“You shall make a table of acacia wood. Two cubits shall be its length, a cubit its breadth, and a cubit and a half its height. You shall overlay it with pure gold and make a molding of gold around it. And you shall make a rim around it a handbreadth wide, and a molding of gold around the rim. And you shall make for it four rings of gold, and fasten the rings to the four corners at its four legs. Close to the frame the rings shall lie, as holders for the poles to carry the table. You shall make the poles of acacia wood, and overlay them with gold, and the table shall be carried with these. And you shall make its plates and dishes for incense, and its flagons and bowls with which to pour drink offerings; you shall make them of pure gold. And you shall set the bread of the Presence on the table before me regularly." - Exodus 25:23–30
Sabbath after Sabbath the priest would take a seat at a rather imposing shiny gold table to get a small taste of the riches of Heaven- the Bread of the Presence, which in Hebrew means "bread of faces". This food would only reach the mouth of the holiest of men, as only those of the royal priesthood would ever receive the satisfaction that comes from not merely seeing, but tasting the goodness of the face of God. That is- except David when he was in a time of need and on the run from Saul.
"'Now then, what do you have on hand? Give me five loaves of bread, or whatever is here.' And the priest answered David, 'I have no common bread on hand, but there is holy bread—if the young men have kept themselves from women.' And David answered the priest, 'Truly women have been kept from us as always when I go on an expedition. The vessels of the young men are holy even when it is an ordinary journey. How much more today will their vessels be holy?' So the priest gave him the holy bread, for there was no bread there but the bread of the Presence, which is removed from before the LORD, to be replaced by hot bread on the day it is taken away." - 1 Samuel 21:3–6
Jesus cited this moment when the Pharisees were accusing His disciple's actions of picking heads of grain to eat on the Sabbath as unlawful. He asked them, "have you not read what David did when he was hungry, he and those who were with him: how he entered the house of God and took and ate the bread of the Presence, which is not lawful for any but the priests to eat, and also gave it to those with him?" (Luke 6:3-4)
I would like to point you all back to how I mentioned previously that the bread of Presence is translated as "bread of faces".
"For what we proclaim is not ourselves, but Jesus Christ as Lord, with ourselves as your servants for Jesus’ sake. For God, who said, 'Let light shine out of darkness,' has shone in our hearts to give the light of the knowledge of the glory of God in the face of Jesus Christ." - 2 Corinthians 4:5–6
Jesus Christ is Himself the fullness of God in human flesh, His every cell is bursting with the glory of the Creator, and the heartbeat in His chest holds the inconceivable depths of all the love Heaven, completely unbound by time and space, is capable of. The compassion we see well up in Him time after time was unmarred by the bent nature of human emotion and He felt the extent of the emotional life in a way we never can. As our emotions are tarnished, His are not. The pure and holy eyes of Jesus hold within them the entire story of the universe and humanity, they saw the fall, saw the death, saw the destruction, and saw the cross. Every word Jesus spoke on earth was confined- the One who spoke all things into existence and whose voice is like thunder was bound by the mouth of man. Everything He touched was evidence of His voice and all earth was engrained with the power of His word, and now people needed to ask Him to speak up if He spoke too quietly for their ears to hear. Can you imagine?
What I'm establishing here is that every single bit of Jesus Christ is the revelation of God, He is God, and He is the Bread of Life.
"Jesus said to them, “I am the bread of life; whoever comes to me shall not hunger, and whoever believes in me shall never thirst." -John 6:35
Jesus is the Bread. He is the sustenance of our souls and the substance of our bodies- He is the holder of our burdened hearts when surrounded by the world's calamity, the Breather of life itself, and the One who moment by moment sustains it because of His presence. Quite unlike the agnostic "watchmaker theory" in which a creator made everything, set the divine clock, and then sat back and let everything tick, tick, tick, do its thing, the hand of God is as apparent in our lives as every breath is. He is that close, that intimate, the one with whom our soul loves- here is rest. For in the very beginning of ages, God spoke everything into existence by the power of His word, but He used His hands to craft man. "Then the Lord God formed the man of dust from the ground and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life, and the man became a living creature" (Genesis 2:7). There's a line in the song Father of Jesus by Jonathan David Helser that puts this so beautifully, "You reached into the clay / Pulled a man up to Your face / Knelt into the dust, and You kissed us with grace / You covered all the space / And all the distance between me and You."
No wonder our soul so deeply craves not empty air, but the fullness of the Spirit of God, the breath that created us. We breathe as deeply as we possibly can muster because somewhere deep within us we are yearning for more than air, we are desperate for the breath of God. It is when we as human beings recognize our hunger for the Bread of His Presence that we don't just breathe deeply, we drink deeply.
This is the substance of our souls.
And the presence of the Lord is not illusive, and it is not exclusive, for "whoever comes" will not walk away hungry. For Mary praised God that "He has filled the hungry with good things" (Luke 1:53).
The table set before us is no longer one of sacrifice but one of communion and the invitation to partake, to remember and receive the finished work of Christ in us, and that affects all the world. Our God is not confined to our "spiritual life", He is life itself. His bread is the one we long for and His presence is always closer than "within our reach". For we can approach His table with even more boldness than David for we, as members of the Body of Christ, are members of the royal priesthood (1 Peter 2:9).
