Cannabilism or Medication?

It is the Spirit who gives life; the flesh profits nothing; the words that I have spoken to you are spirit and are life. (John 6:63)

In the context of some of the mysterious ways Jesus said things in this chapter, this verse is an important key for proper interpretation. Jesus had just stated that unless you eat the flesh of the Son of Man and drink His blood, you have no life in yourselves. This obviously would have had definite shock effect on His hearers and was designed to make them think outside what they were used to thinking. They had been choosing to not track with Him time after time as He tried to present important clues about living in true reality in God's kingdom. They had been insisting on interpreting everything He was saying through the filters of their preconceived ideas about religion and God. But Jesus kept pressing on anyway and finally spoke things that were so shocking that they could no longer find a place in their pat ideas about religion in which to fit these words.

But I have to admit that I too have struggled with these strange expressions of Jesus much of my life. Yes, I have been instructed to interpret these things symbolically, and likely those explanations were true. But at the heart level I continued to wonder why Jesus didn't just speak more plainly so as to avoid any confusion to start with. Why did He have to say things that could so easily be construed to potentially make Him look like He had maybe lost His mind or was bordering on cannibalism? Why did He feel it necessary to go to such extremes with people who were already predisposed to wrest His words in order to discredit Him?

I don't have all the answers to those questions even yet. But in my own heart and mind I need to at least address the questions that linger about the validity of possible explanations for these words. If Jesus was not talking about literally eating His flesh and drinking His literal blood (which some insist was actually His intent even today), then where did He offer an explanation of these strange terms that would help us interpret them properly?

The opening text here is the key to viewing what Jesus was trying to convey and what people were seeking to avoid. From a literal standpoint Jesus almost seems to be reversing Himself by saying that the flesh amounts to nothing after just saying His flesh was vital for us to enter into eternal life. A literalist would find ammunition to quibble with His words, but then so did the unbelieving Jews. But Jesus was trying to get across some vital truths that are necessary to embrace for any who want to enter into real life and I don't want to follow the example of those who seek to distort His words of life.

In chapter three Nicodemus also seemed to wrestle with understanding properly how to enter into real life the way Jesus described it. Jesus immediately took him to the subject of the Spirit and the activity that the Spirit would produce in a person's life if one was willing to be led by it. Here again I find Jesus taking people back to the issue of a willingness to submit to the authority of God's Spirit in the life. But it is highlighting the need to relate to God at the spirit level of our being more than just conforming to outward rules and expectations to appear to be a good person. Unless the heart becomes fully engaged and submitted to the will of God and our spirit becomes aligned with His Spirit, no amount of religious performance will amount to anything whatsoever. True life must be received primarily in the arena of the spirit.

But Jesus takes it even one step further. It can be very easy for people to become so nebulous about following God with their spirit that they come to rely almost totally on their emotions and feelings to believe that they are properly connected with God. But Jesus insists that His words are the core issue in coming to know God and enter into life. In saying this He unlocks the strange words He has just stated about eating His flesh and drinking His blood but He also refers to the content and reason for all the things which He spoke. What was the main focus of all that Jesus said while He was here on earth? What was the purpose of speaking all the things He said to bring us the truth that results in eternal life?

I want to step back one step and ask, What is the purpose of eating and drinking to start with? Besides satisfying our cravings of hunger and thirst, which are certainly God-given urges to bring us to do things necessary for life, what is the fundamental purpose of eating and drinking? What results from these activities?

In both things, but in different ways with each, these are necessary activities by which we fuel our bodies to stay alive physically. To go without food will bring about malnutrition and finally starvation after a number of days. To fail to drink water will even more quickly bring us into ill health as our bodies are made up of around 90% water and we need this vital element to purify and lubricate our internal systems. Understanding the best ways to eat and to drink are important to having a long and healthy life. But even more importantly God wants us to not just have a healthy body but wants us to experience the even greater life that measures with the life of God.

Eating physical food and drinking literal water will not bring to us the full kind of life that God has in mind for us. Yes, it is necessary to take care of our bodies and doing so is an important way to cooperate with God for thriving and living. But there is much more to life than the familiar physical aspects that we are so used to thinking about, and this is the dimension that Jesus was trying to convey to His hearers. Our physical existence is actually something of an analogy to our spiritual existence, not something that should be in competition with it. But focusing on our physical dimension while failing to receive proper nourishment in the more important arena of our spirit's needs will starve us just as surely as refusing to eat will debilitate our bodies and eventually bring pain and death.

Just as it is true that eating the wrong kinds of foods and drinking the wrong kinds of liquids will also produce ill-health, so too it is vital to understand the kind of food and drink that will give us the true nourishment for our spirit that it was designed to live on originally. We have been living on spiritual junk food ever since sin entered into this world. And just like physical junk food can be very addicting in nature but fails to give us the vital nourishment that we need, so too, remaining stuck on spiritual junk food will lead to disease and death instead of the kind of eternal life that we were designed to enjoy.

