“And while they were eating, Jesus took bread, and blessed it, and broke it, and gave it to his disciples, saying, Take and eat; this is my body.” Matthew 26:26.
All moving beings on the earth need to eat and need food. And it was not a need that came after Adam’s sin and fall. When Adam was first created, God prepared food for him.
“And the LORD God caused every tree to grow out of the earth, that it might be pleasant to the eyes of man, and the fruit thereof good for food.” Genesis 2:9.
By man’s relationship with food, God demonstrates the dependence of man’s life on the Creator. This is not a defect, but an essential characteristic of the attributes of human life.
Many of the significant aspects of the relationship between Israel and Yahweh revolved around eating. At Mount Sinai, where God first appeared to Israel, the Israelites ate. “His hand did not lay upon the noble ones of Israel. They watched God; they ate and drank.” Exodus 24 .11.
Eating was even more an important part of the sacrifice and all the feasts, including the Passover.
Then there was even manna. In its most basic sense, as a provision for life, manna was the purest form of food. And in terms of what God expresses through food, that is, the dependence of human life on God, manna is unique and incomparable.
If there is a people in this world who truly understand the significance of food for life, it is Israel. Not because they had ever lacked food (for every people on earth has experienced famine), but because they had been in the wilderness for 40 years, completely dependent on a single provision from heaven, which God had given them. It was the Lord’s special purpose to make the Israelites understand the relationship between life and bread. This lesson lasted for nearly 40 years, and God excluded all other factors in the wilderness, where no food could be produced, so that the Israelites would not have any illusion that the bread of life was grown by man himself.
Apart from God, they could not survive, nor could they remain on the earth.
If the Son of God says one day, “My body is your bread,” and a people of the earth would have understood the meaning of this statement most clearly, that people should have been Israel.
But they did not understand.
At that time the Lord said, “I am the bread of life which came down from heaven; if anyone eats of this bread, he will live forever. The bread that I will give is my flesh, which is given for the life of the world,” (John 6:51) but hearing those words, not only did they not understand, but many of those who had followed Jesus left as a result.
But on that last night, at the Passover feast, the Lord made to the disciples not only the last and deepest charge, but also made them participants in the most holy sharing of life.
“Take and eat; this is my body.” Matthew 26:26.
The disciples still did not fully understand, but they were at least not offended. They may have begun to understand gradually that if they did not eat the Lord’s body, they had no part in his life. But they did not really understand until after the Lord’s ascension, when the Holy Spirit came down from heaven, filled them, and let them recall what had happened in the past and what he had said.
Therefore, they broke the bread often, in remembrance of the Lord (Acts 2:46).
The broken body of the Lord is the soundest place in the universe
The body of the Lord Jesus was broken before it was given to us. This represents his death and his sacrifice. But the broken body of the Lord is the soundest place with the highest integrity in the universe.
Integrity means soundness, both complete and healthy, without disease, without corruption, without pollution, without defilement, without defect, without destruction, without decay, without compromise.
This is the absolute opposite of the world. The world is fallen, corrupt, sinful, unhealthy, full of disease, and finally doomed to death. If we the fallen in sin put their ultimate hope in this world, we will end up hopeless, for there is no real sound “food” in this world that can provide life forever.
This is precisely the Lord Jesus Himself. He came in person, not only to give us new life, but also to be the food for our new life.
Moreover, it is in the sharing of the same bread that is broken that all new life is united into one body, the church of Christ.
That which is broken is precisely the most complete of the universe.
Eating the bread shows us our complete dependence on the Lord
The natural man does not like to hear the word “dependence”, because he thinks it is a defect and a shortcoming to have a necessity. But do you not know that all things depend on God, which is the first law in the final and complete order of the universe? The original rebellion of the archangel against God in heaven was that he wanted to be independent of God. Adam’s fall also consisted in his independence from God. This is the root of all lawlessness in the universe, and lawlessness is sin, the root of all sickness and death. All abnormalities in relation to God’s order are sin and disease. Death, on the other hand, is the summation of all anomalies in relation to the divine order.
Because of this, the only answer to the first problem of the universe is for the Son of God to manifest His life of complete obedience and dependence on the Father.
He Himself became that order, the order of the new heavens and the new earth, the order of new life, the order of eternity. The order of the old creation was held together by His omnipotence and command (Hebrews 1:2-3), but the order of the new creation is based on the substance of the life of Jesus Christ, the Son of God.
This is one of the reasons why the Son of God came to earth in the flesh. In heaven, Satan could challenge God, saying that your Son is perfectly obedient to you because he is equal to God, and the Father and the Son are perfectly united, but if he had taken on human form and come to earth to live a real human life, he would have been like Adam, who planned for himself and became independent of (and separated from) God.
But the Lord Jesus did come to earth and took on human form. And this was the original plan in the Godhead.
He came to earth as the Son of Man, but did not sin. We often think that because he is the Son of God, so what is so strange about he not sinning? However, the standard we use is not committing sin (doing wrong) as we think of it. In contrast, the standard the Son of Man has to satisfy is an absolute one, because it must not only resist sin but defeat sin completely. As long as the mind of Jesus deviated from the will of God the Father in any way, and acted according to his own will, and had plans for himself, Satan would have succeeded. This is what Satan tried to do in the wilderness when he tempted Jesus, and what Satan tried to do in the Garden of Gethsemane that night.
Yet Jesus did not do anything according to his own will.
“But that the world may know that I love the Father, and that as the Father has commanded me, so I do.” John 14:31.
“And Jesus said unto them, Verily, verily, I say unto you, The Son can do nothing of himself: but whatsoever he seeth the Father do, that shall he do; and whatsoever the Father doeth, that shall he do also.” John 5:19.
“He said, “Abba! Father! In you all things are possible; remove this cup, I pray you. Yet not from my will, but from thy will.” Mark 14:36.
So we come today to break bread and eat it, showing that our lives are totally dependent on Him. Not only because he is the bread of life, but also because the new life in us is a life of total dependence on God, a life of total obedience.
Jesus said, “My food is to do the will of Him who sent me, and to accomplish His work.” John 4:34.
If obedience (including dependence) is the food of the Lord Jesus, how can it not be our food too?