GOD'S PROMISES # 12

' ... the one who feeds on me will live because of me'

This promise is another of the many promises spoken by Jesus Christ in the sixth chapter of John's Gospel.

Using the physical symbols of 'feeding', 'eating' and 'bread', Jesus again makes a direct connection between himself and life.

He has twice told us that he is the bread of life. He has told us that he both gives, and is, the food that endures to eternal life, the true bread from heaven which God, the Father, gives from heaven, and the living bread that came down from heaven.

He tells us that if we 'eat' him, the true bread from heaven, we will not die, but will live forever. In fact, he says, that if we do not 'eat his flesh' we have no life in us. Only those who 'feed on' him live because of him.

By way of this symbolic language Jesus is speaking of spiritual life - life reconnected to God, the source of all life. Such is the identity between God and Jesus Christ that he said: 'When a man believes in me, he does not believe in me only, but in the one who sent me. When he looks at me, he sees the one who sent me.'

To believe in Jesus Christ is to know the one, true God; to see him, is to see the one, true God. Thus when we realize and acknowledge that Jesus Christ is indeed God in human flesh, we are reconnecting with him who is life and the source of life.

Without this reconnection, Jesus says, we have no life in us; we are, as stated elsewhere, 'dead in transgressions and sins', severed from God, in whom alone is spiritual life.

Many of Jesus' hearers were offended by these claims made by Jesus Christ in John 6, and ceased their allegiance to him. Only the twelve disciples remained with him, and one of them did not believe.

Now the challenge confronts each one of us: do we believe in Jesus Christ? Are we feeding on him? Or are we among those who cannot handle his claims to have come down from heaven, and to be the one and only place where eternal life can be found?

Scriptures: John 6:57; John 6:25-70 - various verses; John 12:44,45; Ephesians 2:5; Isaiah 59:2; Matthew 16:15.