The stuff of earth is the stuff of life—and also the stuff of the biblical story. Trees, mountains, water, and food all figure prominently in the slowly unfolding drama of the Holy Scriptures. Now the fact is, there are lots of prisms for viewing the storyline of the Bible, many built from big theological concepts like covenant and kingdom. But it’s also possible to over-theorize the Bible, turning it into a collection of abstractions. But the Bible itself doesn’t do this. The Bible keeps its story close to the ground, making sure we remember it’s fundamentally a down-to-earth saga.

So, following the lead of the Scriptures themselves, we’ve given you some takes on the big story from the perspective of four earthly elements of redemption. These windows into the Bible’s narrative of renewal are all the stuff of life. We’ve already looked at the story of trees, mountains, and water. And just as with those earlier elements, today we’ll see how food threads the whole story of the Bible. From beginning to end God is talking to us about what we’re eating.

Eating Our Way to Eternal Life

The Bible opens with a poem-like presentation (maybe even a song?) of the creation of the world, complete with refrains of goodness and day counting. Right here at the beginning the Lord is already accounting for food. “Here, see all these plants and produce-laden trees? Those are meals for you, and for all the birds and animals too.” He built food-producing machines right into the fabric of our home.

God didn’t just want us to be. He wanted us to eat to be.

“He gives food to every creature.
His love endures forever.”

Then, in the very next entry in the Bible, food is right there at the center of the story again. This time it’s the trees specifically, but the description is enticing. “Look at them! Overflowing with fresh fruit. Luscious, right? Yes, they’re good for food, so help yourself.”

Adam and Eve, in God’s garden, and the eatin’s good in their new neighborhood.

But there’s also this: “That tree over there, I insist you stay away from it. Don’t eat that, it’s not for you.”

Sadly they ate, and so do we. We seek wisdom apart from God. We try so hard to go our own way. What, exactly, did God really say anyway? It’s unclear, so we’d better decide for ourselves. We have an awful lot of faith in our own perspective, our independent take on things. We’ve assumed a stance of superiority. Aspiring to be God-like, you might say.

And we’ve paid.

The good earth that was meant to be a place that was easy to plant, easy to grow, easy to harvest—this place became dry, hard, sun-baked ground. The gift turned into back-breaking, painful work, all for a little food which was there for the taking at first. So blessing became curse, fruit turned foul, and when we reach for it now, so often it’s only thorns and thistles we come up with.

In the biblical tale this is the ongoing struggle of the present evil age. We need food—real bodily sustenance and solid spiritual nourishment. We’re not necessarily good at getting either on our own, and the creation itself sometimes seems to be working against us.

It’s no accident that eating is at the heart of the biblical story of both creation and fall. Food is so central to life you might even say it is life. In all kinds of ways, we really are what we eat. We are hungry beings—both our hearts and our bodies are longing for everything they need to thrive.

God knows this, of course, so his great, long term restoration project comes with a food plan.

Within the heart of Israel’s sacrificial system is the invitation to feast with God. Bring a food offering to God’s home, light the fire on his altar, and he says repeatedly that the aroma pleases him. At Israel’s birth he invites Moses, Aaron, and the elders to climb the mountain and, believe it or not, to see God and eat and drink. It is a vision, a foretaste, a promise of all that God is working for in this story.

“Come on, let’s eat together,” he says. It’s a way of saying, “Let’s do life together.”

This is why God is so adamant in his Torah instructions that it’s crucial to make sure the poor are fed. Don’t you dare try to sell them food at a profit, or have you forgotten that I’m the one who helped you when you were scraping the bottom of the barrel for leftovers in Egypt? I brought you into this land and gifted you life, so you in turn give your fields a year off and let whoever wants to, grow whatever they want to. Being holy as he is holy includes being generous as he is generous. God himself is the Defender of the fatherless, the widow, the foreigner—so welcome them to share all the gifts of life he’s shared with you.

In the Bible, celebrations of life and God’s good gifts are always times of feasting. God’s gifts are always about building more and better life into his creation. Deep gratitude and joy are the right responses to these gifts, and God tells us the way to express this is in feasting well and good. Scrooginess at feast times is definitely disobedience.

But the flip side of this is equally true. And this is why when things go terribly wrong, the response of God’s people is fasting. To fast is to deny oneself the food of life. It is a way of heightening our own awareness of what’s gone wrong—both in us and around us—and identifying it with dying. The mini-death of fasting is a kind of prayer meant to demonstrate strongly to God the seriousness of both our confession and our supplication. We want the world to change and we want ourselves to change.

Therefore feasting and fasting are both essential to our life in this in-between time the Bible describes. Again and again as the narrative moves on we look to see if a table has been set. Is it time to eat? Or time to refrain?

