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“The manna ceased on that day, when they ate of the produce of the land; and there was no longer manna for the children of Israel, but they ate of the yield of the land of Canaan that year” (Josh. 5:12). Here is the third stage of eating in the life of God’s people.
The Christ we eat is first for our full salvation, as is depicted for us by the eating of the passover. Not only does the blood provide us with redemption and release from God’s condemnation, but also, by eating of the lamb, the unleavened bread, and the bitter herbs, we are energized to walk out of Satan’s territory and cross the Red Sea. Full salvation includes redemption, regeneration with the life and nature of God, and deliverance from the world. Are you enjoying this full salvation, or are you still lingering in Egypt?
In the second stage we have Christ to sustain us on our wilderness journey. The eating of the manna is not for our salvation but for the building of God’s dwelling place and the carrying on of God’s testimony. Here in the church life we are eating Christ for the building up of the house of God.
In the previous chapter we covered these two stages.
In the Bible two is the number of testimony, not of completion. Our eating is not complete with just two stages. As 1 Thessalonians 5:23 says, for our whole sanctification we must be preserved in spirit and soul and body. While the eating in Egypt was good in that it strengthened us to make our exodus, the eating in the wilderness was better because the tabernacle resulted. Not until its erection did God’s glory descend from the heavens to fill the house for Him on earth.
To be in the third stage required that God’s people leave the wilderness, by crossing the Jordan River, and enter into Canaan, the land promised to Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob as an inheritance for their children. It represented the promised goal of God.
What then is this third stage? It is eating for the house of God to be settled on a solid foundation. Instead of a movable, portable tabernacle, there was a temple constructed on a firm, settled base. This construction could not be done in the wilderness. The temple was built in the good land, and it meant that the kingdom of God was established, expressing God and His authority.
These are the three stages of eating, and they form a history of our Christian experience. Just as God is triune and man is tripartite, so our spiritual eating has only these three stages. Our spiritual growth depends upon our eating. Are you still eating lamb and bitter herbs? Is manna your daily food? Manna is the food for wanderers, those still in the wilderness of the soul. Are you in the good land, enjoying the produce of Canaan in your spirit?
You may find it hard to be sure which stage you are in. You may feel that even in one day your experience can shift back and forth from the good land to Egypt or to the wilderness. However, if you have ever tasted the experience of being in the good land, declare by faith that that is where you are. Do not believe Satan’s lie that you have slipped back.
While manna was the only food provided for the children of Israel in the wilderness, the produce of the good land was varied. It was “a land of wheat and barley and vines and fig trees and pomegranates; a land of olive trees with oil and of honey; a land in which you will eat bread without scarcity” (Deut. 8:8-9). Not only was there this assortment of vegetables and fruits, but they had herds and flocks as well (12:6). It reminds me of what is offered in an American supermarket — the great variety of fruits, vegetables, and meats.
From chapters 12, 14, and 16 of Deuteronomy it is clear that there were two kinds of eating in the good land. All the increase, whether from the field or from their flocks and herds, had to be divided into two parts. Ninety percent of it was the portion that belonged to the Israelites and could be eaten within their gates (12:15). This we may call the common eating.
The other ten percent, the tithe, had restrictions upon where it could be eaten: “You may not eat within your gates the tithe of your grain or of your new wine or of your fresh oil, nor the firstborn of your herd or of your flock,...but you shall eat them before Jehovah your God in the place which Jehovah your God will choose” (vv. 17-18).
Suppose, for example, I am an Israelite with a herd of cows. When one of them has its first calf, I am not free to kill it and make a feast for my family, even though the herd belongs to me. I must save it until the time of the Feast of Tabernacles, the fifteenth day of the seventh month. If this same cow has a second calf, though, we are free to fatten it up, kill it, and make a feast for all our relatives.
The firstborn calf, along with the firstlings of all my flocks and herds and the tithe of my produce, I must take to the place “where Jehovah your God will choose to cause His name to dwell, there you shall bring all that I am commanding you, your burnt offerings and your sacrifices, your tithes and the heave offering of your hand” (v. 11). “On the fifteenth day of the seventh month, when you have gathered in the produce of the land, you shall keep the feast of Jehovah seven days” (Lev. 23:39).
The common eating within the gates is a type of the common enjoyment of Christ. We can feast on Him at home alone or on the campus or even meeting with a few others. This enjoyment of Christ may be precious, but, as many of you can testify, our highest enjoyment of Christ occurs in the church meetings. It is only here that we enjoy the top portion of Christ. This is the place where He has chosen to set His name and build His habitation. However good your home meeting or little fellowship group may be, it is not where God dwells. The habitation of God today is the church, and Mount Zion is today’s church meeting, where the tithes and offerings are to be presented.
Eating Christ in the third stage involves not only His riches but also the matter of the oneness of God’s people. Once the children of Israel occupied the good land, it would have been easy for them to be separate from each other. What kept them in oneness was this requirement: “Be careful that you do not offer up your burnt offerings in every place that you see; but in the place which Jehovah will choose in one of your tribes, there you shall offer up your burnt offerings, and there you shall do all that I am commanding you” (Deut. 12:13-14). All the males had to appear before the Lord three times a year in the place of His choosing (16:16) to celebrate the feasts with the rich produce of the land.
Suppose two neighbors had a disagreement and were no longer on speaking terms. Though most of the time they avoided each other, the day would come when they would both have to make the journey back to Jerusalem. By coming together on the highway to Zion, they could settle their differences and join the others in declaring, “Behold, how good and how pleasant it is / For brothers to dwell in unity!” (Psa. 133:1). This was one of the Songs of Ascents that the Israelites chanted as they came together and ascended Mount Zion to present their offerings and to keep the feasts.
