The Bible reveals to us first that God is both the eternal God and the God who created the universe and all the things therein. Second, it shows us that this God who created everything became flesh; He was a perfect man. Third, this One who is both God and man became our Redeemer and Savior. He became a man by virtue of His birth, and He became the Redeemer by virtue of His death. Nevertheless, He did not stop in death. Because He is the eternal God, death could not hold Him. Therefore, He rose from death. By such a resurrection, He became our Savior.
This Savior is life and resurrection. His salvation is not objective and is not from the outside; rather, it is subjective and is from within us. As the life-giving Spirit, He has entered into us and is living in us as our life. This life in us can lead us to break through death and resist all the adverse situations. Whether death or suffering, whether catastrophes or persecutions, in any difficult situation, and in all hardships, He as the resurrection life can get us through all of them.
This wonderful One, who is both God and man and who is the Redeemer and the Savior, is the life-giving Spirit today. What we have received is not a dead religion but a living Lord, a living God, and a living Spirit. The Bible does not give us some doctrines in letter; rather, it reveals this life-giving Spirit who has become our life and reality. We are not here following dead rituals and regulations. Rather, we are here enjoying God and letting God enjoy us.
The Bible tells us that when the people of God gather together, they are coming to a feast. We are feasting with God, and the riches of this feast are Christ. Christ is God’s enjoyment and our enjoyment. We enjoy Christ with God, and we also share Him with others. The more we eat, drink, and enjoy Him, the more worship He obtains. We know that to eat or drink is to receive food that is outside of our body into our body. What pleases our Lord the most is for us to receive Him into us, even to such an extent that He not only is our food but also becomes our element. Thus, He becomes our life and life supply.
In the Old Testament, God wanted His people to keep the feasts; He did not teach them to bow down, kneel down, or “kowtow” before Him. On the contrary, in Exodus, Leviticus, and Deuteronomy God repeatedly taught and indicated to His people that whenever they were to come before Him to keep the feasts, the main thing was to bring the offerings, which are all types of Christ. This means that God wants His people to bring Christ before Him. After they brought the offerings, they had to learn how to present them. Because we are sinful, we need to present the sin offering. Because we have trespasses and offenses, we need to present the trespass offering. Because we should live absolutely to God, we need to present the burnt offering. Because we desire to enjoy a fullness with God, we need to present the meal offering. After presenting all these offerings, we all have peace, so we present the peace offering. In this way we all sit down before God to eat and drink and enjoy Him. We satisfy God, and God also satisfies us. This is the worship that God wants. The worship that God desires is that we eat, drink, and enjoy Christ.
After God created Adam, He did not give him any commandments. Instead, God brought Adam before the tree of life and wanted him to eat of the tree of life and not to eat of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. After God created man, what concerned Him the most was the matter of eating. Regretfully, man ate of the tree that was forbidden by God. Thus, man was poisoned and thereby lost the right to eat of the tree of life.
God’s people became fallen and later went down to Egypt, but God came to them to carry out His salvation. God’s way of salvation was by the sacrifice of the lamb. At this time it was not enough merely to eat, because now man had sinned. In the beginning, when there was the tree of life, there was no need for the shedding of blood because there was not yet the problem of sin. However, later, at the time of the Passover, not only was there the need to eat of the flesh of the lamb, but it was also necessary to first shed the blood of the lamb. This was because man’s sins had to be washed away first, and then man could eat the flesh of the lamb under the covering of the blood.
After the exodus from Egypt, the Israelites lived forty years in the wilderness. It seems that every day they did nothing but eat the manna that descended from heaven, drink the living water that flowed out of the rock, and carry the ark in their journey through the wilderness. After they entered into the land of Canaan, there was again the matter of eating. They started to sow seed in the land of Canaan, and three times a year they kept the feasts by bringing the riches of the harvest before God to eat, drink, and enjoy together.