How is it possible for the Triune God to be our life and blessing? It is not a simple matter for something to become our life. For example, the food we eat and digest becomes our life supply. In order for anything to be our life or life supply, that thing must be organic. If you swallow a stone, that stone cannot become your life supply, because a stone is not living and organic. Only something organic can be digested by us and then assimilated into us to become our life supply. In a similar way, in order for the Triune God to be our life supply and even our life, He must come into us to be digested and assimilated by us. To be sure, the Triune God is living and organic.
According to chapter six of the Gospel of John, Christ is a loaf, the bread of life, for us to eat. The Lord Jesus said, “I am the living bread which came down out of heaven; if anyone eats of this bread, he shall live forever,” (v. 51). Then He went on to say, “As the living Father sent Me, and I live because of the Father, so he who eats Me shall also live because of Me.” (v. 57). Any believer who eats the Lord Jesus as the bread of life will live by Him. When we eat this bread of life, He comes into us to be digested by us and to be assimilated into us organically. This is the only way the Triune God can become our life. The Triune God becomes our life supply and our life by entering into us organically to be assimilated into the very fibers of our spiritual being.
Taking in the Lord to digest and assimilate Him that He may become life to us is signified by the eating of the loaf on the table. Whenever we come to the Lord’s table, we see a loaf. That loaf is not merely for display; it is for us to eat. When the Lord Jesus instituted His supper, “He took bread, and blessed and broke it, and gave it to them, and said, Take; this is My body” (Mark 14:22).
According to Luke 22:19, the Lord Jesus said, “This is My body which is given for you; do this unto the remembrance of Me.” This verse speaks of remembering the Lord. For years, I remembered the Lord at His table merely by concentrating on His incarnation, His life of suffering, His death, and His resurrection. I had not been told that the proper way to remember the Lord Jesus is to eat Him. The real remembrance of the Lord is to eat the bread and drink the cup (1 Cor. 11:24, 26), that is, to participate in, to enjoy, the Lord who has given Himself to us through His redeeming death. To eat the bread and drink the cup is to take in the redeeming Lord as our portion, as our life and blessing. This is to remember Him in a genuine way.
One day, more than thirty years ago, I was seeking to define the significance of the Lord’s table. As I considered the bread and read the verses in the New Testament concerning it, light came to me regarding what it means to remember the Lord at His table. I saw that to remember the Lord is not merely to think about Him, not merely to recall what He experienced. Rather, to remember the Lord is to eat Him. The Lord clearly said, “This is My body which is given for you; do this unto the remembrance of Me.” By this we see that the proper remembrance of the Lord is to eat Him, to take Him in as our life supply.
The bread on the table is not for us to analyze or merely think about; the bread is for us to take in, to eat, as our life supply. This bread should be digested and assimilated by us to become our very being. The significance of this is profound.
Eating the bread of the Lord’s table indicates that the Lord comes into us as our life supply and then actually becomes us. If we consider the matter of eating, we shall realize that the food we eat eventually becomes us. We may say not only that the food becomes us, but even that we become the food. Not only is there an organic union between us and the food we eat, digest, and assimilate; we are mingled with the food we assimilate into us.
It is a serious mistake to say that mingling is not scriptural. How could anyone reasonably deny the fact that we are mingled with the food we eat, digest, and assimilate? In fact, assimilating food into our being goes beyond mingling. We do not have the words to describe this. However, we do know that we are mingled in a deep way with the food we eat. In a similar way, when we take in the Triune God as our food, we are truly mingled with Him. In order for the food we eat to become our life, it must be mingled with us. The principle is the same with taking in the Triune God as our food.
We have pointed out that eating food involves something much more than an organic union between us and the food. Actually, eating, digesting, and assimilating food involve an intrinsic mingling of the food with our being. What we eat actually becomes part of us. Hence, this is not only a mingling; it is also a becoming. The food we digest and assimilate becomes part of our very being. For this reason, after we have thoroughly digested and assimilated our food, it is impossible for it to be located within us, because it has become a part of us. We use this matter of assimilating food to illustrate the deep significance of eating the bread of the Lord’s table.