The Bread of Life (V)
This is a transcript. It may contains some inaccuracies.
We can really title today's message “Satisfying Soul Hunger”. This portion of this paragraph that we've been studying together—Satisfying Soul Hunger. Hunger is an interesting thing. I'm going to talk a little bit about hunger, and I hope you had your breakfast so I won't lose you this morning. But hunger is really an interesting thing.
If I had to ask you, why do you feel hungry? You might say, “Well, because I haven't eaten. I haven't eaten”. That's not actually why you feel hungry. The body, I'm told, has a hormone called ghrelin. Ghrelin. And by the way, it's often known as the hunger hormone. Ghrelin is a hormone that's produced when your stomach is empty, and at that point, it sends a signal. It dispatches a signal to your brain with a message. And the message is, your stomach is empty. It's time to eat. And when you eat, your stomach is full. Your stomach produces, well, another hormone called Leptin. And leptin tells your brain, “You're full. Stop”.
But as you know, there's more than one kind of hunger. There's a physical hunger, bodily hunger, but there's also soul hunger. The French philosopher and mathematician Blaise Pascal once compared the human heart to a deep, in fact, a bottomless hole. A bottomless abyss. He said, and I quote, "Man feels this emptiness inside himself, and he tries to fill that abyss, he tries to fill that hole with things. Stuff. The problem is that as he fills it with stuff, like pleasure, achievements, success, fame, wealth, relationships, whatever your particular pleasure may be or is, the problem is that as you do it, as you're trying to fill this hole, this abyss, the hole is never ever filled. You'll always come up empty."
And the problem with mankind is not that we have such great desires or our desires are too strong, but the problem really is that our desires are too weak. And let me explain, let me clarify this statement in context. It's not that our desires are too hard to satisfy, it's that they are so easily satisfied. Instead of being satisfied only when that hole is filled, really filled, we feel satisfied when we've satisfied smaller little hungers and when we've filled really little holes. And when we fill those holes with fame and fortune and power and pleasure, well, we ignore the gaping abyss in our hearts, which is soul hunger.
We ignore soul hunger by satisfying smaller hungers, and they kill our appetite for the real hunger—for food, real food. Blaise Pascal put it really well. He said this, and I quote, "The infinite abyss of the human heart can be filled only with an infinite and unchangeable object. In other words, God Himself." There's no other way to fill it.
You could try to fill it. You could try all you want, and maybe you are trying right now, and every time you try, you will come up empty. You will come up short, and you will strive for more, and you will try this and that and the other. Read the book of Ecclesiastes. It's all vanity. All of it.
Soul hunger requires something much greater than temporal things, fleeting things, passing things, things that decay and perish. Soul hunger requires something ultimate, permanent, eternal, a final ultimate thing that truly, really satisfies. And that's what John 6 really is all about—satisfying soul hunger. John 6 actually records an intense and lengthy discourse, but it's a discourse that took place between some so-called disciples of Jesus and Christ Himself.
And really, if you look at the entire passage, you will see that it is structured around exactly seven questions, as I mentioned a few weeks ago, and I think that's no accident. John loves the number seven. There are exactly seven questions that these so-called disciples ask, and as Jesus answers these seven questions, He teaches life-changing truth, and we can summarize it this way: real life, real faith, and the real Messiah. That's it. Real life, real faith, and the real Messiah.
He teaches us you can only get ultimate life by feeding on the ultimate food. The question that must be answered this morning is, what are you eating? What's your diet like? That's the question that our text implicitly wants us to consider. What are you eating? Not physically, but spiritually.
We hear a lot these days about the importance of a healthy diet. You are what you eat. You've heard that before, right? You are what you eat. A lot of us eat a lot of junk food, resulting in a lot of serious but avoidable consequences. A lot of people, in the society in which we live, that's how we live. Most of us could benefit from being careful about what we eat, and the same is true spiritually.
You see, if you gorge yourself on the latest entertainment available every single day—the latest movies every night, or the latest sports channels, and what have you—and you watch them, and you indulge in them, but you seldom go to feed on the Word of God, don't be surprised if you're not spiritually healthy. If there's an inordinate draw towards those things at the expense of eating real food. If your spiritual intake consists of a sugary devotional that you grab on the run, like a power bar, like a donut, or an occasional sermon—an occasional sermon when you aren't doing something else on Sunday—don't be surprised if you're feeling kind of spiritually sluggish, anemic.
The same thing—someone can attend church, you know, Sunday morning for an hour, an hour and a half, and that's it. The rest of the week, it's just nothing. Giving themselves to everything else under Heaven. This and that and the other. And I'm not talking about necessarily sinful things, but we're feeding on other things. You are what you eat.
