To consume God, he must first consume us

Issue #153

This is going to be a shorter newsletter. In light of the concepts I’ve drawn out in the past few issues, of the liturgical pattern of consumption, I want to zero in on a particular application.

We have seen that both the eye and the mouth are a symbol of consumption in scripture. We take things in with our eyes and our mouths. In both cases, doing so changes us: we are transformed in some way by consuming. When we fix our attention on something, we start to be changed into the image of that thing, which is why Paul tells us, “we all, with unveiled face, the glory of the Lord beholding in a mirror, to the same image are being transformed” (2 Co 3:18). One day this transformation will even be physical, as John tells us when he says that “if he may be shown forth, we shall be like him, because we shall see him as he is” (1 Jn 3:2).

But even more elemental than seeing is eating. Man was made to eat.

The paradox of eating and being eaten

Lo, I have given to you all plants sowing seed, which is upon the face of all the earth, and all trees in which is the fruit of a tree sowing seed; to you it is for food. (Ge 1:29)

These plants and trees sprouted from the earth itself. Like the man, they were made of earth. Their roots go into the earth and consume what is in the earth, and so transform the earth into fruit — and then the man comes, and he consumes the fruit, and in turn transforms it into…well, into him. We become what we eat, but what we eat also becomes us. It isn’t just a cliche; it’s how God made us. Our bodies are made of what we eat. Man was made from the earth, and in a sense he was made to eat the earth, as Jim Jordan puts it; but he doesn’t eat raw dirt. He eats transformed dirt. And in so doing, he transforms it further — he actually transforms the dirt into the image of God himself.

In the process, he too is transformed. His body starts out made of raw dirt, but gradually is turned into a body made of transformed dirt, a body made of fruit and vegetables, and then later of transformed vegetables — he takes the wheat and breaks it down and mixes it with olives that he has broken down into oil, and water, and fire that he makes by breaking down wood and transforming it into flame, and when he does that just right, he gets bread. It’s transformation all the way down, and all the way up, and all the way in, and all the way out.

There’s a strange paradox here; when you eat, you also are eaten; when you take something in, you also become that thing in some sense, and so it also takes you in. Adam takes in living things, and they die, so that he may live. They are given up for him; they are sacrificed. This is all meant to teach him something about the nature of reality, about the cosmos itself.

If he is an image of God, then he is supposed to wonder:

Does God himself eat? And if so, what? If I’m at the top of the food chain, but God is above me, then…God eats me, right? I go into God, and I am transformed by being turned into God’s body, but then when that happens, because of the strange eating paradox, God himself is transformed — not in his immutable attributes, but in his relationship with me, and the whole world through me.

In the language of scripture, again, he is glorified — but so am I, and so is the world.

You can probably see how this ties into the second Adam, the Lord Jesus Christ, who is making all things new (Rev 21:5), summing up all things in himself (Eph 1:10), in whom all things hold together (Col 1:17), and through whom all things in heaven and on earth will be reconciled to God (Col 1:20). If we don’t understand this strange paradox — that when we eat, we are also eaten — we will not truly understand pretty much anything about the Christian life. I don’t mean we won’t have any knowledge of doctrine or practice — but we will be missing something profound that sits behind it all; something so basic and so elemental that it is built into our most primal appetites, and imaged in the very survival of all living things.

Consumption is worship

We know that we are transformed into the image of Christ by consuming him — and this teaches us that consumption is a kind of worship. We are always feeding on something, and if we will not feed on God, we will eventually end up devouring his creation — which means ultimately we consume ourselves, because creation can never sustain us eternally. There simply isn’t enough of it. God is infinite; we are not. Plus, it isn’t made of the right stuff. When we eat things they die — and dead things, of themselves, can never produce life.

This is another puzzle built into creation, to keep Adam pointed in the right direction. If you only eat what is beneath you, you will end up dead, because you’re only eating death. You have to look above, Adam. Find the life to eat up there.

To remain alive, you must feed on life; and only God has life in himself.

