Good morning, everyone. Let’s continue reading in John chapter 6. If you could reopen your Bible there, that would be great. And we’ve read up to verse 51.
Let’s continue from verse 52. John 6, verse 52. Then the Jews began to argue sharply among themselves, How can this man give us his flesh to eat? Jesus said to them, Very truly I tell you, unless you eat the flesh of the Son of Man and drink his blood, you have no life in you.
Whoever eats my flesh and drinks my blood has eternal life, and I will raise them up at the last day. For my flesh is real food, and my blood is real drink. Whoever eats my flesh and drinks my blood remains in me, and I in them.
Just as the living Father sent me, and I live because of the Father, so the one who feeds on me will live because of me. This is the bread that came down from heaven. Your ancestors ate manna and died, but whoever feeds on this bread will live forever.
He said this while teaching in the synagogue in Capernaum. On hearing this, many of his disciples said, This is a hard teaching. Who can accept it? Aware that his disciples were grumbling about this, Jesus said to them, Does this offend you? Then what if you see the Son of Man ascend to where he was before? The Spirit gives life.
The flesh counts for nothing. The words I have spoken to you, they are full of the Spirit and life. Yet, there are some of you who do not believe.
For Jesus had known from the beginning which of them did not believe and who would betray him. He went on to say, This is why I told you that no one can come to me unless the Father has enabled them. From this time, many of his disciples turned back and no longer followed him.
You do not want to leave too, do you? Jesus asked the twelve. Simon Peter answered, Lord, to whom shall we go? You have the words of eternal life. We have come to believe and to know that you are the Holy One of God.
Then Jesus replied, Have I not chosen you, the twelve? Yet one of you is a devil. He meant Judas, the son of Simon Iscariot, who though one of the twelve was later to betray him. This is God’s Word.
Have you ever had the experience of pulling out of a deal? Ever had the experience of being on the brink of an investment and then having second thoughts? So, on a small scale perhaps, it was an item of clothing at the shop and you thought, that looks nice. And you stood in the line to buy it and then you just had that second thought and you took the item back. You put it back on the shelf.
Well, that’s a really small thing, but let’s think about something a bit more consequential. Maybe you’ve had the experience of wanting to buy a house and you wanted it. You put in an offer for it.
The offer was accepted. But as the closing date approached, you had your doubts and you pulled out of the deal. Something you thought you were going to invest in, but you decided against it.
Well, that sort of wrestle, that sort of dilemma, that kind of choice brings us right into the territory of John 6 and the second half of this chapter. Because this long chapter, this in some places quite complicated and deep chapter, in the end, it really boils down to one question. Will you keep investing in Jesus or will you pull out of the deal? Or in the terms of the passage, will you keep feeding on the bread of life or will you put Jesus back on the proverbial shelf and say, he isn’t for me? That massive choice comes to the people in this passage and it comes to each one of us as we sit here this morning.
Because you’ll notice in this passage, the choice doesn’t just come to the crowd as a whole, but it even comes to those that were closest to Jesus as close disciples. So this choice is something that all of us need to consider and maybe reconsider even if we are Jesus’ followers. Well, before we get to that choice, we need to consider what Jesus is offering.
And so let’s begin. We’ve got two points this morning to help us think this through. So the first point is the bread you can’t get anywhere else.
Let’s think about the bread that you can’t get anywhere else. As a family, we used to go to France on our holidays. Almost every year we would take the drive across and take the ferry over.
And one of the things we liked about France was the bread. And it was my job every morning to go to the shop, and I didn’t mind doing that, to buy the bread. And so I got a lovely few minutes of just smelling the bread as I was holding it on the way home.
I don’t know why it is that French bread is so much better than any bread we can produce in our shops. But if there is a league table of bread, then the French are definitely at the top. But what is amazing in John 6 is that Jesus says He offers a bread that surpasses all bread.
It even beats the French and their bread. And Jesus says this in the context of the Galilean crowd once again tracking Jesus down. Remember that Jesus is sort of going from place to place in a kind of itinerant ministry, and crowds and disciples are following Him around.
