The Word Is Food for Our Souls

The Gift of Nourishment

The word of God is food for our souls. We regularly sing songs that emphasize our dependence on God for sustenance. God himself says to Israel,

I am the Lord your God,
who brought you up out of the land of Egypt.
Open your mouth wide, and I will fill it. (Ps. 81:10)

Yet just as we are meant to be satisfied with God’s steadfast love (Ps. 90:14), his word is meant to nourish us and fill our souls to overflowing. Put another way, one of the main ways God satisfies our famished souls is by giving us his words to feed on. The psalmist in our passage prays,

I open my mouth and pant,
because I long for your commandments. (Ps. 119:131)

Like a hungry and thirsty traveler desperate for any kind of sustenance, the psalmist comes to God’s word, looking to be fed. Daniel Estes notes, “The psalmist depicts himself as a young bird with its mouth open to receive food. This image implies that he is eating necessary nutrition, not an optional snack or dessert. Far from accepting God’s word out of a sense of obligation, he pants and longs for God’s commands.”¹ When God speaks, he is able to satisfy the deepest needs of the soul.

The Goodness of God in the Gift of Scripture

Uche Anizor

Twenty warm, engaging readings, based primarily on Psalm 119, encourage regular meditation on God’s gifts in Scripture—including blessedness, hope, and peace—as well as warnings and wisdom that bring repentance.

Bread of Heaven

Jesus had just miraculously fed more than five thousand people off the coast of the Sea of Galilee. The crowds are astonished, and hope begins to mount that he is indeed the longed-for Messiah, the “Prophet who is to come into the world” (John 6:14). Sensing that they were going to try to make him king, he withdraws for a while. A little later in the day, his disciples set sail to return to their homebase of Capernaum without Jesus. Then comes the storm. And then comes Jesus calming the storm. The next day, the crowd that had been fed realizes that Jesus and his disciples are no longer there. So they get into boats and head for Capernaum, looking for Jesus.

The story gathers steam when they finally find him. They ask him, “Rabbi, when did you come here?” (John 6:25). Rather than answering their fairly straightforward question, Jesus cuts the small talk and goes to the heart of the matter: “Truly, truly, I say to you, you are seeking me, not because you saw signs, but because you ate your fill of the loaves” (John 6:26). This is a strange accusation. Elsewhere in the Gospels, Jesus indicts his opponents or chastises the crowds because all they want are signs. Here, signs and wonders are not the big draw—a full belly is. Jesus cautions them, “Do not work for the food that perishes, but for the food that endures to eternal life, which the Son of Man will give to you” (John 6:27). Jesus explains that the work required to get the food that he provides is to believe in him. It is only at this point that they demand a sign, completely missing what he just said: “Our fathers ate the manna in the wilderness” (John 6:31). In other words, “Prove yourself, Jesus! Give us another food miracle like Moses did!” They’re demanding this even though he had just miraculously fed them on the other side of the Sea of Galilee, something to which they can testify.

“Truly, truly,” Jesus responds, “it was not Moses who gave you bread from heaven, but my Father gives you the true bread from heaven. For the bread of God is he who comes down from heaven and gives life to the world” (John 6:32–33). And then comes the key line: “I am the bread of life; whoever comes to me shall not hunger, and whoever believes in me shall never thirst” (John 6:35). The feeding of the five thousand is one big setup. Its narrative purpose is to highlight a singular point: Jesus is the ultimate soul food. We must eat his flesh and drink his blood, if we want to have eternal life (John 6:53–57). His flesh is “true food” and his blood “true drink” (John 6:55). What is Jesus getting at?

The food of the word gives access to a feast of life-giving flesh and blood.

Throughout church history, these verses have been used to defend various interpretations of the Lord’s Supper, but we can ignore those debates here. What is clear is that eating and drinking Jesus has to do with what he said earlier about working for “the food that endures to eternal life” (John 6:27). That work, as we saw, is to believe in Jesus. This is repeated later when he says that the way to partake of the bread of life is to believe in him (John 6:35). Eating is believing. Yet believing in Jesus is inseparable from believing the words that he speaks. This is why the crowds ask for a sign so that they might believe him—that is, in what he is saying (John 6:30). This is also why this episode culminates with Peter’s beautiful confession: “Lord, to whom shall we go? You have the words of eternal life” (John 6:68). Peter and the disciples feasted on Jesus as the true bread from heaven. But they also recognized that to feed on this bread required that they feed on his words. The food of the word gives access to a feast of life-giving flesh and blood.