In John 6, after He fed the 20,000-plus with five loaves and two fish, Jesus repeatedly offers Himself as the spiritual food that gives eternal life, eternal satisfaction to everyone who eats. Glance with me at this chapter. Look what Christ does. Look at verse 27: "Do not work for the food which perishes, but for the food which endures to eternal life, which the Son of Man will give to you, for on Him the Father, God, set His seal." Go down to verse 32: "Jesus said to them, 'Truly, truly, I say to you, Moses has not given you the bread from heaven, but My Father gives you the true bread from heaven.'" Verse 33: "For the bread of God is that which comes down from heaven and gives life to the world." Verse 35: "Jesus said to them, 'I am the bread of life. He who comes to Me will not hunger, and he who believes in Me will never thirst.'" Verse 48: "I am the bread of life." Verse 50: "This is the bread which comes down from heaven, so that one may eat of it and not die." And verse 51: "I am the living bread that came down from heaven. If anyone eats of this bread, he will live forever. And also the bread which I will give for the life of the world is My flesh."
A reference, obviously, to Calvary—dying in our place. And once again, we have a scene in John where the hearers just cannot penetrate below the level of the physical and the visual. They cannot grasp, they cannot see the spiritual meaning. Remember back in chapter 2 and verse 19, when Jesus said, "Destroy the sanctuary, and I will raise it up in three days." Then the Jews said, "It took forty-six years to build this sanctuary, and will You raise it up in three days?" But He was speaking about the sanctuary of His body.
It was like when He was talking to Nicodemus in John 3, and He said, "Unless you be born again, you cannot see the kingdom of Heaven." And Nicodemus goes, "Well, how can you get back into your mother's womb and be born again?" Well, of course, Jesus meant the new birth—spiritual birth. And you remember in chapter 4, talking to the Samaritan woman, He said, there's a kind of water that is self-replenishing, and if you get it, you don't need to drink ever again. And the woman says, "Where's this water? Can I get some so I will never be ever thirsty again and come back to draw water?" And of course, Jesus meant He Himself is that water of life.
So here again, you have that same situation where He's saying, "I am the food. I am what you eat and what you drink. I am your sustenance. I am the food that satisfies." And so, predictably, their fifth question is like those previous—total misunderstanding. But here, unlike the Samaritan woman and Nicodemus, it is utter unbelief. Look at question number five. Just to remind us, question number one was a question of curiosity back in verse 25. Question number two was a question of religiosity, verse 28. Question number three was a question of perversity, that's verse 30. Question number four was a question of identity, verses 41 and 42. And we get to question number five in verse 52—we can call it a question of incredulity, a question of unbelief.
Verse 52: "Then the Jews began to argue with one another, saying, 'How can this man, this man, give us His flesh to eat?'" They began to argue. ‘Machomai’ (μάχομαι)—the verb, strong word. It describes a serious conflict, to fight as in a war, a battle. It means they were fighting, they were quarreling, disputing with others of the same kind in a stand against Christ.
Beloved, if you present truth to someone not interested in receiving truth, you cause people to become angry. They murmur, they argue, they want you gone. And keep in mind that Christ has been preaching that faith in Him alone is what can save one from sins, and of course, the people did not like this message. Now they were arguing about His metaphor of Him being the bread of life, and it's interesting how Christ responds to these Jews.
He does not change the metaphor. He does not water it down. He doesn't clean it up. He doesn't water down His teaching just because it made them mad or offended them. As James Montgomery Boyce said, and I quote, "He does not tone down the teaching just to make it more palatable," end of quote. He doesn't.
You see, rather than softening the analogy so as to be less shocking, less offensive, Jesus goes on to make it more shocking, more offensive. He changes the bread analogy to His flesh. He takes it up a notch in a statement that would have really offended just about every Jew. He added that not only did they need to eat His flesh, but they also needed to drink His blood.
Verse 53: "So Jesus said to them, 'Truly, truly, I say to you, unless you eat the flesh of the Son of Man and drink His blood, you have no life in yourselves.'" And again, notice the beginning of the statement. I mean, you remember from last time—"truly, truly"—this is what indicates the dogmatic certainty. Pay attention to this. It's absolutely certain, and you need to underscore this. Don't miss this. "Truly, truly, I say to you, unless you eat the flesh of the Son of Man and drink His blood, you have no life in yourselves."
And He follows that up—"truly, truly"—with that strong Greek conjunction, "unless." Unless. You know what this does? It makes this very narrow with absolutely no flexibility, no wiggle room whatsoever. There's no other way around this. This is not a multiple choice, not a buffet. There's no other way around it. Now remember, they are arguing about the problem of eating Christ's flesh, so Jesus adds more fuel to the fire by adding, "You must also drink His blood."
Verse 54: "He who eats My flesh and drinks My blood has eternal life, and I will raise him up on the last day." Verse 55: "For My flesh is true food, and My blood is true drink." Verse 56: "He who eats My flesh and drinks My blood abides in Me, and I in him." Verse 57: "As the living Father sent Me, and I live because of the Father, so he who eats Me, he also will live because of Me."
Any life connection that any person actually has with God the Father will be due to a relationship with God the Son. Life with the Father comes from having life from the Son—period, paragraph, end of story. There's no other way around it. No one comes to the Father except through the Son.