As we eat Christ, we will find that we are brought into oneness with all the saints. We may be unhappy with certain brothers or sisters and decide to discontinue attending the church meetings. We may say that God’s presence is everywhere and that we can enjoy Christ at home. But the extra portion of the enjoyment of Christ cannot be ours apart from the church meetings. If we try to have both the common and the particular portions of Christ in the place where we choose, the oneness is damaged. However disgruntled we may feel about things in the church, we must meet with the saints. The habitation of God is the church, not our little fellowship group. We must all meet in the place where God has chosen to cause His name to dwell.
The produce of the good land did not rain down from heaven as the manna had done. The children of Israel had to till the soil, sow the seed, keep the ground watered, and get rid of damaging insects. Then when harvest time came, they had to reap the crop.
Christ is our good land. Day by day we must labor on Him. We begin with morning watch, tilling the ground and sowing Him as the seed. Sometimes we just water the crops and kill some snails. During the day we keep laboring on Him by experiencing, enjoying, and partaking of Him. We also snatch a few minutes now and then throughout the day to read a chapter in the Word.
By such faithful laboring, we gradually accumulate the rich experiences of Christ. Then we bring our surplus to the meetings. The Israelites had only three feasts yearly. We do not have to wait that long! We have at least three meetings a week, every one of them a feast, to which we may come, not empty-handed but laden with the experience of Christ: “They shall not appear before Jehovah empty-handed; each man shall give as he is able to give, according to the blessing of Jehovah your God, which He has given you” (Deut. 16:16-17).
Of the five books of Moses, only Genesis gives no instruction on the way to worship. The other four cover in considerable detail the worship and service of God. The natural concept is that to worship God we must bow down, kneel, or prostrate ourselves. This was the custom of the nations surrounding Israel (Exo. 23:24). But the instruction given to the children of Israel was to bring their rich produce, offer it to God, and then eat it with one another in His presence and with Him. What they offered was both their food and God’s. The eating in God’s presence is worship.
The more we come together with our hands full of Christ, the more we offer Him to God and enjoy Him in the presence of God, the more we are worshipping Him. Our Father God desires the worship that is our eating of the Son. God is happy when we are in His presence enjoying His Son.
In John 4 the Lord Jesus linked worship to God with drinking of Him. After the Lord told the Samaritan woman, “Whoever drinks of the water that I will give him shall by no means thirst forever” (v. 14), she turned the subject to the matter of worship. The Lord’s reply was, “An hour is coming when neither in this mountain nor in Jerusalem will you worship the Father...An hour is coming, and it is now, when the true worshippers will worship the Father in spirit and truthfulness, for the Father also seeks such to worship Him” (vv. 21, 23). Our spirit is Jerusalem, God’s habitation (Eph. 2:22), and it is here that we worship God, not by prostrating ourselves before Him but by enjoying Christ as the reality. This drinking of Him is the real worship to God.
We offer the Christ we have experienced in our daily walk whenever we come to the meetings. Do not think that musical instruments are a necessary part of our worship. Music is not the reality. The reality is found in our spirit, in the very Christ whom we have experienced. These experiences are the rich produce of the good land. It may be that sometimes our meetings will have no singing or even praying but only rich testimonies from our daily life. The bountiful produce will be heaped up before the Lord. The testimonies may be quite short, yet because they come from the riches in the spirit, they may be more than a testimony. What we say as a testimony may be in the form of a prayer or may be an offering of praise.
What form the meeting will take cannot be predicted. Each one may be different. Surely some meetings during the first century were like what we have described. We do not try to arrange different styles of meeting. How the meetings are comes out of how we are. We live a certain way, and we meet this same way. We do not come together to perform but to bring an overflow of the rich Christ we have been enjoying. It is thus that we eat Christ together in the presence of God.
How good it will be when all the churches are like this! Today we are still under the influence of degraded Christianity, with the singing of hymns and praying as part of our form of meeting. The Bible does not give us a ritual way to meet. No formal way is prescribed for our coming together. We should be like the children of Israel coming together in ancient times to the unique place, Jerusalem, with all the rich produce of the good land; that is to say, we come to the spirit, offering our rich experiences of Christ. Whether we sing is not at issue. We may spend a whole meeting only singing, if the Lord so leads. What concerns us is only that we meet in spirit and with the riches of Christ.
When we share our experiences, we should not do so in a scattered way. Because we all have such bountiful and varied experiences, what we say should follow the line of the one who preceded us. We cannot have a feast with an odd assortment of groceries that do not fit together.
If our meetings are full of such an attractive Christ, those who come will be convinced, subdued, and captured. It is not exciting meetings that gain others. Christ Himself is the attracting factor — not a Christ in doctrine but One whom we experience.
The third stage of eating is complicated. There is the common way of eating together within our gates of the riches of the good land. There is also the particular way of bringing our tithes to the chosen place to eat before the Lord in order to keep the oneness of God’s people. Further, this stage of eating requires that we labor, not just gather what has fallen from heaven. Finally, we must worship the Father by bringing all the rich variety of the experiences of Christ to the meetings and presenting them to God and to His people.
This third stage is the one that accomplishes God’s purpose. This is our goal, toward which we must aim, in the Lord’s recovery. Thus the church life will be produced, God’s kingdom established, and His temple solidly built up.