This was written not just into the nature of the world, but also into the law, to remind us, to instruct us, since in the fall we became slow-witted, and unwilling to discern the truths of nature without having them spelled out to us:

and he causeth thee to hunger and doth cause thee to eat the manna (which thou hast not known, even thy fathers have not known), in order to cause thee to know that not by bread alone doth man live, but by every produce of the mouth of Yahweh, man doth live. (Dt 8:3)

The second Adam knew this very well, for he quoted this passage to Satan when he tempted him in the wilderness, after 40 days of eating nothing.

Christ eats us

In the last issue, I looked especially at the Lord’s Supper — so let me connect what I’ve said so far to that, so I can move through it and on to the practical point I want to make:

I believe that many of the errors and schisms over the Lord’s Supper could be avoided if we spent less time fighting about what it means for us to eat Christ, and more time asking what it means that he eats us.

Christ comes first. It is he who sets the pattern; who reveals what eating is. He must! Our eating can only be understood in light of his — not his in light of ours. “It is he who made us, and not we ourselves” (Ps 100:3). We are made in his image; we follow his patterns. So if we want to understand what it means for us to eat him, we must first understand what it means for him to eat us. Eating is a spiritual pattern first, and a physical pattern second. When we put the cart before the horse, all kinds of things go wrong. If you will permit me to mix my metaphors, the tail should not be wagging the dog.

“But wait,” you might say. “What are you talking about Christ eating us, Bnonn? Where is that in scripture? That sounds like absolute nonsense. Heretical even. Have you lost your mind?”

Well, what does Christ himself say in his letter to the Laodiceans, in Revelation chapter 3?

So — because thou art lukewarm, and neither cold nor hot, I am about to vomit thee out of my mouth. (Re 3:16)

What is this talking about? How did the Laodiceans get into Christ’s mouth to begin with? Modern translations obscure the answer by being squeamish with the Greek, translating it “spit” — “I will spit you out of my mouth,” says the ESV — but the word really means vomit. The ASV says spew. This amuses me, but more importantly, it is accurate. Christ is threatening to eject the Laodiceans not just from his mouth, but from his innards — from inside him.

How did they get there? To answer that, let’s firstly draw some connections. If you remember the structure of that letter, it begins with the warning that he will vomit them up, and it concludes with an encouragement which is obviously parallel — an encouragement which has to do with eating things down:

look, I have stood at the door, and I knock; if any one may hear my voice, and may open the door, I will come in unto him, and will eat with him, and he with me. (Re 3:20)

And this is not the first time we have heard I-with-him-and-he-with-me type language in John’s writings. That is actually a common theme. For instance:

He that abideth in me, and I in him, the same beareth much fruit: for apart from me ye can do nothing. (Jn 15:5)

If that which ye heard from the beginning abide in you, ye also shall abide in the Son, and in the Father. (1 Jn 2:24)

If we connect this with Revelation 3, we start to suspect that Jesus could have equally said, “eat me, and I will eat you.” Except, actually he did say that…

He that eateth my flesh and drinketh my blood abideth in me, and I in him. As the living Father sent me, and I live because of the Father; so he that eateth me, he also shall live because of me. (Jn 6:56–57)

Now, this latter passage is obviously connected to the Lord’s Supper — so something mysterious is going on when we celebrate it. We thought we were eating Christ, and we are — but it turns out he is also eating us.

But what follows? Given that this is connected to the Lord’s Supper, what is the application?

How to safely consume

Allow me to remind you about how there are two patterns of consumption presented in scripture. The first is the pattern of the fall, which starts with:–

• Take, eat, give…

The second is the pattern given by Christ in the Lord’s Supper, which adds blessing (that is, thanksgiving), and reverses giving and eating; so:–

• Take, bless, give, eat…

Christ is establishing in the Lord’s Supper a liturgical pattern of consumption that reverses the fall. There is a parallel between the fall — eating the sacramental tree of knowledge — and redemption — eating the sacramental tree of life. All consumption should be preceded by thanks and praise. Before we consume, we ought to bless.

