Come and Dine – Digesting the Word
Come and Dine – Digesting the Word.
“You cannot live on bread alone, but on every word that comes from the mouth of the Lord.” (Deuteronomy 8:3).
FOOD: Any nutritious substance that people eat or drink in order to maintain life and enable growth. Any substance that provides nourishment for survival and nutrition for maintenance of life. Food is consumed in order to keep oneself alive and healthy.
Imagination. The Christian faith demands an active imagination. So much that is read in the Scripture is actually meant to be a picture of something that we need to acquire through the imagination, something that is done figuratively and not literally. A literal action in the Bible might instead be an invitation to consider what that action represents. Something done physically is sometimes meant to teach us a spiritual lesson. An example is the eating of Scripture. Three different characters in the Hebrew Bible were told to literally eat the Word, to ingest it, and they did. In these cases of John, Jeremiah and Ezekiel, their rather unexpected action of eating the Scripture is intended to symbolize the importance of taking in God’s Word, right into our innermost being, fully digested.
Spiritual Digestion. What are these three incidents telling us? Scripture seems to be implying that we all have a spiritual digestive system. God’s Word is something to consume like food, the nutrients of the Word chewed, swallowed, and broken down in such a way that the Word’s wisdom and life is spread throughout our whole being. We eat this spiritual food and we are nourished as it enters our blood vessels and spreads to our very nerve endings. Our soul hungers for the nutrients of the Word. When we eat God’s Word, we are participating in Scripture and not merely spectating from a distance. When we ingest the Bible, our spiritual life is full of life and growth and vitality. The Bible is intended to be assimilated to every cell of our spiritual being, giving us energy, purpose, spiritual substance. The Scripture is meant to be digested so that we can flourish in the Christian life. Swallowing the Word down our spiritual gullet is a far cry from simply sipping alphabet soup or munching on a word salad. Scripture is solid spiritual food.
A Balanced Diet. While we are feasting on Scripture, we need to maintain a balanced diet… Since we are children of Abraham (Galatians 3:29), we need to study the Hebrew Bible (the O.T.) seriously and regularly with its Torah and writings and prophets; and we need to delve deeply into the New Testament as well, remembering that the Gospels are our bread and butter. The Gospel story is the greatest story ever told. As Andrew Klavan once said, the Gospel is when myth meets history, when mankind’s most earnest and persistent hope becomes reality. The Gospels are our grid when considering theology. If a particular theology seems inconsistent with the Jesus we find in the Gospels, go with the Gospels. The Gospel Jesus trumps a theological Jesus, because the Gospel is God’s Word, and theology is man’s word. God’s Word is our reference point whenever discerning man’s word. While we’re at it, we need to remember that the Old Testament is actually the Hebrew Bible. Why do Christians continue to call the Hebrew Bible the “Old” Testament? This is very offensive to those believing Jews who dislike the Old in Old Testament. Why call it old, which could easily mean outdated, hobbled by age, past its usage date? The Scriptures that have been believed in by faithful Jews through the centuries has been called the Hebrew Bible. If only Christians could respectfully call it that. And why are there so many Christian translations of the Hebrew Bible? Aren’t the Jewish translations good enough? Christians should be reading the Tanakh from the Jewish Publication Society as often as all the Christian translations. Jewish scholarship is beyond reproach, and since the Hebrew Bible was written by Jews to Jews who were laying the groundwork for a Jewish Messiah, it would seem it would be helpful to receive the Jewish perspective first hand. By honoring the Hebrew Bible, we honor our spiritual roots.
Our spiritual digestive system might look something like this as we consume Scripture:
(1.) Open the mouth. Put your food on your plate, fill up your glass, be ready to dig in and enjoy the meal. Submit to the digestive process by placing the spiritual food within easy reach and lifting it to your soul’s mouth. We’ll never eat the Word if we don’t submit to the process and first open the Scripture for reading and consideration. We need to open our spirit to the Word like we would open our mouth for the food. As we open the Scripture to read, we open the spirit to eat. Remember Chesterton’s words, open your mind as you open your mouth, so you can close it on something solid. Like the Word of God, for instance.
