Personal Nourishment

[WordSword]

Satan was conquered when the Lord Jesus drank the cup which His Father gave Him to drink. The deliverance is complete for us—our Father has given the Savior, and, if God be for us who can be against us (i.e. successfully—NC)? If matters little that Satan and the wilderness are still there. I leave all aside, because I know that my Father is for me.

But there is more which I ought to know. The Jordan remains, which is a different thing altogether. The Lord Jesus is dead and risen for me: such is what the Red Sea tells me; but the Jordan declares that I have died and risen with the Lord Jesus (answering to taking stones out of the Jordan River and carrying them to their “lodging place”- Jos 4:3—NC). It is the knowledge and the enjoyment of my union with Him. When we have this, we begin to eat the “old corn of the land” (Jos 5:11, 12—signifying advancement from only manna, to the variety of “the fruit of the land”—NC). We are “seated in heavenly places in Christ” (Eph 2:6). 

Concerning our being nourished by Christ, we see that, when the old corn of the land was eaten, the manna ceased; that is, we enjoy redemption in quite a new way. The principle of the difference lies here. At the beginning I thought of my sins and of the Savior; this is the door by which we must enter. We must be humbled and enter by Him. But afterwards, knowing that the Father loves us as He loves His Son, and that His favor rests on us, we begin to estimate the love of the Son as the Father estimates it, to have the same thoughts as He in this respect.

Then I see the Lord Jesus in quite another way than before; I am nourished by Him in an entirely new way. It is no longer a mere question of being sheltered only, but I am united to the Lord Jesus Himself. I contemplate all the perfection of the Lamb who is there; and when I think of the abasement He submitted to on the Cross in order that God might be just without giving up love, then I love Him.

The Son of man has been glorified because the Father has been glorified in Him. He goes to the end and drinks the cup that the Father might be glorified and we saved. Now I am nourished by all this; not only am I sheltered, but I love. What occupies him who is in his sins is to be sheltered; but he who feeds on the Lord Jesus while loving Him rejoices, while contemplating Him, that he is seated with Christ in heavenly places.

The more spiritual we are, the more we know what the glory is that the Lord Jesus would share with us (Jhn 17:22). That which He was through all eternity, and all He has won by His work on the Cross is given us, and “we shall be like Him” (1Jo 3:2). Is not the Lord Jesus seen in heaven an Object of affection to me? Am I glad to see Him there? He wishes that our affections should find nourishment in looking upon Him in glory (Cor 3:18). “If ye loved me,” He said to His disciples, “ye would rejoice, because I said, I go unto the Father” (Jn 14:28).

When I think that the Lord Jesus has been banished and rejected by the world, I am happy to see Him in heaven. He is the old corn of the land, for He is of the heavenly country. He is also the food that suits us. The Christian is heavenly and ought to be occupied with and receive nourishment from Him who is there as the Lamb.

When God visited His people in Egypt, He did not speak to them of the desert they had to cross, but of Canaan. So in drawing us out of the world for fellowship with His Son, the Father speaks to us of heaven; He had glory in view for us. But we are apt to stop and consider our circumstances in the wilderness; but when the Holy Spirit acts, one sees only the goal. “This one thing I do, forgetting those things which are behind, and reaching forth unto those things which are before, I press toward the mark for the prize of the high calling of God in Christ Jesus” (Phl 3:13, 14).

—J N Darby (1800-1882)