Eat Up!

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We've been reading through John both in church and in our family worship time, and there's a real distinct trend I've noticed that I wanted to bring up, an attribute of God that has a lot of implications.  This attribute is provision.

Consider, if you will, the woman at the well in John 4. What is it that Christ offers her?  Living water, capable of giving life. And later in that chapter, when His disciples urge him to eat, He says that He had "food to eat that you do not know about." Later, in John 6, we see Christ feeding the five thousand men (plus women and children), and in John 7:37, we see Him once again offer the Living Water that gives life.  In Mark 8, we see Christ feeding four thousand in a separate large-scale food miracle. During each of these cases, the parallel is either a direct spiritual one, or in the case of the literal physical provision, He uses it to point people to the spiritual eternal life-giving provision from God. So why the repeated theme of providing food and drink to the hungry and thirsty, both spiritually and physically?

The answer has several layers, I think. First off, earthly food is what preserves physical life in us, and the parallel between life-giving sustenance, and spiritual eternal life, is an easy one to make and easy for people to understand.  You MUST have the food/drink that Christ offers in order to have true spiritual eternal life!  Second, Christ compares himself to food in an allusion to the incredible picture that was to take shape later in the form of the Lord’s Supper.  He does this in John 6:48-51, where he compares Himself to the manna that came from heaven to feed the Israelites when they were lost in the wilderness (interesting to note that we were in the same spiritual state prior to receiving the spiritual life-giving food as the Israelites were physically prior to receiving the physical provision of food).  He was Himself bread from Heaven, come down to give life to men. This comparison is a very deep one, because it also acts as a proof of Jesus’ oneness with God.

I was working in our garden the other day, and it occurred to me that this attribute of God providing food goes all the way back to the very beginning, when God put plants on the earth.  In His incredible design, He created them not just to reproduce, but to reproduce many times over, thus giving a sustaining, repeatable food source for us!  In the case of the manna, and later the quail, God took the dire situation of the Israelites and provided abundant food to renew them.  2 Kings 4 has two more instances of provision in the form of the multiplication of the widow’s oil, and the barley loaves for the hundred men.  There are so many instances in Scripture of this miraculous provision from the Lord to sustain life – it is a repeated pattern with Him.  And this is why these miracles of Christ providing food are that much more important – because they attest to His Godhood! 

While on earth, Christ performed these miracles that provided physical food to those in need of temporary sustenance, and this was in and of itself an attribute characteristic of God throughout Scripture.  The ultimate miracle of provision, though, was that by His death and resurrection, the breaking of His body as bread, and the bleeding of His body as wine, He provided the spiritual food and drink that our souls must partake of to have eternal life.  Praise God!
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