As stated in the first post of the Disciples’ Prayer, Our Father Who Art in Heaven, the petitions that Jesus taught his disciples were not given so that we can know how to get something from God as much as they were given as the gift of God in themselves. Christ taught his disciples to pray in this manner because each of the statements in the prayer pertains to a crucial element of our relationship to him.

We know that God will provide all of our needs; we know that we are not to worry because our heavenly father knows what we need before we even ask. God provides for the sparrows, not allowing one to fall apart from his knowledge, he clothes the flowers of the field, will he not provide for us also? If we are given these promises and are told to trust in him for the sustenance of our bodies, why are we told to ask?

What is the particular significance of God’s providence of food for our bodies in our relationship with him?

In his sovereignty God created the earth as physical and humans with physical bodies. He could have made us spirits, like the angels, but he rather desired to realize a communion with his creation through the medium of the physical.

The post The Christ is still Incarnate rapidly follows the incarnational means of God’s salvation, ultimately in Christ, but communicated in all times through physical means.

However these ordained means of grace are given to establish a continual communion with God. But this communion is also sustained and nourished through physical means. Let’s begin with the Garden of Eden.

God created all things, then created Adam and Eve and placed them in a garden. This was the precedent set: God communes with humanity in the context of a beautifully prepared creation.

He then planted two trees and gave them the tree of life to eat of. The other, the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil, was not in itself sinful, but was in fact beneficial for the relationship between humans and God if Adam and Eve saw it as a symbol of God’s infinite wisdom and knowledge of good and evil and exercised complete reliance on his wisdom by leaving it alone and resting in him and his spiritual providence in partaking of the Tree of Life (see Evil and the Tree).

So God’s communion with humanity was through both the eating of food and in the not eating of food! (This concept is explored more in The Feast of Fasting).

The picture we get of the created life is of God ‘resting.’ This rest is a reciprocal giving between God and humanity, fueling a giving among humans, all nourished by spiritual ‘eating,’ provided by God, which was inextricable from physical eating.

And this makes sense. God created us with a spirit, but in his wisdom he ordained that this spirit dwell in the physical and be nourished and grown through physical means. Communicating his image of love, which is the essence of his spiritual life, consists in sacrificing the self, physically, for the well being of another, physically and spiritually, and this communicates God’s spirit, for the love is fueled by the indwelling of his spirit.

Therefore the consummation of food necessarily pertains to our relationship with God to some extent. For it sustains the body which is God’s chosen means of making his presence known among humanity. But just as the Tree of Life was no longer accessible to Adam and Eve when they no longer rested in God’s loving providence but take of the Tree of Knowledge for selfish gain, so it is with food today. It is only when we partake of that spiritual food which God provides (his word and its physical means) and depend on it for all that we need, physically and spiritually, that the gift of physical food and all other things necessary for our earthly life are invested with a sacrificial communion with his spirit.

In the giving of them