John 6:41-59 The living bread
This passage starts where Jesus had just landed the bombshell declaration that he is from heaven. This caused the crowd, that had so recently tried to make Jesus their king, to murmur, to grumble, to resist his words. As long as Jesus was healing and feeding them they were ok, but once Jesus begins to lay out truth they don’t want to hear it.
Jesus declares that he is the bread from Heaven. This living bread that Jesus gives us brings life to our souls since it is himself, the author of life, the creator, that is the bread. Notice that there is only one bread from heaven that gives life. Contrast that with the single fruit in the Garden of Eden that brought death. Both are metaphorical in that the bread is the confident belief that what God says is true while the fruit is the rejection of the truth.
Picture a compass face with its 360 degrees. To get to where you want to go there are 359 wrong degrees and 1 correct one whereas, in the garden, Adam and Eve were where they needed to be so there were 359 perfect directions and only one bad one. One bad apple to spoil the bunch. As Jesus said in Matthew 7:13-14 the way is as narrow as a single degree.
The crowd couldn’t accept Jesus’ divinity partly because they thought that they knew him. They were wrong. I think that a lot of people have the idea they know about Jesus or about Christianity and they can’t or won’t accept it because they can’t get past what they “know”. Will Rodgers is quoted as saying, “It isn’t what we don’t know that gives us trouble, it’s what we know that ain’t so.”
Jesus doesn’t give an inch to their complaining. In fact he pushes harder saying that they can’t argue their way into heaven, they can’t do anything to attain eternal life. No one can. (Ephesians 2:8-9) Unless the Father draws them. Everyone the Father draws will participate in the resurrection of the saints (1Corinthians 15:50-58)
Jesus alone has seen the Father, as it says in 1 Timothy 6:15-16, “He who is the blessed and only Sovereign, the King of kings and Lord of lords, who alone possesses immortality and dwells in unapproachable light, whom no man has seen or can see.”
God provides richly, he feeds the birds, he fed the children of Israel in the desert but this is only physical life. Jesus is the bread of life, the provision of God for spiritual, eternal life.
Jesus doesn’t let up for a single second. He now ratchets up another notch by saying that the bread he would give them is his flesh. Jesus was speaking about his crucifixion but the crowd had no way to know that. Jesus had asked for their belief in him and then challenged that belief with this hard to believe statement. What can we do when God doesn’t make sense? When he won’t stay in the box we have for him? In those times where it seems like God isn’t acting they way I think he should I can only ask myself the question, do I truly believe?
“Safe?” said Mr. Beaver; “don’t you hear what Mrs. Beaver tells you? Who said anything about safe? ‘Course he isn’t safe. But he’s good. He’s the King, I tell you.” ― C.S. Lewis, The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe
brotherpayne 