I have been especially thinking about how to apply this to our modern smartphone world. We are constantly being pushed to consume. And in fact, in this, the world is constantly seeking to consume us. Smartphones want our attention so they can feed us ourselves. We have created a machine to feed us ourselves.

So how do we safely use such a machine? We can choose not to use it, but it does come with many benefits — if we can safeguard our souls. This is what I really want to talk about today, and my application is actually very simple, but we needed this groundwork to be able to truly see the importance of it. What I am about to say would no doubt seem true without this groundwork, but you would be inclined to treat it lightly — as just a bit of good advice, like something Christians should do because, you know, it’s pious or whatever. You’d certainly say, “Oh yeah, Christians should do that.” But then you wouldn’t, really — or at least, you don’t do it with much zeal, with much eagerness.

You just wouldn’t have a sense of urgency about it because it seems very ordinary.

But it’s not ordinary.

It’s anything but ordinary.

When you start to think about how strange and marvelous and powerful a thing it is to be eaten by God, by eating him in turn, you start to realize how profound my very simple application is, and you will (I hope) start to take doing it much more seriously.

So what is the application? Let me make one more connection to explain it:

If that which ye heard from the beginning abide in you, ye also shall abide in the Son, and in the Father. (1 Jn 2:24)

This is functionally identical to what Jesus says about he himself abiding in us — but notice that in this case, he abides in us through what we have heard. He says a very similar thing in John 15:

If ye abide in me, and my words abide in you, ask whatsoever ye will, and it shall be done unto you. (Jn 15:7)

There is a clear connection in John between the words of Christ abiding in us, and Christ himself abiding in us. John 15 begins with Christ saying, “Abide in me, and I in you.” And then he circles through this in multiple ways, so we can understand what he means — and how we can ensure that he abides in us. And so he says, “If my words abide in you.” If abiding and eating are in some sense interchangeable here, as we have seen they are, then we could paraphrase him as saying, “Eat my words and I will eat you.”

It is through eating him that we become like him, and overcome the world — a connection he makes in Revelation 3:

look, I have stood at the door, and I knock; if any one may hear my voice, and may open the door, I will come in unto him, and will eat with him, and he with me. He who overcometh — I will give to him to sit with me in my throne, as I also did overcome and did sit down with my Father in His throne. (Re 3:20–21)

And it is through eating his words that we eat him. Therefore, eating his words will help us overcome the world.

This is the same thing God tells Joshua as he is about to set out to conquer the land of promise:

the scroll of this law shall not depart out of thy mouth, and thou shalt murmur in it by day and night, so that thou observest to do according to all that is written in it; for then thou shalt make thy way to prosper, and then thou shalt have success. (Jos 1:8)

Notice that Joshua has to put the law in his mouth. Why there? Well in one sense, of course, it is coming out of his mouth. But in another, it is going in. Again, Revelation shows us an image of eating God’s word:

Go, take the little scroll that is open in the hand of the angel who hath been standing upon the sea and upon the land: and I went away unto the angel, saying to him, Give me the little scroll; and he saith to me, Take, and eat it up, and it shall make thy belly bitter, but in thy mouth it shall be sweet — as honey. And I took the little scroll out of the hand of the angel, and did eat it up, and it was in my mouth as honey — sweet; and when I did eat it, my belly was made bitter. (Re 10:8–10)

We know from Psalm 119:103 that God’s word is sweet honey — but why does it make John’s stomach bitter? Well, one reason that may be applied to all of us, beyond John’s immediate ministry, is because the word requires us to die to our appetites, to renounce the god of our belly, and to crucify our flesh. Think of how bitterly Paul laments the sin that still lives in him in Romans 7 — but thanks be to God, who delivers us from this body of death through the Lord Jesus Christ abiding in us, eating us as we eat him, by eating his word.

