"FOOD WHICH ABIDES" (1)
“FOOD WHICH ABIDES” (1)
Epitome of First Reading Genesis 1 and certain verses of John 6 were under consideration. It was pointed out that John 3 presents a religious wreck (Nicodemus); John 4, a moral wreck (the woman of Sychar); John 5, a physical wreck (the man at the pool of Bethesda). Correspondingly the background of chapter 3 is a world of darkness, of chapter 4, a world of thirst, of chapter 5, a world of death, and in chapter 6 a world of hunger is in view. God meets all in Christ.
Chapter 5 contemplates figuratively that the believer is raised up by the word of Christ into the sphere of eternal life; in chapter 6, we have the food that sustains him in that sphere. The gift of the Holy Spirit underlies all this. He creates desire in the believer for food. But there must be the laying aside of all malice, guile, hypocrisies, etc., and then, “as newborn babes desire earnestly the pure mental milk of the word, that by it ye may grow up to salvation”, (1 Peter 2:1,2).
Genesis 1 corresponds: a sphere of light and life is opened up — of course in a material sense. On the third day the earth comes into view, out of which should spring up the herb producing seed, fruit trees yielding fruit after their kind, the seed of which is in them. These were to be man’s food. The idea of “seed” here is important; it is what is produced, and, of course, seed becomes itself productive. Much is eaten by saints (literature read, etc.) which is not seed-producing according to God. What is of God is continued as we produce after our own kind. Some, alas! feed on radios, novels, newspapers, etc. — there [p. 2] is no seed of God in these things. In the house of a brother in fellowship the Saturday Evening Post and a radio were seen lately, and the brother and his family had no conscience as to them — an evidence that they were not saved from the elements of the world.