Eating Christ’s flesh? Uh, that is some heavy stuff, Wayneman. Especially when you use the verb “eat.” That word triggers my mouth into getting involved with ingesting food. But eating Christ’s flesh? And drinking His blood? Really? How are we supposed to do that?
Well, Christ does say, “Except you eat the flesh of the Son of man, and drink His blood, you have no life in you” (John 6:53). It is this everlasting life that defines Christ’s abiding in us. He promised that He would abide and dwell in us if we ate His flesh and drank His blood.
Some people today will react to this statement the way many did 2,000 years ago. It was this very teaching that separated the sheep from the goats. “From that time many of his disciples went back and walked no more with Him” (6:66). How serious was this situation? After witnessing many miracles and just being with Him, they could not handle the eating of His flesh and the drinking of His blood. They thought that He had gone too far with His mysterious sayings.
What was their problem? Christ said that it was their unbelief (6:64). But unbelief of what exactly? It was unbelief in anything that their eyes could not see. All they saw was the flesh of His body. They were looking after the flesh and not after the spirit. To understand this enigmatic passage, we must look on his “flesh” and “blood” after the spirit. Christ said as much: it is the spirit that quickens” (6:63). We must catch the “spirit of the thing” to understand it.
What spiritual action is taking place with His earthly body and blood? Ironically, we must look at Christ’s flesh body and blood after the spirit. The spirit makes His teachings come alive. Eating His flesh and drinking his blood are metaphors, not literal, material things to do. We must look to the spiritual applications of what His flesh and blood did on the cross.
The Flesh and the Blood—What Did They Do at the Cross?
Christ made an extremely important statement. “Except you eat my flesh and drink my blood, you have no life in you.” Obviously, we cannot consume the flesh of His physical body cannibalistically. What then does his “flesh” signify? It is a metaphor for the final act that His physical body performed. That act was Christ laying down his physical body unto death. The eating of his flesh is us believing what the sacrifice of His body did for us all. It is believing that His death on the cross and His subsequent resurrection of that physical body, served to take our sins totally away. His flesh dying as a sacrifice for the sins of the whole world is the bread of life. It is what we are to take in/eat/and digest—spiritually.
Christ is called the Lamb of God for this very reason. All our sins were laid upon His body. Our sins were placed upon the Lamb. He was our scapegoat offering. When His flesh body died, our sins died with Him. When His blood was shed, the life of sin died that day on the cross.
“Without the shedding of blood there is no forgiveness of sins” (Heb. 9:22). “He was made to be sin for us, who knew no sin, that we might be made the righteousness of God in Him” (II Cor. 5:21). He was our pure Passover Lamb, crucified, and with his crucifixion, sin died that day. All we must do is just believe it. When His flesh body died, our old sinful selves died with Him. And “he that is dead is freed from sin.” The lifeblood of our sin is drained away with Christ’s blood.
When we were baptized in water, “we were baptized into His death.” When Christ’s sacrificial flesh and blood died, our old sinful self died with Him, “that the body of sin might be destroyed.” We are free! We are new creatures in Christ (Romans 6:1-12).
When we believe what the death of His flesh body and the shedding of His blood did for us, then we will have eaten and drunk His blood. These figures of speech mean that we have taken into our hearts the love that He expressed to us. We must not corrupt the “simplicity that is in Christ” (II Cor. 11:3). Beware of those who would beguile you to follow the path of transubstantiation. God is Spirit, not material and physical. He does not live in a lifeless wafer and a sip of wine.
[What are your thoughts on this subject? Please leave them in the comment section. Subscribe and give us a “like” if we have helped you. May Yah continue to enlighten your steps.] Kenneth Wayne Hancock