EATING JESUS’S BODY AND DRINKING HIS BLOOD?
June 4, 2019
READ TIME: 1-2 minutes
“Dave, what does it mean in John 6:48-58 to eat Jesus’s body and drink His blood?”
A person is saved when he believes in Christ. This salvation is pictured as eating His flesh and drinking His blood.
In the context before this passage, Jesus makes it very clear that eternal life is through faith in Him (John 6:29, 35, 40, 47). These claims are made within His use of the Old Testament story of the manna in the wilderness and the analogy of Himself as the bread of life. The comparison to bread leads to the analogy between eating and believing, just as He earlier used the story of the serpents in Numbers 21 as an appropriate analogy between looking and believing (John 3:15). The analogy of eating and drinking emphasizes the internalization or reception of the truth Christ teaches about Himself. The result of never hungering and thirsting stresses the eternal life one enjoys. This is an apt illustration of belief. It’s vital to stress that the Lord’s Supper is a memorial of Jesus’s broken body and shed blood (1 Cor 11:24–25), not the source of eternal life.
The manna in the wilderness was only intended to be a temporary solution to hunger, but the reception of eternal life results in never hungering again in a spiritual sense. Once a person believes in Jesus (partakes of eternal life), he/she is saved and secure forever!
As always with John, his analogies of believing are simple acts that convey no hint of works or merit before God. It strains the analogy to say that eating and drinking (or elsewhere in John receiving, looking, hearing, entering) is anything more than simple illustrations of what it means to accept and appropriate the Truth. No one considers eating and drinking work; that is simply how sustenance is appropriated.
Sources Used
Bing, Charles C. Grace, Salvation, and Discipleship: How to Understand Some Difficult Bible Passages. Grace Theology Press. 124.
Wilkin, Robert N. “The Gospel according to John.” The Grace New Testament Commentary. Ed. Robert N. Wilkin. Denton, TX: Grace Evangelical Society, 2010. 397.