And He’s just left the east side of the lake, and the crowd now travel, they follow Him around the lake to Capernaum, which was on the northwest shore of Lake Galilee. And why had they sought Jesus? Well, Jesus gives an interesting explanation as to why they were following Him in verse 26. They’ve not come to hear His teaching.
They’ve not even come to see His miracles, which Jesus calls signs, because they signify His identity as God and Messiah. These miracles, they kind of point to who He is. They’ve not come for His teaching.
They’ve not come for the signs. No, they’ve come for a more basic reason. They’ve come because of food.
Verse 26, it’s because you ate the loaves and had your fill. It’s because Jesus had just fed 5,000 men with a free lunch. And to be fair, who of us doesn’t like a free lunch? You know, it’s like this at church, isn’t it? You put on a free lunch, everyone turns up.
Same kind of thing. Jesus uses this point to make an even bigger point about an even greater priority. Look at verse 27.
Do not work for food that spoils, that’s regular food, but for food that endures to eternal life. Jesus is saying that everyday food, though necessary, is limited. And in a real sense, it’s perishing.
I mean, if I didn’t eat that lovely French baguette, it would eventually go stale and go off, and eventually it would perish. The point is that even though bread sustains our temporal life, the bread itself is temporary. And therefore, physical bread shouldn’t be what I work for in life as the main thing.
Don’t work for food that spoils is a dramatic method of contrast. He’s saying there’s an eternal food that is so much more important by comparison than the earthly food that you work for. That’s how much better this bread is that I’m about to offer you.
Now, it’s just worth pausing for a moment and to think, is this a mistake I am making in the way I live my life? Am I just living for the temporary? Am I just working for food that spoils? Am I playing the… Some of you might remember this, the game of life. Did any of you ever play the game of life? It was a board game called the game of life. I think there’s a video game with it now, the game of life.
And the primary goal of the game of life was, guess what? To make money, right? Now, you can kind of do side quests in the game of life. You can get married, you can have children, you can take on various jobs. But really everything in the game is serving the ultimate goal of more bread, more dough, more money.
And the person with the most money wins the game. Quite telling that, isn’t it? It says something about what we think of as a successful life. But what if the bread at the end of the game perishes? What if? As the old proverb says, there are no pockets in a shroud.
Physical bread is not what we eternally need. The bread that Jesus is offering is so much better. In fact, it is even better than Exodus bread.
Exodus bread. Now, what do I mean by Exodus bread? Well, Exodus was a period in the history of Israel when they were brought out of slavery and they went on a journey to the promised land. And one of the most famous things that happened on that journey was that God provided bread for His people.
Exodus bread. And the crowds remind Jesus of this bread in verse 30. As He’s talking about the best bread ever, like where their minds go to is, ah, the best bread ever.
Clearly, that must be the manna bread in the Old Testament. And the crowd rather cheekily asked Jesus for another sign. Even though He had just fed 5,000 plus people less than 24 hours earlier, yet they asked for another sign.
Jesus, what other sign are you going to give us? Our ancestors saw a good one. They received the manna bread in the desert day after day. Jesus, are you going to match that miracle? Are you going to equal the gold standard miracle of the Old Testament, the giving of manna? I just love how Jesus burst their bubble here.
Cast your eye down to verse 49. Your ancestors ate the manna in the wilderness, yet they died. The manna bread was an amazing miracle.
It kept the people alive for 40 years. But in the end, that bread was no more powerful than everyday bread. Jesus’ point is, I’ve got a bread for you that’s actually way more powerful than even Exodus bread.
This is quite the buildup, isn’t it? Jesus is saying essentially, I can offer you a bread that has never been seen in history ever before. No wonder the crowd was saying in verse 34, as we would be saying with them, sir, always give us this bread, like point us to the shop. But what is this bread? Jesus answers in verse 35 by pointing to himself.
I am the bread of life. The bread you can’t get anywhere else is Jesus. Jesus is the living bread.
I am the bread of life. It’s the first of seven I am statements in John’s gospel. Jesus, in these statements, He’s taking God’s name from Exodus chapter 3, the self-existing I am, the God who’s always been and always will be.
