In the Fall of 2015, I had what I call a “waking dream” where you see something just as you’re waking up, but you’re not quite awake. However, I didn’t just SEE this image. I tasted it, too. In the dream, someone handed me a Bible, and I took a bite into it. It tasted like sweet apples. Then I wondered what the individual books in the Bible tasted like, but I specifically remember the crunchy texture and the juiciness of it. To this day, I’m not entirely sure why the Lord showed me this, but as I reflect on the whole experience, I realize that He was showing me how to “taste and see that the Lord is good” just as King David described in Psalm 34:8.
The Dilemma
There are many who read this historical text that we know as the Bible and never actually have an encounter with the One who inspired the Biblical writers to write what they wrote. To them, it’s a lifeless text. It’s ink on a page and nothing more. Paul describes this phenomenon in his letters to the Corinthians, saying “The natural person does not accept the things of the Spirit of God, for they are folly to him, and he is not able to understand them because they are spiritually discerned” (1 Corinthians 2:14). Unfortunately, the Body of Christ in the West has largely become a naturally-minded people who do not accept the things of the Spirit of God and think of these things to be foolish. These are the same who might even be able to quote you every verse of the Bible that they’ve learned from memory, but they have never had an encounter with the Man Jesus Christ of Nazareth whom all of scripture points to. The result is a people that are full of intellectual understanding of the text, but are not full of love for Him. It ought not be so.
Jesus Commands us to Eat Him
If you get nothing else from this article, I hope you at least comprehend this next statement:
The Bible is not God, but His Word is.
That is NOT to say that the Bible isn’t trustworthy, or accurate, or inerrant, or inspired, or important today, because it is all of those things and more, and we have thousands of years of history and our own testimonies to prove it. What I am saying is that God isn’t calling us to read the Bible. He’s calling us to eat His Word.
Before John even delves into his eye-witness testimony of all that Jesus did and said, he established the preeminence of Jesus before all creation and said “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. He was in the beginning with God. All things came into being through Him, and apart from Him not even one thing came into being that has come into being” (John 1:1-3). Understanding this premise as Jesus being The Word of God is important before we explore this next passage.
Keeping in mind that Jesus is The Word of God, John documents an interesting confrontation between Jesus and the Jewish leaders of the day after they scoffed at Him for saying that He was going to give people His flesh to eat. He said:
“Most assuredly, I say to you, unless you eat the flesh of the Son of Man and drink His blood, you have no life in you. Whoever eats My flesh and drinks My blood has eternal life, and I will raise him up at the last day. For My flesh is food indeed, and My blood is drink indeed. He who eats My flesh and drinks My blood abides in Me, and I in him. As the living Father sent Me, and I live because of the Father, so he who feeds on Me will live because of Me. This is the bread which came down from heaven—not as your fathers ate the manna, and are dead. He who eats this bread will live forever” (John 6:53-58).
There are many that read the Bible but are still spiritually dead and hell-bound. That’s because the Bible in and of itself doesn’t hold the power to save anyone or to give its readers eternal life. Only Jesus, The Word of God, wields that power and authority, and the Word of God is telling us to eat Him so that we may truly abide in Him, and Him in us, and that’s how we get the word communion. This was His goal from the beginning—since before mankind was created, then after the fall, until the time Jesus came, and long after He returns. The Word of God wants to commune with us, and the only way to accomplish this is by sitting at His table of sacrifice and eating The Word made flesh so that all who accept this offering may be restored back to life and commune with the Father, just as He ever lives and communes with the Father.
All of this may sound offensive. When Jesus spoke these words, many of His own disciples were offended and ended up abandoning Jesus until there were only twelve left. Jesus clarified what He spoke and said “It is the Spirit who gives life; the flesh profits nothing. The words that I speak to you are spirit, and they are life” (John 6:63). The Jews of the day may have known the word of God well from the Torah, but when face to face with The Living Word in human form, they did not recognize Him and therefore could not receive His words. Having been acquainted with the miracles God performed amongst their ancestors when He rained bread from heaven in the wilderness which was a level of glory that passed away, they still rejected the Bread of Life in their day which lives forever.
What Happens When you Eat The Word?
Jesus says that if you eat Him, you will live, which by itself is incredible. However, in a historical sense, there was a level of responsibility for prophets to whom the Lord gave His word to eat. They needed to speak the message aloud to the people. When Ezekiel was being commissioned as a prophet to speak the word of the Lord to Israel, the Lord said “‘Son of man, eat what you find; eat this scroll, and go, speak to the house of Israel.’ So I opened my mouth, and He fed me this scroll. And He said to me, ‘Son of man, feed your stomach and fill your body with this scroll which I am giving you.’ Then I ate it, and it was as sweet as honey in my mouth” (Ezekiel 3:1-3). After eating the scroll and being full of the word of the Lord, the rest of the book of Ezekiel becomes about Him boldly prophesying against the wicked works of the Israelites in the temple of God.
Hundreds of years later, when the apostle John had been banished to the Isle of Patmos because of the testimony of Jesus, he had a similar experience. The Lord instructed him to “‘Go, take the little book which is open in the hand of the angel who stands on the sea and on the earth …Take and eat it; and it will make your stomach bitter, but it will be as sweet as honey in your mouth’ … And he said to me, ‘You must prophesy again about many peoples, nations, tongues, and kings’” (Revelation 10:8-9; 11). It was then that John was shown and told many things about what was to come, all of which is still waiting to come to pass as we speak.
How much more of a responsibility do we have as believers when the Father hasn’t given us a heavenly scroll or a book to eat, but the Word of God Himself? And if we don’t eat His Word, we don’t have life, and if we don’t have life, it’s impossible to testify of the works of Jesus to a dying world around us, because “the testimony of Jesus is the spirit of prophecy” (Revelation 19:10), God wants us to take what we’ve received at the communion table with The Son and to prophesy to others that the Kingdom of Heaven is drawing near to them, and that whatever Jesus did in our lives, He can do for others.
I pray that you would not only see, but TASTE the Word of God in your own life. The Holy Spirit is ready, willing, and able to breathe life on every Bible verse you read and to reveal Jesus, The Word of God, on every page from beginning to end. It’s His favorite thing to do. Because “man does not live by bread alone, but by every word which proceeds from the mouth of God” (Matthew 4:4), let the Holy Spirit feed you with the Bread of Life. There’s a communion table where Jesus is seated, and He beckons you to come and eat, and to taste and see that He is good.
The Secret Girl
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