How we must truly incorporate Christ [from Part II]
![How we must truly incorporate Christ [from Part II]](/woodcuts/1704Luik1/00033355.jpg)
Author: Luiken, Jan, 1649-1712
Image Title: How we must truly incorporate Christ [from Part II]
Scripture Reference:
- Psalms 42 (further images / scripture text)
Description: Jesus, wearing and aureole, and the soul, depicted as a young woman, contemplate the stock of food in a cellar. In the cellar is a window with a flowering plant in a pot. The Dutch artist and poet, Jan Luiken (1649-1712) was responsible for drawing and etching this emblem and composing the poem that accompanies it.
Poem: The Soul desires to have Christ, the bread of life, truly inside her.
Though I saw the entire house filled with food,
And that I, like Cattle in grass, lay in it,
I still remained unsatisfied, it would not give me nourishment,
The food would have to be in me, if I would live.
Now notice, Oh human child, this concerns you absolutely:
Although the eternal depth is full of the clear Deity,
As long as the Soul’s fire does not eat from the godly being,
So long it will also be a barren hunger.
As from the food that the little seed absorbs,
A graceful little Flower is begotten in its body;
So is the fiery Soul suffused with newness,
If it has truly imbibed God’s being;
That holy being becomes so glorious around the spirit,
A lovely and spiritual life from heaven’s flesh and blood,
Wherein it burns eternally, and gives from its digesting
A light clear Spirit, a mirror before the Lord.
This is the new human, who is stuck in the old one,
Like gold in a stone: when the old one breaks,
Then the new one stands naked, before God and the choir of Angels;
So is born, through the right belief, the right human.
The true believer does not remain merely outside:
But breaks through everything, and grasps the Deity.
That one must be his nourishment and give him strength and wisdom,
That is his bread and wine, a food for the righteous life.
God's Answer:
“I am the bread of life. Whoever comes to me will never be hungry, and whoever believes in me will never be thirsty" (John 6:35).
(Translation by Josephine V. Brown, with editorial assistance from William G. Stryker)
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