And in this case, He’s saying, I am the bread of life. I think that means He is the only source of true life. Because we’ve got to think ourselves back into those days where bread was the basic staple of life.
Bread was such a basic staple that if you had it, you would live, and if you didn’t have it, you probably were going to die. That’s the sense of this here. Jesus is saying, I am the only source of true life.
You can’t get this anywhere else. It isn’t the church that’s the source of life. It isn’t religion that’s the source of life.
It’s me. And where has He come from? Where has this living bread come from? Look at what He says there. He says that He has come down from heaven, come down from heaven.
And Jesus keeps repeating this in verses 32, 33, 50, 51, 58. And in verse 41, this claim to have come down from heaven becomes a sticking point for the crowd, and it results in them grumbling. The crowd grumble at Jesus saying, I came down from heaven.
Because in some way, as Jesus says this, He’s somehow claiming to have come from God’s domain, a bread that came from God’s domain and which was sent by the Father. There’s so much in this passage about the Father and the Son, two of the persons in the Godhead, the Father, the Son. Actually, the Spirit features as well in this passage.
I think I said in the very first sermon in John, John is a Trinitarian gospel. It’s the good news of the Father, the Son, and the Spirit bringing salvation and life. But here there’s a particular emphasis on the Father and the Son, about the Father sending the Son, about the Son doing the Father’s will and carrying out the Father’s mission.
There’s a new Mission Impossible film out at the moment. And if you watch that, or even if you watch the old series, it seems to me that particularly Ethan Hunt, he does anything but accept the mission he’s given. You know, they give him one mission, and then he just goes rogue and does his own thing.
So maybe that’s not a good illustration, but here is the perfect agent. The Father gives the perfect mission, and the Son goes into the mission field to complete the mission perfectly, and just as the Father ordered. And what is the mission? The mission is to give life to the world.
Notice that in verse 33, he talks about it there. This is not just life to the Jewish people. This is not just keeping a group of Jewish folk alive for 40 years, but this is a life that’s for the whole of the world.
And what kind of life is it? Jesus has already hinted at the limitation of everyday bread and Exodus bread. It’s temporary bread, and the results of it are temporary. But by contrast, Jesus gives a bread that offers us eternal life.
When you feed on Him, you will never die. It’s a spiritual life that Jesus is offering, which also has a physical promise attached to it. Take a look at verse 40.
Verse 40 speaks of people looking to the Son and believing and having eternal life. That’s present tense. That’s spiritual life internally.
Internally. But then Jesus adds, and I will, that’s future tense, raise them up at the last day. Speaking there of a future physical bodily resurrection.
So, the life that Jesus is offering here is both now and future. It’s both spiritual and one day physical. When someone becomes a Christian, their dead soul, which is dead to God and has no relationship with God, comes alive spiritually right here and now.
And in that moment, they are guaranteed the promise of a physical life in the new creation. This is an unparalleled sort of bread. And the question is, how then do we eat it? How then do we consume this bread that is Jesus? How do we eat this? Of course, this is all symbolic.
You understand that. There’s a symbolism being used here. How do we eat this bread? The way that we eat this bread, the bread of Jesus, is by believing in Him.
We see that, again, if we look back at verse 40, notice again verse 40, it’s the one who believes in the Son that has this eternal life. Augustine, one of the early church fathers says, believe and you have eaten. Believe and you have eaten.
So, that’s how you consume this bread of eternal life. You don’t go to a shop somewhere. You believe in Jesus, and then you have consumed, if you like, this bread.
You believe that He came down from heaven. You believe that He was sent on a divine mission. You believe that He came to give eternal life to the world, including you.
And in that believing, you receive this life. And yet, that is really the question, isn’t it? Have we eaten this bread? And if we have, will we keep on, as it were, feeding on this bread? And that brings us to our second point this morning, and this is a question now. Will you partake of this bread or walk away? Will you partake of this bread or walk away? This is now the crunch of the passage, verse 60.
On hearing this, many of His disciples said, this is a hard teaching. Who can accept it? Now, they’d already grumbled when Jesus said that He came from heaven. But now they have a real problem when they come to this part of the passage, when they say, there’s a hard teaching that we can’t accept.
