Christ is also the believers’ spiritual food. In 1 Corinthians 10:3 Paul says, “All ate the same spiritual food.” This refers to manna (Exo. 16:14-18), which typifies Christ as our daily life supply (John 6:31-35) for the Christian journey. We believers should all eat the same spiritual food, not eating anything other than Christ.
According to God’s economy, we should live on Christ and on Christ alone. Christ should be our unique food, and we should not seek to live on any other food. Whatever satisfies, strengthens, and sustains us is our food. The unique food we should take for our sustenance, strength, and satisfaction as believers should be Christ. We all should be able to testify that only Christ satisfies us and that daily we are strengthened, sustained, and satisfied by Him.
The Christ who is our spiritual food is the Christ who becomes subjective to us. He is the processed Triune God indwelling our spirit as the all-inclusive Spirit. How wonderful that Christ is within us subjectively! The main purpose for His being subjective to us is that He may be our spiritual food. Anything that is to be our food and life supply must be something that can enter into us and then be digested and assimilated by us to become part of the very tissue and fiber of our being. Christ is subjective to us in precisely this way. When we eat Christ as our spiritual food, we are joined to Him and become one spirit with Him (1 Cor. 6:17). Hence, the Christ who is subjective to us, to whom we are joined and with whom we are one spirit, is our spiritual food.
The sixth chapter of the Gospel of John presents Christ as the believers’ spiritual food. In verse 48 the Lord declares, “I am the bread of life.” The bread of life is the life supply in the form of food, like the tree of life (Gen. 2:9). In verse 33 Christ refers to Himself as the bread of God, who came down out of heaven and gives life to the world. Christ, the very God, became flesh in order to be the bread of life for us to eat. He came from heaven not only to be our Savior but also to be our food. We need to realize how much we need Christ as our daily food.
John 6 is unique in giving many details concerning Christ as the bread of life, as our spiritual food. In this chapter we have five characteristics of Christ as our bread: heavenly bread (vv. 41, 50, 51, 58), the bread of God (v. 33), the bread of life (v. 35), the living bread (v. 51), and the true bread (v. 32). As the bread that came down out of heaven, Christ is the heavenly bread. As the bread of God, He is of God, He was sent by God, and He was with God. As the bread of life, He is the bread with eternal life. As the living bread, He is living. As the true bread, He is the bread of truth or reality. Christ is the true food, and all other kinds of food are merely shadows of Him as the real food. The reality of the food we eat daily is Jesus Christ. He is the true bread of life sent by God to bring us eternal life. We all need Him to be the bread of life, the spiritual food, to us.
In John 6:57 the Lord says, “He who eats Me shall also live because of Me.” To eat is to take food into us to be assimilated into our body organically. Hence, to eat the Lord Jesus is to receive Him into us to be assimilated by the regenerated new man in the way of life. Then we shall live by Him whom we receive as our food. It is in this way that Christ lives in us as the resurrected One (John 14:19-20).
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