Not Only Bread

Jesus’s interaction with the crowds in this Gospel episode recalls the most important miraculous feeding in Israel’s history, at least prior to his miraculous feedings of thousands—the provision of manna in the wilderness. The story is familiar. The people of Israel are wandering in the desert, just shortly after the defeat of Pharaoh and his army at the Red Sea. They are really hungry, so they start complaining about their food options, especially in comparison to what they ate as slaves in Egypt (Ex. 16:1–3). God then provides them with “bread from heaven,” along with stipulations on when and how much to gather to “test them, whether they will walk in my law” (Ex. 16:4).

When Israel is on the cusp of entering the promised land, Moses recalls this episode and provides a pastoral interpretation of what God was really doing in his provision of manna. He says to the people,

And you shall remember the whole way that the Lord your God has led you these forty years in the wilderness, that he might humble you, testing you to know what was in your heart, whether you would keep his commandments or not. And he humbled you and let you hunger and fed you with manna, which you did not know, nor did your fathers know, that he might make you know that man does not live by bread alone, but man lives by every word that comes from the mouth of the Lord. (Deut. 8:2–3)

God let his redeemed people starve so that he could miraculously feed them. Yet the miraculous feeding—and the awe that it might elicit—was not the only goal. The Lord wanted to test and teach his people. He wanted to test whether they would wholeheartedly trust and obey his words. He wanted to teach them that life as God’s people in God’s world is not a matter of food and drink, or even of receiving miraculous bread from heaven.

Charles Spurgeon, in a sermon on this passage, marvels at something we often miss as we seek to apply these verses.² He remarks on how it is a wonder that bread should have the power to sustain the human body: “The process is a very wonderful one by which bread turns into flesh, and blood, and bone, and muscle, and hair, and all sorts of things, by a perpetual working of the power of God.” But even more marvelous is how physical food keeps both body and spirit alive. He admits, “And how is it that the material substance in bread somehow works to the keeping of our spirit in connection with this flesh and blood? I cannot explain this mystery, but I believe it to be a continual miracle wrought by God.” The point for Spurgeon is that, in a superior yet equally mysterious and marvelous way, God uses his word to sustain body and soul.

The word in our passage likely refers to God’s law and promises. God’s laws are to be obeyed; his promises are to be trusted. In these ways, Israel remains a faithful covenant partner and recipient of God’s blessings. Spurgeon helpfully makes much of “every word,” observing that we all have favorite aspects of Scripture that we tend to privilege to the neglect of others, whether they be doctrines, precepts, promises, histories, prophecies, and threats or warnings. His counsel?

If you restrict yourselves in your food to one or two articles, every physician will tell you that there is a danger that your body may not be supplied with every form of nutriment that it requires. A good wide range of diet is recommended to those who would have vigorous health. And in spiritual things, if you keep to one part of God’s Word, you may live on it, but the tendency will be for you not to attain to complete spiritual health through the lack of some nutriment with which the Word would have supplied you had you used it all. Every Word of God is that upon which man lives in the highest and healthiest state.

No matter how the word comes to us—a voice from heaven, in a cloud, on a mountain, in tablets of stone, on parchment, in the Son, or in a book—Spurgeon encourages us, “Let it be to you, spiritually, your house, your home, your food, your medicine, your clothing, the one essential element of your soul’s life and growth.” He says to us, as he did to his congregation almost a hundred and fifty years ago, “Oh, keep to the Word, my brothers! Keep to it as God’s Word, and as coming out of his mouth. Suck it down into your soul; you cannot have too much of it. Feed on it day and night, for thus will God make you to live the life that is life indeed.”

Only the word can sustain hope, joy, and connection to the life of God, especially when bread ceases to fall from the sky.

Notes:

Daniel J. Estes, Psalms 73–150, in The New American Commentary (B&H, 2019), 430.
The following quotes are from Charles H. Spurgeon, “Living on the Word,” March 15, 1883, in Metropolitan Tabernacle Pulpit, vol. 44, https://www.spurgeon.org/.

This article is adapted from The Goodness of God in the Gift of Scripture: 20 Meditations by Uche Anizor.

Uche Anizor (PhD, Wheaton College) is professor of theology at Talbot School of Theology, Biola University. His other books include Overcoming Apathy and How to Read Theology.

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