Dining with Jesus (part 1)

It’s all about eating

“Here I am! I stand at the door and knock. If anyone hears my voice and opens the door, I will come in and eat with him, and he with me.” (Revelation 3:20)

When we sit at a table and dine together, we talk and laugh and commune with one another the way that humans were meant to share with each other. Seems these days that we spend more time eating in the car, eating in front of the television, eating alone, eating in the “closet” or just not eating at all. The nourishment of food has been lost since its original intention of communion. A true “dining experience” comes at a high price where we pay large sums of money for people to bring us plates of food for our fleeting pleasure. We rarely experience the taste and texture of food any more, it is simply to fill the empty space in our stomachs and stave off the hunger of our bellies. The foods we eat now have very little nutritional value and simply leave us fat and dissatisfied until we can find something else to ease our cravings.

The world has lost its communion with itself and with God. In the Bible, God used food to remind people of His presence and His promise to take care of us. The Israelites wandered in the desert for 40 years being provided every meal by God. And when they complained about the fare for the day, he sent them something different! Very few fathers would relent to the childish antics of one of their own by providing a different meal when the child insolently proclaims “I don’t like that” or “I am tired of that!” Of course these days, with the ease of microwaves and pre-packaged delights, so many parents simply give in and cook those chicken fingers and French fries for the finicky child who refuses to eat the green beans on his plate.

God gave us the hunger pangs in our bellies to remind us to fill them with good things to nourish our bodies and keep us alive. I believe we have spiritual hunger pangs similar to physical ones that God also gave us as a gift to remind us to fill our hearts and minds with Him. We are supposed to commune with God, to dine with Him daily, to fill our spiritual stomachs with His Word. We have lost the knowledge that the hunger we feel is for a righteous God and now look for earthly things to fill our spiritual insides. Material possessions, sex, empty religions, other humans, and even food are the things we believe that we crave to stave off the spiritual hunger that we feel. Of course, we never get full. We just keep stuffing it in at an ever-increasing pace only to become more and more empty inside. We are literally obese and starving to death at the same time!

Food was obviously important in the Bible. God carefully crafted man as a machine that had to be fueled to remain running at its peak. This daily eating was a way to remind ourselves of our humanity and God’s infinity. We are His creation and we can only survive on His terms. The intricacies of our bodily systems and the pleasure we derive from fueling our bodies with food are no accident. God intended to parallel our physical desires with our spiritual desires. It is perhaps the only way He had to allow us to understand the greater knowledge that awaits us upon our rebirth into the Kingdom.