God joins us in this dual approach to eating. At more than one point he says, “Enough with these sacrifices!” The way we’re acting makes him doubt we really want to share a meal with him. Then again, he always eventually comes back to the dining room, and he’s always rewriting those invitations. “Taste and see that the Lord is good.” He is downright determined to eat with us, and he’ll even dress us up when we need it. He tells us straight up that the only attire for a proper meal with God is the robe of righteousness, the garment of justice. He’ll provide them, but it’s still up to us to credibly wear them.

There’s no question his desire to eat with us runs strong, and we get the feeling as we read along that the banquet is going to win out over the deprivation. Even if we’re unfit for the meal, if we’re found to be less-than-worthy guests, he will overcome even that obstacle.

Whatever it takes, whenever there’s a decent reason, someone’s calling for food.

The ark of God brought to Jerusalem? David shares loaves of bread, and cakes of dates and raisins with the entire assembly. Torah read out loud to the people for the first time in a generation or more? Nehemiah exclaims, “Don’t weep, celebrate! Go enjoy choice food and sweet drinks, and be sure to share with those who don’t have any.”

But even as we read of all these festivities and giant spreads, we know that they are at best temporary reprieves from the daily grind of life in the ancient world, the frequent misery, the devastating destitution. Is this story going to be an ever-revolving tale of feast and famine?

No.

It turns out these earlier refreshments are mere appetizers, foretastes of the real deal meal that’s coming. That greater fare is introduced by a wild man wearing leather and camel hair, surviving on locusts and a little bit o’ honey.

The main course is a Messiah. He says “Yes, you’ve had some manna from heaven before, but I have food you know nothing about, have never experienced. I am here to give you myself, for I am the true bread from heaven. I am the author of life, and I’ve come to be both host and meal for you. Whoever eats this bread will live forever, and not have to worry about famine and fasting ever again.”

The Son of Man came eating and drinking and they called him a glutton and a winebibber, not to mention a friend of all the wrong kind of people. The kind of people who know they are starving, and will welcome a square meal, some fellowship, and a fruit dessert from the tree of life anytime.

This is the wedding supper of the Lamb himself. A feast not just for his people Israel, but for everyone from east and west, north and south, taking their places in the kingdom of God. Those who are last will be first, and the first will be last, and the fast will become feast, forever. Meanwhile, all those who’ve been stuffing their own faces while ignoring the poor will be thrown out.

Wealthy, self-serving Babylon will fall, its prosperous merchants now weeping. But there’s another city, a new city, the Jerusalem of God. It will come down out of heaven to an earth renewed. It’s a city on a hill, with the river of the water of life running right through it. And there, right on this new world beach, someone is cooking for his friends, saying, “Come, have some breakfast with me.” When he takes the bread, gives thanks, and breaks it for us, we’ll know exactly who he is.

The stuff of earth is the stuff of life—and also the stuff of the biblical story. Trees, mountains, water, and food all figure prominently in the slowly unfolding drama of the Holy Scriptures. Now the fact is, there are lots of prisms for viewing the storyline of the Bible, many built from big theological concepts like covenant and kingdom. But it’s also possible to over-theorize the Bible, turning it into a collection of abstractions. But the Bible itself doesn’t do this. The Bible keeps its story close to the ground, making sure we remember it’s fundamentally a down-to-earth saga.

So, following the lead of the Scriptures themselves, we want to give you some takes on the big story from the perspective of four earthly elements of redemption. These windows into the Bible’s narrative of renewal are all the stuff of life. We’ve already looked at the story of trees and mountains. Today we’re diving into the deeps, to see how the Bible’s drama flows like an unstoppable river toward the ocean of God’s redemption. In the next and final entry, we’ll explore how the bread of heaven nourishes this narrative.

A Sacred Story in Search of Living Water

In the beginning, the water under the darkness was wild and uncontrollable. But the Spirit was hovering there, contemplating a different and better future. Then God went to work in a series of good, good days. The essence of it was to bring order, consistency, and beauty out of the chaos.

This meant putting unruly water in its place, first creating a vault to hold the water up high away from the water down low. Next he told the water down low to settle in and stay within its proper bounds. Water, left to its own devices, tends run roughshod over everything, which only begets bedlam.

Bedlam is not what God intends for his new world.

So God separated what was all run together, and then he filled those newly created spaces with all kinds of living, flying, running, swimming, growing things. Life. When it’s working like it’s supposed to, life operates with a simplicity on the other side of complexity. Living things working together for mutual benefit. This is the flourishing vitality God wants. He wants rich, strong, ongoing life in all the spaces and places of his creation.

And in the water, now duly tamed, he generated the great creatures of the deep and all manner of living, teeming things and in an inordinate number of shapes and sizes and colors.

And about this thing called life God stepped back and said, “This is of an exceptional quality—marvelous actually—and I fully approve.” God loved life. The story of the Bible is really nothing more than the outworking of this great love of God’s, despite all the obstacles that will arise.