(2.) Taste the Food. Enjoy the flavors, the aromas, the textures, the colors of the Word. Get a feel for the language, the way the words are put together and the scenes are prepared. Enjoy the vastly different personalities involved in Scripture, the history, the backdrop and setting. The process of eating is not meant to be painful or boring, but instead a wondrous meal to participate in. These are the words of the almighty God, and are important as well as interesting. Enjoy the reading as if you are at a healthy buffet. Notice the different flavors of writing: stories, songs, poetry, drama, humor, conversations, plotlines, demonstrations, visual aids and illustrations, imaginative metaphors. The Scripture has it all, just like one of those famous Swedish smorgasbords.
(3.) Chew the Food. Think about the words you read, ponder the ideas being expressed. Chew on it. The farmer’s term for a cow’s endlessly chewing its cud is ruminate. Process the spiritual food you are chewing like you would carefully chew on a tasty meal that you want to enjoy to the last tasty tidbit. One of the biblical words for chewing in Scripture is meditate. Eugene Peterson unpacks the meaning of meditate through its Hebrew word, “hagah.” That is the word used to describe a lion growling over its prey (Isaiah 35:4). To meditate on a passage is like a dog with its bone, a lion enjoying its meal, gnawing on it, getting everything he can out of that bone, “growling in pleasurable anticipation” over the Word. Meditating on Scripture is murmuring out loud as you process the words and ideas, working on it like a dog with a bone (Eat This Book, Peterson). Some thoughts to consider as we chew on the Word: Seek wisdom and understanding, not just facts and data; chew longest on that which will feed your soul; there is no expert in Scripture, so come as a child, teachable; don’t forget about your heart as you use your intellect and imagination; pray for the Holy Spirit as you are chewing. Pray and chew. Don’t limit yourself to letting others do your chewing of Scripture for you and then spoon feed you with it. Do as much of your own chewing as you can, guided by the Spirit. We find that the more we do our own chewing, the stronger our jaw muscles become and the longer we can chew for further passages.
(4.) Swallow the Food. At some point after the chewing, the Word has to be swallowed. Scripture needs to be accepted, believed, received into the digestive tract. Spiritual food requires a swallow of faith in order to be absorbed into the spirit. After all that thinking and chewing, we need to trust that the Bible is indeed the Word of God. Maybe the whole Bible doesn’t need to be swallowed at the same time. Perhaps a mustard seed of faith is all we need to digest the passage. As we find that a portion of Scripture has settled well and has proved truthful and trustworthy, our level of faith will take the next size up, from a mustard seed to a grapevine seed. And then, when we continue in this Word diet, we will discover that the nutrients from our spiritual food will nourish our soul and give us life, meaning, joy and a future. It all began with a swallow of faith. If someone asks you if we actually can swallow that Bible stuff, we can say, “Actually, yes!”
(5.) Exercise Daily. There are too many of us who are spiritually overfed. We don’t get outside and flesh out the Scripture. We need to put the Word into action, using the energy and insight that has been absorbed into our soul. Live out the Word. We cannot afford to be spiritual couch potatoes. Exercise the truth every day. Put some effort into letting the Word form your character and integrity and life purpose. Let the Bible affect your outlook on your life, your meaning for existence. Internalize the Word through spiritual digestion, and then externalize the Word by putting it into practice. We need to be doers of the Word, and not readers or hearers only. Maybe it’s time to turn off the religious podcast and love your neighbor. Perhaps we should file away those sermons and put the Scripture to good use. Instead of picking up another Christian self-help book, maybe we should put that book on the shelf and follow the light we’ve been shown. Christians are always in danger of being overfed and under exercised. Spiritual obesity only comes to those believers who gorge themselves on Christian input without practicing the truth that was just digested. Let the spiritual nutrition give you the energy to love the Word and live into the Word.
“Blessed Lord, who has caused all Holy Scriptures to be written for our learning; Grant that we may in such wise hear them, read, mark and inwardly digest them, that by patience and comfort of your holy Word, we may embrace and ever hold fast the blessed hope of everlasting life, which you have given us in our Savior, Jesus Christ.” (Anglican Book of Common Prayer, 1662).