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God is not interested in giving you instruction. He is not out to develop your personality. He does not care about your self-improvement program. He is not trying to make a better person out of you. Rather, He wants you to come to the dining table and feast. The dining table is the Bible. You need to come to it at least three times a day. By pray-reading this book you will be nourished by the rich Christ, and God will have a way to fulfill His purpose.
The matter of eating is alluded to many times in the Epistles and in Revelation. In these final books of the Bible we find the outcome of eating. From the previous chapters I believe you have seen that God would have us take Christ Himself as our life supply into our being. Now we shall consider what happens to us when we thus receive Him.
The apostle Paul prayed, “That Christ may make His home in your hearts through faith...that you may be filled unto all the fullness of God” (Eph. 3:17, 19). The issue of our enjoying the riches of Christ is that we become His expression. When this unlimited One has been wrought into us so that He can make His home in our heart, fully possessing our mind, emotion, will, and conscience, we will be filled. To be filled means to have something added into us. When we are filled with the riches of Christ, the result is the expression of God.
God is not expressed by our good behavior, by our doctrinal knowledge, or by our self-improvement. His expression is solely the result of our receiving the riches of His Son by eating. This organic, subjective receiving results in Christ’s becoming part of us, similar to the way our digested and assimilated food becomes part of us.
When Paul said, “To me, to live is Christ,” he was describing the outcome of his day-by-day eating of Jesus. The result, then, of feeding on Christ is that God is expressed.
“Do not be fashioned according to this age, but be transformed by the renewing of the mind that you may prove what the will of God is” (Rom. 12:2). This verse gives us another result of our taking Christ into us as food: we are transformed. I like the word transformed. There is no religion that aims at transforming us. At best, religion’s goal is to develop or improve what we are. This is not the case with God’s salvation. He has no interest in helping us to be better behaved. His desire is to add something into us that formerly was not there. We were born with only a human life; when the divine life is added into our being, transformation can be accomplished.
The renewing and transforming can be likened to grafting. Paul uses grafting as an illustration of God’s salvation in Romans 11:17-24. We, the wild olive tree, were grafted into the cultivated olive tree.
Grafting is an organic mingling. This is what our Christian life is. Bible teachers have called it an exchanged life, but this is the wrong way to describe it. We do not hand our poor life over to Christ for Him to discard and have Him give us His life to treasure. No transformation would be involved if that were what happened. Rather, we have been grafted into Christ, and Christ has been grafted into us. We are being transformed, not only by Christ but also with Him.
In Paul’s writing concerning how he had cared for the Corinthian believers, he says, “I gave you milk to drink, not solid food” (1 Cor. 3:2). The way Paul took care of the Corinthians was not to teach them but to feed them. Yes, there are verses that mention teaching and learning, but there is this concept here that the believers need to be fed.
In verse 6 Paul says, “I planted, Apollos watered, but God caused the growth.” Our need is growth, not an improvement in behavior. Where do the gold, silver, and precious stones, mentioned in verse 12, come from? Our nature by birth is wood, grass, and stubble; that we are now in the nature and form of gold, silver, and precious stones indicates that we have been transformed.
We may feel like wood, grass, and stubble most of the time, but be strong in faith. We are in the process of transformation. Declare to Satan, “I am in the process of being transformed into gold, silver, and precious stones. Even if it takes a long time, my God is not worried about time. To Him a thousand years are as one day.” In the Lord’s recovery we have the planting and the watering. Be assured that the growth is coming. Be ready to welcome it.
Second Corinthians 3:18 gives us another picture of how this transformation comes about: “We all with unveiled face, beholding and reflecting like a mirror the glory of the Lord, are being transformed into the same image from glory to glory, even as from the Lord Spirit.” How are we all being transformed into the same image? We must first ask the Lord to remove any veils from us that we may behold Him openly. The thought in this verse is that we are a mirror, facing Christ. As we behold and reflect Him, we are transformed into His image. The more we behold and reflect Him, the more He comes into us and changes us, from one degree of glory to another. In this beholding, His element is being added to us, just as the grafted branch receives the life-juices from the better tree to which it has been grafted.
Stay in the church life to be part of the beholding and reflecting mirror and to be the grafted branch, absorbing the life supply that flows from the better tree. Over the years I have seen the saints being transformed from one degree of glory to another, even as from the Lord Spirit. Day by day the Lord has been adding Himself to us, and we are being transformed.
“The God of peace Himself sanctify you wholly, and may your spirit and soul and body be preserved complete, without blame, at the coming of our Lord Jesus Christ” (1 Thes. 5:23). God as the life-giving Spirit comes into the center of your being, your spirit, and begins to saturate you. This saturating sanctifies you. This twofold process gradually spreads outward into your surrounding soul, and from there it encompasses even your body. When your body is sanctified, you are mature and ready to be raptured.
To be raptured is to be reaped. Christ, the heavenly Farmer, is coming to reap us. But first we must grow so that we are no longer so green and tender. To grow is to be saturated with the element of God. When we are fully sanctified, from the spirit through the soul and out to the body, we are ready to be reaped, for we will then be completely transformed into His image. The sanctifying and saturating are even now going on within us.