The thing about life is, it’s always tied closely to water. All the creatures, not just the sea creatures, need water. This is why in God’s garden, even before there was rain, God was watering everything with surface streams bubbling up from the waters under the earth. It’s why the garden was the epicenter of fertility, the source of life flowing out to the wider world.

In the Bible’s founding story, the Garden of Eden was the equivalent of the Most Holy Place in the Temple, that is, God’s throne room. (Or perhaps it’s more accurate to say the Most Holy Place is the equivalent of the Garden of Eden, which is the first temple in the narrative.) As in other ancient near eastern stories, life-giving water flows from the deity’s throne spreading health and vivacity wherever it goes. Eden’s four rivers—the Pishon, Gihon, Tigris, and Euphrates—could all just as well be named Life.

So there you have it. The two big ideas about water that run through the entire narrative focus on the threat of chaotic, uncontrolled water and the absolute necessity of the running, streaming, flowing water of life. The struggle between these two opposing expressions of water is the battle at the center of the Bible.

Tragically, evil grew in the human heart—all the human hearts—so that the inclination toward wrongdoing became pervasive. And all that good, good life that God loved is now constantly threatened. God sees and knows and his own heart becomes more troubled than he can take. What will he do?

Remember, it was God himself who made the water stand down at the beginning of the story. But when Adam’s children go from bad to worse, not long after that glorious beginning, he decides to un-create the world by letting loose the wild water once again. He opens the vault and the crazy waters fall and flood and destroy his world.

What is this? God regrets that he even made the human race in the first place? Really? Regrets the whole thing? Is this biblical drama to be merely a short story about a very temporary world? Yes, yes, and yes, but then thankfully, no.

God preserves a precious few representatives of life on earth, seeds of a second chance. The story lives to see another day. As a sign that God will at least not flood the stage again, he makes a firm promise and hangs his bow (the same Hebrew word as is used in bow and arrow) in the sky as a reminder of his pledge.

The next major water event in the Bible is another ark story. The life of Israel’s still-tiny first liberator is preserved in an also tiny papyrus boat. Providentially, it is royalty that recovers the basket and is immediately enamored with the baby boy. The saga of Moses, as it turns out, will be about water at several key moments. In his face-off with Pharaoh water will figure in three of the plagues to fall on Egypt—water turns to blood, swarms of frogs come up out of the Nile, and finally hard water shreds the land in a vicious hail storm.

The plagues finally work and Pharaoh decides to free the Israelites, but then reverses course and chases them. Moses and the Israelites are trapped between the troops and the sea. But the Lord who put water in its place at the start of the story can do it again. He drives the waves back and creates a path for his people. When they are stuck in the desert, thirsty and despairing, he brings them to the springs and palm trees of Elim, and even squeezes water from a rock. One way or another, God is going to provide for his people.

From this point on we see water flowing alongside the story at every turn. It’s in the great basin in the Tabernacle, cleansing those who will enter into the presence of God. The Psalms celebrate God’s Spirit going forth to renew the face of the earth, bringing water with him for the beasts of the field and the plants on the ground. Sometimes, though, the water comes in the form of tears, signs of longing and pain. Exiled people sit by a river in Babylon and add to its volume with their weeping.

In the end, he will lead his children beside quiet waters

God’s goal is always life and renewal. He pushes water aside when he needs to, for he is Lord over the deep. But in the end, he will lead his children beside quiet waters. It is the more gentle gift of the water of life that will settle things once and for all.

This is precisely what the prophets foresee: a coming time when streams will run in the desert of Israel’s life, in the wilderness of its discontent. The Lord’s word is like rain and snow that fall from heaven, watering the hope of healing and restoration.

The Messiah enters the drama by joining in a baptism of repentance for Israel. Just as the nation crossed the Jordan River when they first entered the land, so now Israel launches the time of renewal in the Jordan with John the Baptizer. Jesus, too, came up out of that water, the agent of Israel’s rebirth. The Spirit descends on him like a dove, and the Father speaks his approval. The time has surely come, and we know because of what’s happening in the water.

Jesus too is Lord of the waters, acting like Yahweh, walking on seas and calming fierce tempests with a word. He even turns water into wine, signaling that the promised time of plenty exists wherever Jesus is. But the best word he ever spoke—best and most essential—he actually spoke twice.

“Thirsty?”

First he said it to a foreign, ostracized woman at a well, and then again on the last and greatest day of the Festival of Tabernacles in Jerusalem. “Thirsty?” Thirsty for something more, something lasting, something deeply transformative? Then come to me. Come and drink and truly, I’m telling you, rivers of living water will now flow within you. The Spirit who renews life will renew your life.

This Jesus-river will grow and flow from the Temple of God, freely and far and wide, covering the whole earth with the knowledge and love of God. It will heal all things, grow all things, restore all things. It will be like the Garden of Eden all over again, but now a garden in a city, the New Jerusalem. This is the future the story of the Bible yearns for, this story which is really an invitation.

Thirsty?

Part 4: The Bible’s Story Told by Food >>>