Now, what are they referring to there? You could argue that it’s all that Jesus has been saying, that the whole thing’s a hard teaching. But I think it is particularly what Jesus has just said in verse 51. Look at verse 51.
I am the living bread that came down from heaven. Whoever eats this bread will live forever. This bread is my flesh, which I will give for the life of the world.
And you’ll notice that it’s after Jesus says this that things really kick off, verse 52. How can this man give us his flesh to eat? I mean, this is weird and cannibalistic. They’re not really understanding the symbolism that’s going on.
But notice that rather than retracting what He says or sort of saying, oh, I didn’t really mean that, Jesus doubles down on it. I tell you, unless you eat the flesh of the Son of Man and drink His blood, you have no life in you. So, now Jesus says, actually, you’ve got to both eat my flesh and as well drink my blood, or you will not have eternal life.
This is the hard teaching. Now, let’s stop and think about it. We’ve already said that eating is a picture of believing.
So, when Jesus says to eat His flesh, there’s something here about believing in His flesh, believing in His blood. But what’s Jesus talking about? Why does He mention flesh and blood? Well, again, when we read things like this, we need to read the Bible in context. Context is always the key to interpreting something.
And there’s two bits of context to think about here. First of all, the context of the whole of John’s gospel, and then the context of chapter 6 in particular. Context of the whole of John’s gospel, where are we going in John? We are going to a hill on which there is a cross.
Jesus is going to die as a sacrifice for sin at the end of this gospel. That’s the wider context. Now, here’s the more immediate context.
Earlier in chapter 6, do you remember we were told that all of this is happening at the time of the Passover festival? And remember at the time we said that this is significant, we’ve got to keep this in our minds as we’re going through John 6, that this is Passover time. And what happened at the original Passover? What happened at every Passover? Lambs would be slain for the sins of the people. A flesh and blood sacrifice took place so that the people might be forgiven.
And so, when Jesus says that people must eat His flesh and drink His blood, I think what He’s saying is that we need to believe in and trust in the sacrifice He makes. We need to nourish our souls on the benefits of His death for us. That’s how you become a Christian, by believing not only in Jesus generally, but believing specifically that He gave His flesh and blood in your place and for your sake.
And this is the thing, this is the crunch of it. You can’t feed on the living bread without, as it were, eating the flesh and drinking the blood. In other words, you can’t have eternal life without the cross.
And this is the sticking point for so many people. People often want a Christ without a cross. They want Jesus, the good moral guide, but they don’t want Jesus, the flesh and blood sacrifice.
Because the Jesus flesh and blood sacrifice means that there’s nothing I can do to achieve my salvation. It means that I need to rely on the works and on the death of another. We see that at the start of the conversation here, actually.
If you look back at verse 28, way back at the beginning, the crowd asked Jesus, what must we do to do the works God requires? Verse 28. Notice there it’s the works. They’re expecting a big list of laws and things to do.
But Jesus comes back and says, the work of God is this. Jesus gives them not a list of things to do, He gives them one thing to believe. The work of God is this, to believe in the one He sent.
He says, put all your laws to the side, put all your works to the side and just believe in one thing. And when we get to the end of the passage, we see what that one thing is. It’s the work of the cross.
I was chatting to Lucy this week about, Lucy is going to be starting a role with us later in the year. And she told me an illustration that they’ve sometimes used with students when they’re trying to share the gospel and trying to give a picture image. And they say something like, God’s holiness is way up here.
It’s a very high and lofty thing. It’s perfection. But down here, down here at the bottom is us and our sin.
And we’re very lowly and we’re very disconnected from God because of our sin. And they say, the higher we see that God is holy, the more perfect and pure we see He is, and the more sinful we see we are. In other words, the higher God is and the lower we are, actually, the bigger the cross gets.
Because you see, in the gap between God and us is the cross. That’s the gospel, isn’t it? It’s that the cross fills the gap between the holiness of God and the lowliness of our sin. And in a sense, the more you see that God is holy and the deeper you see that you’re sinful, the bigger the cross gets.