Joshua is told that God’s law must not depart from his mouth, but he must murmur upon it day and night. Psalm 1 tells us that the happy man, the blessed man, is one who has only the law of Yahweh as his pleasure, and “in his law he murmureth by day and night” (Ps 1:2).

You probably know that most Bibles will translate this meditate — but meditation in our day certainly does not mean what Joshua was commanded to do, or what David is talking about. Quite the opposite: meditation, as most people think of it today, involves saying something meaningless, something empty of meaning, in order to empty the mind. I am not saying we must abandon the word meditation; what Joshua is being commanded to do may be fairly described as biblical meditation. But it is critical to understand the difference. Pagan meditation is the very antithesis of biblical meditation. It is as far from it, and directly contrary to it, as the east is from the west. Biblical meditation has us murmuring upon God’s words, repeating them softly to ourselves, memorizing them through continual speech, filling ourselves with perfect meaning, with the fullness of God’s own mind. The idea is to fill ourselves with him — to fill our minds with his mind — so that we are continually feeding upon him, and he on us.

But pagan meditation has the hapless fool murmuring upon vanity, upon empty words, murmuring upon the void, saying things like “Ummmmm” in order to lose his mind, continually feeding upon nothing, and being consumed in turn — becoming nothing. You ask a Buddhist or a Hindu what the goal of enlightenment is, and they will tell you it is to become nothing. To disappear. To shed the illusion of self. That is natural to a cosmology that rejects the creator-creature distinction; a cosmology that despises God and refuses to thank him and submit to him and worship him.

But to those who do call upon his name, he bids us to fill our minds with him, and in so doing, we become not less, but more. As we become transformed into his image, we do not become less like ourselves, but we become fully ourselves. We do not disappear; we appear. We do not lose who we are; but find it. Instead of becoming nothing, and casting off the illusion of self, we are filled with everything true and good and beautiful, and our self becomes a unique, glorious, individual expression of every treasure that is found Christ. We become like him — but remember the paradox: we eat, and we are also eaten. So he becomes like each of us. We participate in the divine nature, and the divine nature is truly expressed in each of our one-of-a-kind personalities.

And he hath been as unto a tree planted upon streams of water
That giveth its fruit in due time
And its leaf doth not shrivel
And all that he doeth shall prosper

I told you that this would seem a humdrum application.

You might think I am just saying “memorize scripture.” But it is not exactly memorize — the Hebrew emphasizes that the words must be in our mouths.

You think this doesn’t matter?

I hope by now you realize that every word God gives us is wise and true altogether. It is breathed out by God to be profitable to completely equip us.

Yet we read that the word must not depart from our mouths, but we must murmur in it…and somehow we interpret this to be the same as the word not departing from our eyes, as we memorize it.

But eyes and our mouths are not the same, and murmuring and memorizing are not the same. Do we think God doesn’t know how to say what he means? That he doesn’t know more about how we are made, and what is necessary to us, than we do? It must be in our mouths, and it must be out loud. The Hebrew means to make a noise, to muse quietly to yourself, like a lion growling over his prey (Isa 31:4) or doves moaning (Isa 59:11). It is contrasted with wizards who mutter spells (Isa 8:19) and, in the very next Psalm, with the nations who rage and muse a vain thing (Ps 2:1). Silent reading is only a very recent notion — it was certainly not the norm when the Bible was written, nor for long afterwards.

So let us take God at his word, and murmur in it.

I trust you see now that this is not humdrum at all. That it is profound and powerful. We are being told to eat God that he may eat us. And he has given us a way to do this that accords with our material existence: by putting his mind audibly into our mouths, so that we may be filled. I will have much more to say about this in the next issue of Discipleship & Dominion.

Notable (and relevant):

Unrelated, but one for the ladies that I thought was really good:

Until next time,

Bnonn

P.S. I work hard to teach something each month that is solidly orthodox and Reformed, but also builds up your faith in a way you won’t easily find elsewhere. If my work has achieved that end for you, I’d be grateful for your support. You can become a paid subscriber; or if you’d like to just make a one-time donation, buy me a coffee.