Jesus said to them, “Truly, truly, I say to you, unless you eat the Flesh of the Son of Man and drink His Blood, you have no life in you.” John 6:53 ESV1
Read John 6:29-67
As recorded in the latter half of John 6, Jesus, in some manner, repeatedly referred to Himself as the Bread of Life. He claimed to be “‘the Living Bread that came down from Heaven [and explained that] if anyone [ate] of this Bread, he [would] live forever … [He clarified] the Bread that [He gave] for the life of the World [was His] Flesh’” (John 6:51). Jesus insisted, “‘Whoever feeds on My Flesh and drinks My Blood has eternal life, and I will raise him up on the last day’” (John 6:54). Why did Jesus push the issue of consuming both His Body and His Blood though it offended the religious and secular, the seeker and the devoted alike?
If Jesus’ Blood was shed for our sins, why did Jesus say we must partake of both His Blood and His Flesh? And why did “Jesus on the night when He was betrayed [take] bread, and when He had given thanks, … [break] it, and [say], ‘This is My Body, which is for you. Do this in remembrance of Me.’ [And] in the same way, also … [take] the cup, after supper, [and say], ‘This cup is the new covenant in My Blood. Do this, as often as you drink it, in remembrance of Me’” (1 Corinthians 11:23-25)? Why the emphasis on remembering both His sacrificed Body and His spilled Blood? Are they not for the same thing?
The answer to that last question is: no. The two are related but distinctly different. Until we understand the significance of each, we will not experience true liberty in Christ. Let me explain what I have discovered.
Jesus’ Blood was given for the remission of our sins.
Jesus’ Blood was shed so that we can be forgiven. “Since, therefore, we have now been justified by His blood, much more shall we be saved by Him from the wrath of God” (Romans 5:9). “Indeed, under the Law, almost everything is purified with blood, and without the shedding of blood, there is no forgiveness of sins” (Hebrews 9:22).
Jesus’ Blood was shed for our Atonement. The Blood of Jesus makes amends for us with God the Father. God looks at the Blood of Jesus and refrains from giving us the punishment we deserve. Under the Law, blood was the means for reconciling humans to God. The LORD said, “‘For the life of the flesh is in the blood, and I have given it for you on the altar to make atonement for your souls, for it is the blood that makes atonement by the life’” (Leviticus 17:11).
Do you remember the account of the first Passover, the night Israel fled from their slavery in Egypt? (See Exodus 12). Do you recall how the LORD instructed that the blood of the Passover Lamb should be painted on the doorposts of their homes? Do you remember how the Angel of Death passed over those homes with the blood on the door sparing the lives of all the firstborn in those homes? Do you recall what happened inside the homes which weren’t marked with blood? Jesus’ Blood satisfies God. Because of Jesus’ shed Blood, God the Father, in effect, passes over us leaving us graciously unharmed.
We can come to God the Father based on Jesus’ Blood. “We have the confidence to enter the holy places by the Blood of Jesus” (Hebrews 10:19). Only Jesus’ Blood can justify us before God and can advocate for us before Satan. Both God and the devil look upon the one who has been forgiven, because of the Blood of Jesus, and neither has the grounds to accuse.
“The blood of Jesus His Son cleanses us from all sin” (1 John 1:7b). You see, the Blood of Jesus takes care of the problem of what we have done. It deals with what has happened on the outside of us. But what is taking place on the inside of us also needs to be made right.
Blood of Jesus was shed for the forgiveness of sin. Watchman Nee in his book, The Normal Christian Life, teaches, “The Blood can wash away my sin, but it cannot wash away my ‘old man.’ It needs the Cross to crucify me. The Blood deals with the sins, but the Cross must deal with the sinner.” (Nee, pg. 26)2
Jesus’ Body, which was crucified on the Cross, fixes the problem of our sin nature.
The requirements for observing the Passover didn’t only deal with the blood of the lamb. There were also instructions concerning the flesh of the animal. The Passover lamb was eaten inside the house; it went into the body of the ones consuming it. Similarly, our Passover Lamb, Jesus, must come into us and deal with a problem inside us. Jesus’ Crucified Body fixes the issue of who we are; we are sinners.
Our predicament is in our beings. “The heart is deceitful above all things, and desperately sick; who can understand it” (Jeremiah 17:9)? We need new hearts. The LORD said, “‘I will give you a new heart, and a new spirit I will put within you. And I will remove the heart of stone from your flesh and give you a heart of flesh’” (Ezekiel 36:26).
