Following the dramatic crossing of the sea of Galilee, or lake
Tiberias (6:16-21), we find Jesus on
‘the other side of the sea (6:25). It is
here that the stage for the first of His weighty seven “I Am” sayings“[1]
is
set... “I am the bread of life”.
Our passage essentially makes one BIG point:
Jesus announces Himself to be the Bread of Life
(6:35,48,51). By this He declares Himself to be more than food. He declares Himself to be the sum and substance of our life.
The ‘I Am’
statements are nothing less than
a declaration in which Jesus identifies
with the I AM of Exodus
3:14, where Yahweh, the God of Israel reveals Himself to Moses as, “I AM WHO
I AM”. We are once again confronted by the claims of Christ, and we must
make up our mind concerning Him. Jesus cannot remain weightless among us.
Either He is who he says who He is, or else He is a liar or worse still- He is
a lunatic. As a young student I was very
helped by this quote from C.S. Lewis[2]
:
“I am trying here to prevent anyone saying the really foolish thing
that people often say about Him: I’m ready to accept Jesus as a great moral
teacher, but I don’t accept his claim to be God. That is the one thing we must
not say. A man who was merely a man and said the sort of things Jesus said
would not be a great moral teacher. He would either be a lunatic — on the level
with the man who says he is a poached egg — or else he would be the Devil of
Hell. You must make your choice. Either this man was, and is, the Son of God,
or else a madman or something worse. You can shut him up for a fool, you can
spit at him and kill him as a demon or you can fall at his feet and call him
Lord and God, but let us not come with any patronizing nonsense about his being
a great human teacher. He has not left that open to us. He did not intend to.”
So, Jesus’ disciples had just witnessed two spectacular manifestations
of Jesus’ power (feeding of the 5000; walking upon the sea in a storm) which should
have deepened their faith in Jesus. This
might have been necessary for two
reasons[3]:
(i)
they may have sensed disappointment that Jesus would not fulfill the popular expectations they
may have shared with the crowd who wanted to make Jesus their king
(6:15) (ii) Jesus was about to make statements
that would cause massive
defection from the ranks of His followers (6:66).
Our text is structured around a series of six questions by the Jews concerning the
claims of Christ, and the answers which
Jesus gives them in response.
QUESTION 1 (6:22-27): “When did you get here? (6:25) Our
passage begins with a baffled crowd. They had previously seen Him on the eastern
side of Lake Tiberias where they had witnessed the miracle of the loaves and
fishes (6:1-15), and now He was
gone. After a search they found him at or near Capernaum[4] on the western side of the lake. As they ask
Him, ‘when did you come here?, instead of answering their question, Jesus confronts them very directly concerning their true motives for seeking Him. “Truly, truly, I say to you, you are seeking me, not because you saw
signs, but because you ate your fill at the loaves.” (6:26). Jesus is telling them plainly that what they were seeking
from Him wasn’t eternal life but free food.
So, He tells them, “Do not work
for the food that perishes (i.e. barley loaves and fish), but for the food that endures to eternal
life, which the Son of Man will give you. For on Him God the Father has set His
seal.”
We are reminded that interest in Jesus is not always
spiritual in nature. They were fascinated by the miracles and the free food.
They were taken up with the idea of having a king or another Moses- like figure
leading them and providing heavenly manna for them. Right now they could not see, nor accept or believe
in Jesus, even though the evidences were overwhelming. And you have now sat through 6 chapters of
exposition of John’s gospel. You too have read and heard the extra ordinary
credentials of Jesus Christ in Chapter 1. You have read concerning the extra ordinary miracle of the water into wine (Chapter 2) and the
healings in chapters 4,5 and 6 and
the various discourses where Jesus explains
Himself and His work to the Nicodemus
(a Jew) and to the Samaritan
Woman (a gentile). When you look at Jesus what and
who do you see?
At this point Jesus
enters into this discussion with
them about the food
which they truly need, which will culminate with this
amazing claim in 6:35
, “I am the bread of life.” But
right now in 6:27 Jesus introduces the
food which He (the Son of Man on whom the Father has set His seal) gives. He tells them “not to work for the food that perishes, but (to work) for the food that endures to eternal life.”
QUESTION 2 (6:28,29).
Notice how they latch on to the word ‘work’: “What
must we do, to be doing the works of God?”
i.e. “what good works can we do to
earn the blessing of which you speak?” The assumption is that we get
something from God if we do something for God.
That is the default position of our hearts. What can I do?
We find a similar
habit, when in our society we are invited for a meal, the first question asked is, ‘What
can I bring’? We find it very hard to receive freely, and especially this
in the matter of receiving the gift of eternal life, freely! Jesus’ answer in 6:29, “This is the work of
God i.e. this is what you can do: Believe
in Him who God has sent!
Believe! That word is the golden thread
which runs through the chapter cf. vv.
36,47,64,69. Do you see the irony
in Jesus’ words here? Believing is not really ‘a work’. But for their sake Jesus
called believing ‘the work of God’.
In reality it is no work at all. It is simply trusting God in Christ. Very well
then… BELIEVE.
QUESTION 3 (6: 30-33) : “Then what sign do you do, that we may see and believe?
What work do you perform? Our fathers ate the manna in the desert; as it is
written, He gave them bread from heaven to eat”. We want
to believe, but we want to be fed for 40 years – as in the desert, when Moses
led 1 million of our people. If you really are the prophet foretold by
Moses (see 6:14), then you must do this and be this to us. So, prove that you are like Moses. Give us
another sign, one just like you did across the lake.