This is a table that has enough space, a table with enough Bread to satisfy every soul.
What does this look like, moment by moment? After all, bread, and all food, is a very tangible thing, it ignites all the senses of the human body. I'll say it again and again- receiving the Bread daily is not for our spiritual lives, it is a Life thing. Saint Augustine describes Christ as the "Life of the life of our souls". He is the deep reality in all, for He is all in all. Deeper than our own simple life is Life Himself. Dane Ortlund once described the heart of the follower of Jesus as an onion, peel it to the core and the deepest part, the holiest of holy places, is the Spirit of the Lord. Life. The Life of the life of our souls. After all, we were not living creatures until the breath of God filled our lungs.
Here is a verse you may be familiar with because Jesus used it to combat the devil's temptations in the desert:
"He humbled you, and in your hunger He gave you manna to eat, which neither you nor your fathers had known, so that you might understand that man does not live on bread alone, but on every word that comes from the mouth of the LORD." -Deuteronomy 8:3
Manna, the bread the Israelites woke up to every morning, was from the heavens, but it was not the Bread of the Presence of God. It fed the body and later left it hungry, and the soul was untouched by it.
But in Jesus we see the union of the Word of God and the Bread of Life- we feast upon every word that comes from His mouth. The Word is our Bread. The Bread of His Presence is more than manna, but we still, like the Israelites, we wake to it every morning. We will always receive enough if we choose to receive Him even on the most mundane of days. But to receive we first must be hungry, we first must recognize our humble beginnings- dust.
Without the hand of God, we would still be dust; Without the hand of Jesus Christ nailed upon the cross, that is the place we would be returning to.
He is Life. How could we not partake? How could we deny this Bread? How could we not yield to the strength of these hands that created us and nourish us? How could we not give our lives to Life Himself? Wouldn't it be going against human nature not to? How prideful we must be to believe that our life could be our own! To believe that the core of our hearts is me.
Jesus does not inhabit the fringes of the heart, for if He did so He would not be able to uproot the evil in its core- He dwells and holds and His Spirit inhabits the center of the heart. He is not just at the center of the universe, He is the center of the soul. He gives structure, sustenance, and substance to our body, it is not our flesh. The Bread is always on the table, if only we arrive at it. If only we come.
How often do we pray for the presence of God instead of receiving the Bread He has already set before us each day? How could we ever possibly look at the amount given and ask needlessly for more, more, more, instead of trusting He is truly and completely enough to sustain our souls another day? How could we grumble to God that we want more feelings of His presence, we need more proof, more evidence, more whatever?
Just do this one thing for me, God, and it'll be enough.
No, His broken body is enough, He is enough, it is one of the largest lies ever uttered that He is not. The prideful heart always will doubt the finished work of Christ, and will always convince itself that it can out-sin the grace of God. It takes humility to see that your sin can never diminish the extravagant love of Christ.
Yet we beg for more... perhaps we are no better than the Israelites.
Allow this truth to settle deep- Christ knows how much you need, and that is exactly what He gives. I'm not saying asking is a negative thing (of course I'm not), but I am saying receiving what we ask for will never lead to satisfaction if we don't allow Jesus alone to satisfy. Petitioning is important for prayer ("give us this day our daily bread" sounds an awful like a command, after all), but so is resting. So is adoration. Sometimes our souls best taste the satisfaction of the Bread of Life when our external circumstances leave us the most unsatisfied because it leaves us hungry.
The Bread of Life sustains us when we wait for answers to our prayers, and it sustains us afterward. He is our heart's constant sustenance.
Jesus, the Bread of the Presence, is enough for today. He gives us the breath for today. He gifts us His Spirit for today. He pumps our hearts, do our hearts thank Him in return or groan for Him to do more?
Do those breaths proclaim gratitude back to Him or complain of all the prayers we want to be answered on our timing?
Do we receive that Spirit of power, love, and a sound mind and allow our lives to glorify that Presence? How fickle and prone to wander the human heart is, God forgive us!
Our daily bread is enough for today. The Words He speaks into our lives are enough for today. And every word that comes from His mouth, let this be the sustenance of our exhausted hearts, may we receive it with the thanksgiving He is worthy of.
Truly, who else can receive the fullness of our Lord except the hungry and the humble? The puffed up and those who wish Him to do their bidding are already too full of themselves to recognize that He, the Person of Jesus, is our portion, not what He does or what we will Him to do.
So come, all who are hungry, to the table of our merciful Father; taste the delicacies of Heaven, sweet as honey to the mouth and soul! Feast upon the Bread of His Presence, our Life, stirring warmth in our hearts like a gentle embrace. May we always be hungry for what truly satisfies. May our grumbling cease before the satisfaction given us by our God, our Maker and Life. May Life be the structure of every moment of our lives. May we be so full from the fullness of the Bread alone, the substance that quiets begging and soothes the deep longings for this world, that silences all other voices except our Lord's and our own, as Brother Lawrence once wrote, "I began to live as if there was none but He and I in the world". The reality of our Bread, sweet with the gift of grace, stirs our souls and stills our hearts enough to say the most natural words our mouths could ever utter, the cry of the breath of God returning to its Giver:
Thank you, Jesus.
Comments