In Palestine, the land where Jesus was born and lived, bread was essential to life. If you could not afford bread then basically you starved. So, it became known as an essential to life and living.
But when the Lord Jesus was preaching, He declared that He was ‘the Bread of Life’! In emphasising this truth, He reminded His hearers of a remarkable incident which had happened many years before. Their ancestors were in the Wilderness on a 40-year journey to the land God had promised to them. They were short of bread and likely to starve. In response to their distress God sent them ‘bread from heaven’ known as manna, which they collected each morning from the ground. This was essential if they were to live but it was also God’s gracious gift to them. This event was a picture of how Jesus Christ as the ‘Bread of Life’ is sent from Heaven and how He is essential to having eternal Holy Spirit life within us. He is a unique and gracious gift from God to those who follow Him.
If we believe in Him, we live in Him spiritually knowing His glorious presence in our souls (even after physical death) in Heaven forever. But without Him, ours is an eternal death, the Bible describes as hell! This is why Jesus ‘the Bread of life’ came to suffer and die on the cross at Calvary, to rescue those who trust in Him from such a dreadful destiny!
We ‘feed’ upon this bread when we repent of our sins and put our trust in Christ alone for our forgiveness and salvation. Have we ‘eaten of this bread’ or are we strangers to it and facing eternal death? Only Christ can satisfy – ask God in prayer, to make these truths of eternal life in your soul real to you personally, in Jesus Christ.
Ephesians 2 vs 8