At this point (6:32),
Jesus needs to challenge their false interpretation of the OT event. “It
was not Moses that had provided bread
to a million people, but God who gave you the manna – the bread from
heaven[5].
They are missing the point. They read the Scriptures wrongly. Theirs is the
problem that was already pointed out in 5:39-40! And
Jesus, by implication is saying, “I, who gave you full bellies on the others
side of the lake am not just a prophet like Moses. I am your Creator
(who came down from heaven v.33) who
miraculously provided this bread, as I indeed gave your forefathers Manna in
the desert for 40 years.” This was
what Jesus sought to communicate all the while, while His listeners
intrigued by His miracles were more interested in the material things which He
could supply. They were only interested in food that perishes, and in so doing
they were missing the point! They were not hearing or seeing Jesus for who He
was. But they try anyway …
QUESTION 4 (6:34-40): “Sir may we have this bread always?”. Here is Jesus’ most direct response to them: “I AM the Bread of Life; whoever
comes to me shall not hunger, and whoever believes in me shall never
thirst” (cf. Samaritan woman in 4:14). What they needed to do right
there and then was to commit themselves unconditionally to Christ. The one thing necessary to enable them to live forever in the presence of God is
to receive Jesus as the bread of life. “Do not work for the food that perishes, but for the food that endures to
eternal life.” There is sadly, a BUT in the picture…“BUT, I said to you that you have seen me and yet do not
believe…” (6:36). These
people had seen and heard so much of what Jesus did and said
BUT still they did not believe
Him.
WHY? Here comes the ultimate answer...
Because they needed
divine enablement. This is the essence of
what Jesus says in 6:37-40: This portion of Scripture teaches us that man’s will and inclination to seek
God is so bound by his sinful and
rebellious nature that nothing less than divine enablement would help him to see. All Jesus’ healings of the blind,
deaf and the lame and the raising of the dead are ultimately illustrations of
man’s spiritual state. What can a blind man, a deaf man, a lame man a dead man
do to escape their condition? NOTHING! What can a spiritually dead and unresponsive
man do to inherit eternal life? NOTHING! They all need help. They need divine
help. And this is precisely the thing that Jesus begins to address now. And the
answer is this, “Look to me! I am the
bread of life. Everyone who looks to the Son and believes in Him has
eternal life.”(6:40)
QUESTION 5 (6:41-51): This
statement in 6:40 induces grumbling among the Jews (6:41). “How can we look to HIM? He is
Jesus the son of Joseph, whose father and mother we know?” (6:42). Again Jesus gives the answer: “No one can come to me unless the Father who sent me draw Him” (6:44 repeated in v.65).
The point is this- To raise a spiritually, dead, unresponsive human being takes
nothing less than a miracle - a miracle like all the other miracles, and a
miracle is by definition something that human beings in their own strength,
power or authority cannot do. Jesus is speaking here to people who are
religious, but they are not born again (John 3:1-8) . They are not going
to inherit eternal life unless they look to the Son. And here is the
great difficulty. They MUST look to the Son to have eternal life. But they will not look to the Son because they are blind, deaf, lame and
dead. So, they need the mercy of God to draw them. They (and we) need
to look to the God of Moses to do the
impossible, and so in 6:45 Jesus says, “It is written in the prophets (Isaiah 54:13), ‘And they will all be taught by God.’ Everyone who has heard and learned from the
Father comes to me.” The hearing and learning comes through divine ability. This is the
work of the Holy Spirit, who points us to Jesus, described in John 3:1-8. Again and again, Jesus
affirms that He is the life giving Bread upon whom they must feed (read 6:48,51) to have eternal life.
QUESTION 6 (6:52-58): “How can this man give us his flesh to eat?“ They
think literally. Jesus, of course, means it in
a spiritual sense. He is not thinking about cannibalism. He is saying that we have to take Him into ourselves. We need to receive Him into the core of our being. In that sense alone we need to feed on Him. You have to take Jesus into you. You have to receive Jesus
into your heart.
Sadly there are none as blind as those that will not see this. And so they grumble.
Sadly there are none as blind as those that will not see this. And so they grumble.
We will consider this question and the far reaching conclusions to the end this chapter in greater detail in our next sermon. Be amazed at their unbelief Be amazed at the turning away from Christ.
But YOU- YOU ask yourself. Have I believed in Jesus? Am I into Him? Am I participating in Him- His Life, His death, His resurrection?
Unless you do, you have no assurance of heaven and eternal life.
Come to Jesus NOW!
But YOU- YOU ask yourself. Have I believed in Jesus? Am I into Him? Am I participating in Him- His Life, His death, His resurrection?
Unless you do, you have no assurance of heaven and eternal life.
Come to Jesus NOW!
[1]
The 7 ‘I Am’ sayings (ergo eimi)
: John 6:35 (I Am the Bread of Life) ; 8:12
(I Am the Light of the World) ;10:7
(I am the Door for the Sheep); 10:11
(I Am the good Shepherd) ; 11:25 (I
Am the Resurrection and the Life) ; 14:6
(I Am the Way the Truth and the Life) ; 15:5
(I Am the Vine)
[2]
Lewis, C.S. : Mere Christianity p.52 ,Fount Paperbacks 1989
[3]
Yarbrough, Robert: John p. 71
[5] Ex.
16:4-5; Num. 11:7-9
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