What good would it have done if Jesus only shed His Blood to wash away our sins? If He didn’t deal with what caused us to sin in the first place, we would eventually end up enslaved by sin again. “God shows His love for us in that while we were still sinners, Christ died for us” (Romans 5:8). “By the new and living way that He opened for us through the Curtain, that is, through His Flesh, and since we have a Great Priest over the House of God, let us draw near with a true heart in full assurance of faith, with our hearts sprinkled clean from an evil conscience and our bodies washed with pure water” (Hebrews 10:20-22).
When Jesus’ Body was crucified, our deceitful, hard heart, our old nature, our old self was also put to death. “We know that our old self was crucified with Him in order that the body of sin might be brought to nothing so that we would no longer be enslaved to sin. For one who has died has been set free from sin” (Romans 6:6-7).
Jesus’ Body was sacrificed so that our bodies could be sanctified, made pure and holy, and set free from our sinful nature. “For as by the one man’s disobedience the many were made sinners, so by the one man’s obedience the many will be made righteous” (Romans 5:19). “Thus, it is written, ‘The first man Adam became a living being’; the Last Adam [Jesus Christ] became a Life-Giving Spirit. But it is not the spiritual that is first but the natural, and then the spiritual. The first man was from the Earth, a man of dust; the Second Man is from Heaven” (1 Corinthians 15:45-47).
In Adam, we received all that was in Adam. In Christ, we receive all that is in Christ. “He does away with the first in order to establish the second. And by that will we have been sanctified through the offering of the Body of Jesus Christ once for all. And every priest stands daily at his service, offering repeatedly the same sacrifices, which can never take away sins. But … Christ … offered for all time a single sacrifice for sins … For by a single offering He has perfected for all time those who are being sanctified” (Hebrews 10:9b-12a & 14).
“And the Holy Spirit also bears witness to us; for after saying, ‘This is the covenant that I will make with them after those days, declares the LORD: I will put My laws on their hearts, and write them on their minds,’ then He adds, ‘I will remember their sins and their lawless deeds no more’” (Hebrews 10:15-17)
The crucifixion of Jesus’ Body for our trespasses means death to the old way of things in which we were trapped. Partaking of His Crucified Body means deliverance from our sin nature. Because of Jesus’ broken Body, we don’t have to continue in sin. But Jesus’ Body was not just crucified; it was also resurrected.
Jesus’ Body, which was resurrected from the dead, gives us the ability to live a holy life.
Jesus’ Resurrected Body was the beginning of a whole new thing. “Therefore, if anyone is in Christ, he is a new creation. The old has passed away; behold, the new has come” (2 Corinthians 5:17). If we partake of Jesus’ Resurrected Body, we can live the way God intended in the first place; we can live in holiness. “How can we who died to sin still live in it? … We were buried therefore with Him by baptism into death, in order that, just as Christ was raised from the dead by the glory of the Father, we too might walk in newness of life. For if we have been united with Him in a death like His, we shall certainly be united with Him in a resurrection like His” (Romans 6:2b, 4-5).
Believers “have been crucified with Christ. It is no longer [we] who live, but Christ who lives in [us]. And the life [we] now live in the flesh [we] live by faith in the Son of God, who loved [us] and gave Himself for [us]” (Galatians 2:20). “We know that Christ, being raised from the dead, will never die again; death no longer has dominion over Him. For the death He died He died to sin, once for all, but the life He lives He lives to God. So, you also must consider yourselves dead to sin and alive to God in Christ Jesus” (Romans 6:9-11).
“Your deliverance from sin is no less a gift of God’s grace than your forgiveness of sin.” (Nee, pg. 46).3 God dealt with both sins and the sin problem. He didn’t pay for sins and then expect us to get rid of the thing that produced the sins in the first place. Now, sin itself didn’t go anywhere. We are just delivered from its power in an increasing measure every day, but we can still choose to sin.
“No one born of God makes a practice of sinning, for God’s seed abides in him; and he cannot keep on sinning, because he has been born of God” (1 John 3:9). It is not that we won’t sin, but now we don’t have to. “For the love of Christ controls us, because we have concluded this: that One has died for all, therefore all have died; and He died for all, that those who live might no longer live for themselves but for Him Who for their sake died and was raised” (2 Corinthians 5:14-15). God gets us into Christ, but we have to stay there by abiding in Him. “Therefore, as you received Christ Jesus the Lord, so walk in Him, rooted and built up in Him and established in the faith, just as you were taught, abounding in thanksgiving” (Colossians 2:6-7).
