behold the Lord as He is. It triggers then the necessity of partaking of Him, eating Him, He becoming that which nourishes us, sustains us, fills us, satisfies us, and yet creates a greater hunger to known Him.
We will continue to humble our hearts before Him in these next several sharings and acknowledge that He is who we wish to be partakers of. We will ask that He remove all veils so that we can behold, eat, and understand Him as He desires, in a revelational way, but let me again emphasize to us the absolute necessity of eating of Christ, for there is no true life but Him, and it necessitates eating. My intention is the revelation of Him, especially as the Lamb who is in the center of the eternal heavenly throne. So next we will turn out hearts, our inward spirit man, toward Him as such.
May the Lord grant to us by His Spirit a great eternal, internal desire to become partakers of Him who is the Lamb. Amen.