The wonder of it gets bigger. The excitement and thrill of it gets bigger. But here’s the thing, as she was sharing that, what I then thought about, well, what happens if there’s no cross? What happens if there’s no cross? If we’re not trusting in the cross, then there’s nothing to bridge the gap.
There’s only despair as you’re stuck there at the bottom of the pit. Or we foolishly try and create our own little ladder, which is not going to take us very far. The cross was the bridge to God, and that’s what Jesus is talking about in this passage, and yet so many walked away from it.
Now, just as a very brief aside, let me just say something, that when we walk away from the gospel and when we walk away from the cross, the fault is on our side, it is not on God’s side. There’s quite a lot in this passage about God’s sovereign power and yet our human responsibility. In fact, this chapter would be a great place to study if you’re trying to think through the sovereignty of God in saving people, and yet what’s our responsibility in coming and responding to the gospel? This would be just a brilliant passage to do the study in.
Because in verse 44, you’ve got one side of it there, don’t you? The Father draws people to believe in the Son. Like, if I’m believing this morning, it’s because God’s done a work in me, right? I’m not just doing this on my own steam, I’m doing it because God has been at work in my life. And yet it’s also very clear in the text, isn’t there, that there’s all sorts of things that we are doing, that we’re coming, that we’re believing, that we’re looking to the Son, all sorts of active verbs of response.
And both of these things are true. God is sovereign, and yet we are responsible. But you know, sometimes people blame God and they say, well, you know, the reason I haven’t come is, you know, God’s somehow to blame because He’s not drawn me.
I’ve spoken to people like that, people who are in, they’ve got themselves into knots over the doctrine of God’s election, and they see it as a barrier to coming. Maybe I’m not one of the chosen. The Bible never uses the doctrine of election that way.
Election is never a barrier to faith in the Bible. It is rather an explanation of faith. And if that’s you, I simply want to point out to you what Jesus promises at the end of verse 37, which is that, whoever comes to me will never be driven away.
Our job isn’t to wrestle with whether God’s calling us. Our responsibility is to come. And Jesus says, there’s not a person who has come to me that I have ever, ever turned away.
He doesn’t turn people away, and yet tragically, many people walk away. And notice in verse 65 that many of these people were His disciples. They were not day visitors who came to see the odd miracle, but they were an outer group of disciples, not the 12, but a kind of outer group who were showing some level of interest and commitment.
I guess the equivalent today might be a kind of a churchgoer, you know, someone that kind of goes to church quite regularly. There’s kind of something there of interest. But when Jesus spoke of His heavenly origin, and when He spoke of His destination going to the cross, they walked away from the deal.
They left the ultimate bread on the shelf, and they said, Well, I’m not having that, if that’s what Christianity really means. Will that be our response? Is that currently our response? There’s only two directions you could be going in this morning. You’re either walking away from Jesus, or you’re coming to Jesus.
I hope it’s not the first of those. Jesus then turns to the 12, and maybe you’re sitting here this morning, and you consider yourself to be, you know, very much believing and close to Jesus. Well, these are the people that are, like, really close to Jesus.
They’re the inner ring. And I wonder if they were surprised when Jesus turned to them, and eyeballed them, and He said to them, verse 67, You do not want to leave too, do you? And Peter, ever their spokesman, says, To whom shall we go? You have the words of eternal life. Peter here is the model response.
He knows that Jesus is the source of eternal life, and he believes that, and so do the 12. Well, actually, minus one. Jesus knows one of them is going to betray Him.
But this is the model response, faith, feeding on the bread of life, sticking with Jesus, not walking away, because we know there’s nowhere else worth going. We know there’s no one else like Jesus, and we know there’s no other bread like this. I mean, if it’s not this that we’re putting our whole life into, then we’re just going back to playing the game of life again, a pretty meaningless game when you think it through.
And so even though it’s hard, and even though we’re imperfect, by the grace of God and the Spirit of God, we’re going to stay, and we’re going to keep feeding on Him. And we’re going to feed our souls, especially, we’re going to feed our souls on the magnitude of His cross. That’s why unashamedly as a church, we are a church of the cross.
I hope we are a church of the cross, because that’s where we see the magnitude of God’s love and God’s grace. What are you going to choose? What are you going to keep on choosing?
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