How does one partake of both the sin-cleansing Blood of Jesus and the soul-renewing Body of Christ?
One partakes of both by believing. A major focus of John 6:22-71 is belief. Jesus instructed, “‘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 … [Jesus’ audience] said to Him, ‘What must we do, to be doing the works of God?’ Jesus answered them, ‘This is the work of God, that you believe in Him whom [God] has sent’” (John 6:27a, 28-29).
“‘So, they said to Him, “Then what sign do You do, that we may see and believe You? What work do You perform?’” (John 6:30). “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). Again, Jesus stressed the importance of belief. “‘Truly, truly, I say to you, whoever believes has eternal life. I am the Bread of Life. Your fathers ate the manna in the wilderness, and they died. This is the Bread that comes down from Heaven, so that one may eat of it and not die. I am the Living Bread that came down from Heaven. If anyone eats of this Bread, he will live forever. And the Bread that I will give for the life of the World is My flesh’” (John 6:47-51). “‘For this is the will of my Father, that everyone who looks on the Son and believes in Him should have eternal life, and I will raise him up on the last day’” (John 6:40). Spiritual freedom comes out of belief.
If you are familiar with the history of the United States of America, perhaps the following illustration will help you more fully understand the three-fold deliverance available to us through the Blood and Body of Christ which becomes ours by belief. I did not create this illustration, nor do I remember who spoke it or where I heard it, but I believe it is a good representation of what I have been explaining.
“President Abraham Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation on January 1, 1863, as the [United States of America] approached its third year of bloody civil war. The proclamation declared ‘that all persons held as slaves’ within the rebellious states ‘are, and henceforward shall be free.’”3
After hearing of President Lincoln’s proclamation, a slave owner went to his slaves and said, “The Government of the United States of America, has just emancipated you. That means I can no longer sell you. You never have to be separated from your families. You can now work for me alongside your loved ones without fear that they will be taken from you.” With this knowledge, the slaves went back to work rejoicing that they would no longer have to experience the heartbreak of their families being ripped apart. But they continued to submit to the back-breaking labor, the harsh treatment of the overseers, and the horrendous living conditions.
Not long after this, a former slave, experiencing all that the Emancipation Proclamation afforded him, came upon this group of slaves working under the hot sun and the ruthless management of the overseers. He asked those slaving away, “What are you doing here?” The laborers answered, “We’ve been emancipated! That means Master can’t sell us anymore.” The fully-freed former slave said, “Emancipation doesn’t just mean your master can’t sell you anymore; it means he can’t own you anymore. You don’t have to work for him anymore, don’t have to stay here anymore; you can go anywhere you want. You can have a whole new life!”
If we only know the truth of what the Blood of Jesus has done for us, we will only know the forgiveness of the sins we have and will commit. We will be like the slaves who were only given part of the truth concerning their emancipation. We will know we are forgiven, and that we will go to Heaven one day, but we will not have the full deliverance from sin that Jesus’ Body bought. If we only partake of the Blood of Jesus, we will likely go right back into being slaves to sin.
But if we hear and believe the whole truth of the Gospel, and if we claim what was gained by the crucifixion and resurrection of Jesus’ Body, we will know we don’t have to be subject to sin anymore. We can become truly free from our sinful nature. We can live a whole new, holy life here on Earth. We won’t have to wait until we get to Heaven to experience freedom; we can begin knowing deliverance now. “For freedom Christ has set us free; stand firm therefore, and do not submit again to a yoke of slavery” (Galatians 5:1). “So, if the Son sets you free, you will be free indeed” (John 8:36). You have been emancipated! Believe it, partake of it, and walk in freedom!
1 Scripture quotations marked with ESV are from The Holy Bible, English Standard Version (ESV), copyright 2001 by Crossway, a publishing ministry of Good News Publishers. All Scriptures are taken from the ESV unless otherwise noted. To aid in understanding, I have capitalized references to God.
2 Nee, Watchman. The Normal Christian Life. (Carol Stream, IL: Tyndale House Publishers, 1977).
3 https://www.archives.gov/exhibits/featured-documents/emancipation-proclamation