Will we eat and drink in heaven?

Question 10126.

Will we eat and drink in heaven? On the evidence of Scripture I think the answer is yes, and I say that with more confidence than you might expect, because the Bible mentions food in the world to come far more often than most Christians realise.

The question is not trivial either. It touches what kind of bodies we will have, what kind of world we are going to, and whether the life to come is recognisably life at all or something thin and vaporous that nobody would actually want.

What Jesus said at the last supper

On the night He was betrayed, Jesus took the cup and told the disciples He would not drink again of the fruit of the vine until the kingdom of God comes. That is not a farewell to drinking. It is a postponement with an appointment attached.

Matthew’s version puts it even more warmly: until that day when I drink it new with you in my Father’s kingdom. He expects to eat and drink again, He expects company, and He names the people He intends to do it with.

I find that one of the most human sentences in the Gospels. Facing the cross, our Lord comforted Himself with the thought of a future meal with His friends. If that is how He thought about the kingdom, we should be slow to strip it of tables.

The risen body of Jesus

The clearest evidence is what our Lord did after the resurrection. In Luke 24 He asks the terrified disciples whether they have anything to eat, takes a piece of broiled fish and eats it in front of them. He does it deliberately, as proof that He is not a ghost.

Then in John 21 He cooks breakfast on a beach, bread and fish over a charcoal fire, and invites seven exhausted men to come and have some. Whatever a glorified body is, it can eat and drink, and it can handle grilled fish, and it can operate a barbecue.

This matters because His resurrection body is the pattern for ours. Paul says He will transform our lowly body to be like His glorious body. So the question of whether we will eat and drink in the age to come is answered, at least in principle, by watching what He did.

Need and delight are different things

Someone will object that a glorified body cannot require food, and I agree entirely. Nothing in the new creation runs on necessity. There is no hunger there, no scarcity and no decay, and no one is eating in order to stay alive.

But the leap from does not need to does not do is a leap nobody should make. God did not fill Eden with fruit trees because Adam would otherwise have starved. He did it because He is generous and because taste is a gift.

Take away necessity and what remains is pleasure without anxiety. That sounds to me like an improvement on the present arrangement rather than a loss.

The supper of the Lamb

Revelation 19 announces the marriage supper of the Lamb and pronounces a blessing on those invited to it. The word used is the term for the wedding banquet itself, the celebration meal rather than the ceremony.

Isaiah 25 had already promised that the Lord of hosts would make for all peoples a feast of rich food, a feast of well-aged wine, of rich food full of marrow. That is not the language of a symbol looking for a meaning. It is a menu.

I have written more fully about that occasion in my article on the marriage supper of the Lamb, and the sheer physicality of the imagery is one of its most striking features.

Fruit on the tree of life

Revelation 22 describes the tree of life yielding twelve kinds of fruit, one each month, with leaves for the healing of the nations. Fruit is for eating. If nobody in the eternal city were going to eat and drink, the tree would be an odd piece of decoration.

The detail about twelve kinds and monthly yield suggests variety and rhythm rather than a single unchanging supply. Somebody is keeping track of the seasons in a world that supposedly has no need of them.

Set alongside the river of the water of life flowing from the throne, we have both food and drink in the closing chapter of the Bible, right where the garden imagery of Genesis is restored and enlarged. See my article on the tree of life in Revelation 22 for more.

What about the kingdom not being food and drink?

Paul writes in Romans 14:17 that the kingdom of God is not a matter of eating and drinking but of righteousness and peace and joy in the Holy Spirit. That verse is regularly produced as a knock-down argument, and it is nothing of the kind.

Read the chapter. Paul is settling a dispute between believers about meat and holy days, and his point is that the kingdom does not consist in dietary rules. He is telling the strong not to trample the weak over a menu.

Saying that a marriage does not consist in the wedding cake is not the same as saying there will be no cake. Paul is ranking priorities, not abolishing tables, and Romans 14:17 should not be made to bear a weight it was never carrying.

The witness of the last hundred years

A great deal of popular Christian imagination about heaven owes more to Greek philosophy than to the Hebrew prophets. Plato taught that matter is inferior and that the goal is escape from the body. Scripture teaches resurrection, which is the exact opposite.

Once you have absorbed the idea that spiritual means immaterial, questions about whether we eat and drink sound almost impious. But the Bible never uses spiritual that way. When Paul speaks of a spiritual body he means a body animated and governed by the Spirit, not a body made of mist.

The clouds and harps have no scriptural pedigree whatever. What Scripture describes is a city, a river, trees, nations, work, rule and a banquet, which is a considerably more interesting prospect.

Why we will eat and drink together

In the ancient world, sharing a table was the strongest available statement of acceptance. It is why the Pharisees were so scandalised that Jesus ate with tax collectors and sinners, and why Peter’s withdrawal from Gentile tables in Galatians 2 was such a serious matter.

So when the Bible pictures the age to come as a meal, it is saying something about fellowship as much as about digestion. To eat and drink with the Lord is to be received by Him, permanently and publicly.

Revelation 3:20 offers a foretaste. If anyone hears my voice and opens the door, I will come in to him and eat with him, and he with me. The invitation begins now and the banquet finishes it.

Holding it with an open hand

I want to be careful not to promise more than the text does. Scripture nowhere says explicitly that the redeemed will need to eat and drink, and there may be dimensions to a glorified body I cannot presently imagine.

What I can say is that every line of evidence runs the same way, and none runs against it. When the whole weight of the imagery points one direction, the burden of proof sits with those who want to empty it.

Abraham, Isaac and Jacob at the table

Jesus told the centurion that many would come from east and west and recline at table with Abraham, Isaac and Jacob in the kingdom of heaven. Recline is the posture of a long meal among friends, not a quick bite standing up.

He repeats the picture in Luke 13 and again in the parable of the great banquet, where a man sends his servant out to fill the house. The kingdom keeps arriving in the Gospels in the shape of a dinner invitation, and those who eat and drink at that table are described as blessed.

Luke 22:30 makes it explicit for the twelve: that you may eat and drink at my table in my kingdom, and sit on thrones judging the twelve tribes of Israel. Eating and ruling sit side by side in the same sentence, which tells us the age to come is neither idle nor austere. You can read the promise for yourself in Luke 22:30.

A renewed earth needs bodies that work

The destination of the believer is not a disembodied realm but a renewed creation with a city, nations and a river running through it. A physical world implies physical life, and physical life includes the ordinary goodness of a meal.

Isaiah’s picture of the millennial kingdom has people planting vineyards and eating their fruit, and building houses and living in them. Whatever else those chapters describe, they do not describe ghosts. People eat and drink in the prophets’ vision of the future because the future is a world rather than a mood.

The Greek word Paul uses of the resurrection body, pneumatikos, describes what animates a thing rather than what it is made of. A Spirit-governed body is still a body, and there is no reason it should not eat and drink.

So, now what?

Let this enlarge your expectations. If the world to come includes a table, then it is a world of gladness and company rather than a permanent religious service. Heaven is not a very long meeting.

And let it change how you use tables now. Every meal you share with somebody lonely is a rehearsal. When you next break bread at the Lord’s Supper, remember that you are doing it until He comes, and that He fully intends to eat and drink with you again. Who could you invite to your table this week?

“For I tell you that from now on I will not drink of the fruit of the vine until the kingdom of God comes.” (Luke 22:18)