The thought in Hebrews 5:12-14 is similar to that in 1 Corinthians 3:2. The believers could only take milk, though it was time that they were ready for solid food.
In 1 Peter 2:2 the believers were told to long for the word the way an infant does for milk “in order that by it you may grow unto salvation.” For them to grow unto salvation was for them to be transformed from clay to living stones. The result of their getting the nourishing milk would be not only transformation but also building: “You yourselves also, as living stones, are being built up as a spiritual house” (v. 5). The result of our eating is that the church is built.
At the end of the Bible, the food that is offered to God’s people is the very food presented to man at the beginning: “To him who overcomes, to him I will give to eat of the tree of life, which is in the Paradise of God” (Rev. 2:7). Overcoming in these epistles to the churches at the end of the first century means allowing nothing in the frustrating, degraded environment of Christianity to keep us from eating. The reward to the overcomers is to eat of the Lord as the tree of life in the Paradise of God. This is an incentive for us to leave the knowledge and teachings of religion and return to enjoying Him.
In the epistle to the church in Pergamos the Lord promises the overcomers to eat of “the hidden manna” (v. 17). A portion of the manna, the food of the children of Israel in the wilderness, was preserved in a golden pot concealed in the Ark (Exo. 16:32-34; Heb. 9:4). The hidden manna, signifying the hidden Christ, is a special portion reserved for those of His seekers who overcome the degradation of the worldly church. While the church goes the way of the world, these overcomers come forward to abide in the presence of God in the Holy of Holies, where they enjoy the hidden Christ as a special portion for their daily supply. May we all be among those who seek the Lord, overcome the degradation of the worldly church, and enjoy Him as a special portion today. Then in the coming kingdom He as the hidden manna will be a reward to us.
A further promise to the overcomers in Pergamos is, “To him I will give a white stone, and upon the stone a new name written, which no one knows except him who receives it” (Rev. 2:17). By eating of the hidden manna we are transformed into a white stone for God’s building. Here again eating is linked to transformation and building.
The call to the overcomers in Laodicea is, “Behold, I stand at the door and knock; if anyone hears My voice and opens the door, then I will come in to him and dine with him and he with Me” (3:20). To dine is to eat a full meal, not just a snack. This promise suggests the eating of the rich produce of the land of Canaan by the children of Israel. Christ is a rich meal to us.
The Lord in these closing epistles steps into the degraded situation of the churches and seeks to recover the proper eating of Himself as our food supply. His people have been distracted from taking Him in as their food to the teaching of doctrines for knowledge. Thus, He turns their focus to eating.
In the last chapter of the Bible the tree of life appears again: “On this side and on that side of the river was the tree of life, producing twelve fruits, yielding its fruit each month; and the leaves of the tree are for the healing of the nations” (22:2). Even the final promise in the Bible concerns eating: “Blessed are those who wash their robes that they may have right to the tree of life and may enter by the gates into the city” (v. 14). The right to the tree of life means the enjoyment of Christ for eternity. It is the portion of those who keep their conduct clean through the cleansing of the blood of the Lamb.
In these five chapters we have surveyed the subject of eating from Genesis to Revelation. In every stage of God’s relationship with man — in the garden of Eden, in Egyptian bondage, in the wilderness wanderings, in the good land, when Christ was on earth, when the churches were being established, in the millennial kingdom, and in the New Jerusalem — He made provision for His people’s eating.
This same concern about what we eat should mark us as Christians. Day by day we need to come to the Word and, by praying over what we read, take in the very Christ as our food. He Himself is our tree of life, our Passover, our manna, our good land, our fattened calf, and our heavenly food.
Only by taking Him into us can God’s purpose be accomplished. God is expressed not by our good behavior but as an outcome of our assimilating the riches of His Son. It is by the intake of this food that we are transformed into His very image. He thus saturates and sanctifies us, cleansing us “by the washing of the water in the word, that He might present the church to Himself glorious, not having spot or wrinkle or any such things, but that she would be holy and without blemish” (Eph. 5:26-27).
In the writings of Paul, Peter, and John the thought keeps recurring that God’s people must be fed rather than given doctrinal knowledge. They first must desire milk and then go on to solid food. At the end, eating of the tree of life again comes into view, first as a reward for the overcoming believers during the millennium and then for the enjoyment of all God’s people for eternity.
May we be those who faithfully eat of this feast that God has so richly spread for us. The Bible is the means by which we feed on Christ. By our coming to this Word in a regular way and opening to Him, He will spread throughout our being until eventually our body too will be sanctified, and we will be raptured to His presence.
Eating is the way by which we are “filled unto all the fullness of God.” We must not let anything distract us from routinely coming to the dining table of the Word several times a day to take in its rich nourishment. Then we will be transformed from vessels of clay to precious stones and be built up into His habitation. “I commit you to God and to the word of His grace, which is able to build you up” (Acts 20:32).
