True Satisfaction

What happens to food … like this piece of bread [eat piece of bread] … when you eat it? Well … it goes to our stomach where it is broken down by hydrochloric acid and digestive enzymes so that it can be absorbed into my body. That piece of bread that I just ate will eventually become a part of body at the cellular and molecular level. Pretty amazing, don’t you think? How the body can take a piece of food, break it down, absorb what it needs, and discard or eliminate what it doesn’t need?

Jesus described Himself as a type of “food” … a very special kind of “food.” He said, “I am the bread of life. Whoever comes to me will never be hungry and whoever believes in me will never be thirsty” (John 6:35).

Let’s back up a little here. This discourse … this encounter … came at the tail-end of a miracle where Jesus fed 5,000 people with a boy’s lunch of five barley loaves and two fishes. Then they follow Jesus around to the other side of the lake the next day where Jesus accuses them of only wanting to get something to eat … to take care of their immediate physical needs … but what He tries to explain to them is that He is here to give them a special kind of food… food that “endures for eternal life” (John 6:51). Like the woman at the well, they ask Jesus what they must do to get this special food … this “living bread” from Heaven. “If God has set His seal upon you as you say,” they demand, “then give us bread from Heaven like God did when our ancestors roamed through the wilderness.” Jesus responds by reminding them that their ancestors who ate the bread of Heaven … manna … had to eat it everyday … like regular bread … and they all eventually died. In other words, like regular bread, it sustained them for a day or two … but what Jesus had to offer them was something completely different. Like the manna that came from Heaven, so too Jesus … the Living Bread” (John 6:35) … came down from Heaven … whereas the bread that came down from Heaven could only last … could only sustain them for a day or two … Jesus, the Bread from Heaven, could sustain them forever (John 6:49).

Now … as I pointed out … in order for this bread to sustain me, I have to eat it. [Eat another piece of bread.] I have to ‘take it in’ to me’ where it will be absorbed … become a part of me.

Jesus said that we must do the same thing with Him … we must “eat” Him … take Him into us … in order for Him to become a part of us. “I am the living bread that came down from Heaven. Whoever eats of this bread will live forever; and the bread that I will give for the life of the world is my flesh (John 6:51; emphasis mine). … “Very truly, I tell you, unless you eat this flesh of the son of Man and drink His blood, you have no life in You. Those who eat my flesh and drink my blood have eternal life, and I will raise them up on the last day; for my flesh is true food and my blood is true drink. Those who eat my flesh and drink my blood abide in me, and I in them” (John 6:53-56).

Now … let’s pause here for a moment …

When I “eat” this bread [eat another piece of bread] it becomes a part of me … at the cellular and molecular level. For the Jews, blood was not only a metaphor or a symbol of life, they believed it was equivalent to life itself. The life of the animal … our lives … was, in their minds, logically in the blood … which on some level is true. To remove the blood was to terminate life. If we bleed enough, guess what? We die, right? So, the idea of “drinking” Jesus’ blood meant that we when we “drink” His blood we are “drinking” His life into us … His “life becomes part of us … part of our lives.

Jews were forbidden to touch blood, so Jesus’ command to “drink” His blood was quite shocking, to say the least. When Jesus says that they had to “eat” His flesh and “drink” His blood, He means that we are to “take” Him in … we are to “absorb” Him at a cellular and molecular level. If we don’t, we have “life” … just as the Jews in the wilderness had life … but we don’t have Christ’s life … which is eternal … in us … a part of us.