Then Jesus said unto them, Verily, verily, I say unto you, "Except ye eat the flesh of the Son of man, and drink his blood, ye have no life in you."In context, it is absolutely impossible that this is plain-literal language. It is figurative-literal language, the kind of speech Jesus had been training His students to add to their repertoire of illustrating Biblical truths. Such use in the metaphorical sense had been decorating an adorning the Holy Scriptures for ages, from the beginning of Jehovah's commitment of His thoughts to paper, starting with Job and Moses.
I want you, aMPU, to take note of this particular verse from the Torah, about 1400 years earlier, to illustrate God's unarguably Figurative use of the flesh (fat and kindeys) with the flour-making wheat, and of Blood (equated metaphorically to the freshly-pressed purple juice) of the grape; an expression that Jesus was also equivalently communicating in His reference to the very substantial worth of His words of life-giving belief in Him. This use is found in Deuteronomy 32:14 (AV):
"Butter of kine, and milk of sheep, with fat of lambs, and rams of the breed of Bashan, and goats, with the fat of kidneys of wheat; and thou didst drink the pure blood of the grape."It is beyond question that to reduce the gift of everlasting life as consisting of the mere act of a paedobaptized unregenerated undiscipled dupe to eating a plain-literal wheat wafer dipped in (fermented/leavened/rotted toe-jam grape juice toxin) wine; rather than commemorating His death through faith in His ACT of permitting His Body and Blood ONCE to be offered by HIMSELF as being simultaneously both LAMB and ETERNAL HIGH PRIEST and MERCY SEAT ALONE.
Substituting this eat-wafer-drink-wine concept of "transformation of a temporal substance into a spiritual one" is so ridiculous and scripturally implausible that no sensible spiritually-discerning offspring of The Holy Spirit could ever accept it as an explanation that the Romanists camp on. And I believe this is some sort of a use of physical elements as some kind of magical charm for the purpose of buffaloing blinded credulous worldlings into thinking that the ONGOING ingestion is necessary to KEEP their putative relationship with The Father and The Son.
This is such a great FIB that only shows how marvelously patient the Godhead is with the deluded children of men whom He knows that perhaps even ONE of them might exercise the Word-germinating faith of an already-condemned person in the Person, Work, Shed Blood, and Reconciliation Of The Only Begotten Human Son of The God, to receive the incalculable benefit of new birth and everlasting Existence in union with Him; and continually gathering together with others in Remembrance of His Cross-death, and of His Presence as our First Human-with-a-Body, no parts of which have yet been sent back to the earthly sphere. seated royally in Heaven.
For pretenders to manipulate other humans with this superstitious magic charm of redeployed and resubstantized Holy Flesh is eventually going to incur such a level of The Father's Righteous Fiery Wrath, that it will destroy massive elements of the world and culture we now have as to beggar anything else in which He has expressed His judgment.
Thank you, aMorePerfectUnion, for wading in to contend in the battle for The Faith!
But; as has been pointed out hundreds of times...