ALSO “the hidden Manna” is promised, not in this, but in the life to come. Also this “hidden Manna” he who has found in Christ his Mediator, receives only after death.
So it appeared with respect to the eating of the Tree of Life. This could not be otherwise in connection with the “not being hurt of the second Death.” This was equally clear with the white stone. And the same applies also altogether to the Manna that is hidden. Here, too, it says, that only he, who overcame, shall receive that Manna from Christ. And of course this: He that overcometh shall then only be applicable to you, when the last battle shall have been fought and the crown of life shall be handed you by the righteous judge.
All spiritualizing of this promise must be resisted. Jesus truly calls Himself: “The true bread that is come down from heaven,” and by reason of this a certain pointing forward to Christ can not be withheld from the Manna in the wilderness, and also the Lord’s Supper can be put in relation with the word of our text. But yet, the “hidden Manna” here is not Christ, for Christ Himself declares, that He shall distribute it. Moreover, this did not need to be promised. That the Redeemed above enjoy inwardly and outwardly, speaks for itself. No one indeed could even think this otherwise. There would be no special promise in this. And also, in heaven Christ is in no case a hidden Manna. There He shines out in glory.
On Patmos the glorified Christ sheds a light for us upon the church militant and triumphant. Suffering and struggle here, and after that the victory. But that struggle and that victory do not refer here in the first place to the individual believer, not in the main to his personal suffering, and do not refer to his condition immediately after death. All this is inwoven, but is not the real material of the revelation here given by Christ. That real revelation refers to the church as a whole, to her career, to her struggle in the course of centuries, till the last struggle comes. And the triumph here delineated does not follow immediately after your death, but with and after the last judgment, when the new Jerusalem shall come down from heaven and the Kingdom of Glory is ushered in.
All that here is said of those who fall asleep in Jesus, refers therefore not to the middle-state, in which after dying they exist only after the soul, but to their condition after the resurrection of the flesh, when they will again be soul and body, and that body glorified.
And with respect to that new condition they here receive from Jesus this promise also, that He will give them to eat of the hidden Manna (Rev. 2, 17).
THIS points back to Israel and to Christ in the wilderness.
Altogether wondrous was Israel’s condition in the desert wilderness. There was a stop put to the process of destruction, which at other times makes clothes and shoes wear out. There was also a maintenance of the bodily existence outside of ordinary food. The “in the sweat of thy face shalt thou eat bread” here fell away. God fed His people with Manna. Something intended not spiritually, but bodily. They ate Manna and lived.
Fourteen centuries later Christ in the wilderness was tempted of Satan, also at the point of food. He did not eat forty days and forty nights. And for Christ no visible Manna came down from heaven, as for Israel. God sustained Christ’s body in a wondrous, hidden, invisible way. And when in the end Satan took advantage of this absence of all visible food, to tempt Christ, and called on Him to make bread of stones, Jesus said that here the key to the mystery lay in the rule, that our bodily life, for its sustenance, is not in the absolute sense dependent upon bread, for that God is mighty to make His word go forth, and merely by that word to protect our bodily life from destruction and death.
Thus history mentioned two things.
First the visible Manna, which maintained Israel in the wilderness; and secondly the non-visible, but hidden Manna, with which the Father fed Christ’s body in the wilderness.
Now the deepest mystery lay not in this visible Manna, for, said Jesus, “Your fathers have eaten this visible Manna, and have died.” He Himself on the other hand received the hidden Manna, and lives, after soul and body, eternally.
By that hidden Manna He was sustained those forty days and forty nights in the wilderness. By that hidden Manna He lived the forty days after His resurrection, until His ascension. By that hidden Manna He has since lived all these centuries in His glorified body at the Right hand of the Father.
And now Jesus promises His redeemed, who overcome, that they also shall not only one day receive back again their body “like unto His glorious body” (Phil. 3, 21); but also, that in their glorified body they will be sustained, not by bread, and neither by a visible Manna, like Israel, who have died, but by that same hidden Manna, by which He Himself lives with the Father.
It is in all these promises the constant refrain, that as Christ is, so also His Redeemed, who overcame, shall be. They will sit with Him in His Throne, as He is seated with His Father in His Throne. And so too, they will be sustained, bodily sustained, by the hidden Manna, as He Himself was sustained by this hidden Manna and continued so, first in the wilderness, and now at the Right hand of the Father.
IN Paradise it was the maintenance of the body without labor and trouble, for Paradise itself offered all manner of fruit. On the earth under the curse it became: eating bread in the “sweat of his face.” But over there in the Realm of holiness not only that punishment and that curse pass away, so that there will be no more mention of labor in the sweat of the face, but more yet, it will there be an abundance still richer, still more luxuriant, still more glorious, than it ever was in Paradise. God Himself will sustain His own, spiritually by His Spirit, and bodily by the hidden Manna.
It is the same thought which the holy apostle thus expresses: “Meats (food) are for the belly and the belly is for food, but God shall destroy both it and them” (1 Cor. 6, 13).
Only, what Paul expresses merely by way of negation, saying that then also ordinary feeding by food and through the belly, which applies here, shall not take place yonder in this way, Jesus on Patmos expresses in positive sense. Not only does the earthly maintenance of the body then fall away, but it is superseded by an heavenly maintenance of the body, and that heavenly maintenance does not take place by a Manna as in the wilderness, but by a Manna, which is not, as then, visible and tangible, but which shall be invisible and hidden.
TO him who on earth bathes himself in wealth and affluence, the glory of this comforting thought is certainly less striking.
But he who knows the care, the trouble and the struggle which for millions and yet again millions of the children of men the question of feeding self and family presents every day and sometimes distressingly by night, recognizes here also the Christus Consolator, Who wondrously and as with hidden Manna fed the five thousand, and every time again shows how profoundly He understands the cares and the distress of life.
He who will take all this only spiritually, blots out a whole page of the compassions of Christ, forgets what He said of the rich man and poor Lazarus, and overlooks the spiritual significance, which also lies in that anxiety for bread as punishment for the sake of sin. He sees in Jesus a Redeemer of the soul, but no perfect Redeemer, not One also a Savior from distress and want.
He, on the other hand, who counts with the grinding cares under the load of which by far the greater part of humanity groans, counts with the strength and time, lost everywhere in the sheer preparation of bread and food, and counts also with the endless sicknesses and ailments, which spring from insufficient, wrong or excessive feeding of the blood, he feels and handles, how the maintenance of the body consumes human strength, stifles the heart and is cause of endless trouble.
To be rid of the body and at last be pure soul, then seems deliverance; and from this explains itself, that obtaining the body back again, that the resurrection of the flesh has with most people little or no count, does not interest nor enchant them, and that it would trouble them little, if it never came.
Yet such is not the way of the Lord.
When you die and put off the weary body, you know that you eternally obtain back again a glorified body. This is God’s ordinance. He created you as man. And God has willed that man should exist as a being of soul and body both. And therefore the body must come back to you.
And to banish from this expectation every idea of fear, as though with the body something of the old want and of the old distress might return, and contrariwise to give you the positive assurance, that then also in your new bodily appearance it shall all be blessedness, eternal glory, endless joy and uninterruptible rejoicing, therefore Jesus gave His people also this every distress-banishing promise: That He will then Himself maintain our glorified body, not by bread and not by food, but by an hidden Manna, in which God’s almightiness will glorify itself.
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