But there is another aspect about food and drink that I don't want to miss here. When I take food into my body, that food and the elements within that food that are compatible with my digestive system actually become the organs and tissues and blood of my body. Very literally, I become composed of the actual elements of what I ingest. Likewise with water or liquids, what I drink even more quickly becomes absorbed into my system within seconds and permeates all over my body. When I drink unhealthy things designed to give me more pleasure than health, I suffer consequences of ill-health over time. If I choose to restrict what I eat and drink to the things God has shown are best for me, I can enjoy the optimum level of health and clarity of thinking possible given the body I have.

So too with my spiritual dimension. But in this arena it is often more difficult to easily identify the ill effects so clearly. When I abuse my physical body with poor diet and the wrong kind of drinking, the problems are more apparent, though in our day the disconnect between cause and effect seems to leave millions clueless as to why they experience such poor health and have so much sickness and disease. But when I am so used to the wrong kind of spiritual food from growing up never having experienced healthy spiritual nutrition, it is harder to grasp my desperate need for better nutrition in that area of my life. If I have never known what it is like to thrive and enjoy the freedom and joy of living closely with the real Source of life, then it is harder to sense the sickness that is all I have known since I was born.

This is why it is so important for the Spirit of God to make us aware of our need in this area. It is the Spirit's role to make us hungry and thirsty and to do whatever it takes to help us realize that we are starving for something that only can be found in intimate relationship with our Creator. The problem is that most of the time we interpret our hunger pangs improperly and turn to all sorts of other means to suppress that hunger and thirst. But this is the essence of worshiping false gods, for all other sources we look to for spiritual food and drink will only compound our dis-ease and intensify our cravings. Like a drug that seems to be just what we want but then leaves us more desperate than before, feeding and drinking on spiritual drugs and junk food only leaves us more hungry and thirsty for life and even angry because we are not getting the nourishment that we so desperately need.

So, what is Jesus offering me in this passage when He says I must eat His flesh and drink His blood? How am I ever to find the nourishment I need to thrive and live? Evidently it must have a great deal to do with His words and with the Spirit which He sends to supply this vital nourishment that my soul and spirit need in order to heal and thrive. As Jesus puts it, the literal flesh is not where we are going to find the satisfaction for the deep cravings of our soul. This is most often where we naturally tend to look to satisfy our cravings, but the cravings of the spirit within us can never find fulfillment in the arena of the flesh. We often attempt to satisfy our spirit cravings by exploiting others, through the indulging of lusts of all sorts and in seeking pleasures of various kinds to suppress our deep longings for real life. But they always leave us even worse off than before and until we come to the place where we are willing to listen to the words of Jesus and follow His instructions, we will never receive the kind of nourishment that is designed to perfectly satisfy the deep cravings of our spirit.

There is one more step to understanding the importance of these profound teachings of Jesus. What is the main content of the words of Jesus that when ingested will produce real life and growth and healing? What is it about Jesus' words that causes them to nourish us rather than leave us more hungry and thirsty than before? What are the vital ingredients in Jesus' flesh and blood that makes this source of nourishment effective in place of all the counterfeit sources we have used thus far?

This is the most exciting part of the gospel that I am only now beginning to really grasp. I am starting to see more and more clearly that the sole purpose for Jesus coming to this earth to offer us this life-giving opportunity, the only vital resource that will satisfy our deepest cravings, and that is a radical new revelation of the truth about our Father. All other sources of spiritual food are tainted with the poison of distortions and lies about God. All other food and drink has been contaminated with subtle misconceptions about God that keeps us afraid of Him. And fear that keeps us from trusting God is the very poison that will cause our own deaths eventually if we do not receive the life-giving nourishment and medication that Jesus came to provide for us.

Jesus came to reveal the real truth about the Father, the truth about His love and how He really feels about us. Jesus came to show us that God is not like His enemies have made Him out to be – harsh, vengeful, arbitrary, unforgiving, stern and looking to punish those who are against Him. All of these things contain the poison of lies about Him that becomes the fuel that will eventually destroy all those who cling to these lies. Only as we ingest the real truth about God as revealed in the life and death of Jesus, properly understood, can we be made safe to come into the intense presence of God delivered from the danger the toxic lies inside of us that would consume us from the inside out.

What I now see in these words of Jesus is that as I begin to really grasp the truth about God as displayed in the torn flesh and bleeding body of Jesus caused by the hands of angry sinners, I finally begin to realize that it is not God who is the one who is my problem but it is the lies about God that have kept me in rebellion and fear of Him. It is these that threaten to starve my spirit and destroy my ability to enjoy eternal life. Jesus said very plainly that eternal life is knowing the Father and the One the Father sent to reveal the truth about Him. To intimately know the true God is to enter into a vital relationship with the only Source of life that there is and to begin to experience true satisfaction. And as I come to know the real truth about God and that all the things that have made me afraid of Him are really lies and false accusations of His enemy, I then can begin to experience eternal life and will begin to abide in His Son.

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 eats Me, he also will live because of Me. (John 6:56-57)