Then He goes on. He goes back to the bread analogy in verse 58: "This is the bread which came down from out of heaven, not as the fathers ate and died. He who eats this bread will live forever." Not talking about the kind of bread the fathers ate. This bread came from heaven—the living bread, the bread of life. Then John tells us in verse 59: "These things He said in the synagogue as He taught in Capernaum."
Interesting statement. You remember, you're familiar with the Gospel—at another time, Jesus lamented Capernaum. Matthew 11:23-24: "And you, Capernaum, will you be exalted to heaven? You will descend to Hades. For if the miracles had occurred in Sodom which occurred in you, it would have remained to this day. Nevertheless, I say to you that it will be more tolerable for the land of Sodom in the day of judgment than for you."
What an awful warning. Do you know what Christ is saying? There are certain places that are hotter in hell than others. If you have been the recipient of much light—week in and week out, day in and day out—and you're in a context where you've heard the glorious Gospel, you've heard about the offer of salvation again and again and again, and you keep rejecting it and you keep rejecting it and rejecting it and rejecting it, it will be more tolerable for Sodom and Gomorrah in the day of judgment.
That is why, today, if you hear His voice, do not harden your heart. What an awful warning. It's going to be worse for Capernaum on the day of judgment than for Sodom, because the people of Capernaum did not eat Jesus' flesh and drink His blood when it was offered repeatedly and freely and continually to them. And so we need to be clear about what Jesus means here, and we need to take all of that to heart so that we don't follow Capernaum into judgment.
If we could summarize the lesson here, the lesson is this: Feeding on our Lord Jesus Christ by faith is absolutely necessary for eternal life, for temporal sustenance, and for temporal and eternal satisfaction. We're going to unpack this together. This is an eternal life-or-death matter.
In John 6:50, Jesus says that if you eat of Him as the bread from Heaven, you will not die. He states the converse in verse 51: If you eat of this bread, you will live forever. In verse 53, He warns the Jews that unless they eat His flesh and drink His blood, they have no life in themselves. In verse 54, again He states the converse of verse 53, namely that the one who eats of His flesh and drinks His blood has eternal life. Again, He reinforces it in verse 57: "He who eats Me, he also will live because of Me." In verse 58, He again contrasts Himself with the manna which the Israelites ate and died, by saying that "the one who eats this bread," perhaps pointing to Himself, "will live forever."
So let's begin to unpack this. All of this was an introduction, by the way. Number one: feeding on Jesus by faith is necessary for eternal life. Now let me pause and again underscore this, and I underscore it again by way of repetition because it is repeated by our Lord Himself. Some interpret these verses to refer to partaking in communion, the Lord's Supper, the bread and the cup—the Roman Catholic Church, the Orthodox Church. They base their views on what we call transubstantiation, the view that the elements, the bread and the cup, actually become the body and the blood of Christ. In part, they base it on verse 53, where Jesus says that you must eat His flesh and drink His blood to have eternal life.
Well, before we examine what Jesus means, we need to look at what He does not mean. Eating His flesh and drinking His blood does not refer to partaking of the Lord's Supper. It doesn't. Let me share with you four reasons, and I'm indebted to A. W. Pink for this—four reasons that John 6 does not refer to communion.
First, communion had not yet been instituted. The Lord's Supper had not yet been instituted. Jesus instituted it on the night in which He was betrayed, so this couldn't have been referring to that. Secondly, Jesus was speaking here to unbelievers, and the Lord's Supper is for believers. Thirdly, the eating here is unto salvation or eternal life, while eating the Lord's Supper is for those already saved and points to fellowship. Fourthly, the Lord's Supper does not produce the results that are here attributed to eating and drinking.
If Jesus' words here refer to communion, the Lord's Supper, then you gain eternal life by partaking, which absolutely contradicts many other scriptures that show that salvation is through faith alone in Christ alone, not through participating in a ritual. J. C. Ryle puts it this way, and I quote: "We may eat the Lord's Supper and yet not eat and drink Christ's body and blood. We may eat and drink Christ's body and blood and yet not eat the Lord's Supper." End of quote. Very pointed.
The main problem with the Catholic and Orthodox view of transubstantiation—the elements actually becoming the body of Christ and the blood of Christ—is that it takes literally the words that were obviously meant as symbolic. True, Jesus said in Matthew 26, "This is My body," but He also said in John 10:9, "I am the door." He said, "I am the true vine." Nobody takes those statements literally; Jesus meant them clearly symbolically.
There are other reasons for rejecting the view that the elements actually become the body and the blood of Jesus, and that's not our topic of discussion, but simply to mention, for example, that in Hebrews 7:27 and Hebrews 9:25 and 27, it clearly indicates that Jesus' sacrifice on the cross was once and for all, never to be repeated. It happened once and for all. Jesus cried out from the cross in John 19, " Tetélestai (τετέλεσται) It is finished," and the tense of the verb means forever finished, never to be repeated again.
It's obvious that Jesus' words here in John 6 to these unbelieving Jews, spoken at least one year before He instituted the Lord's Supper, have nothing to do with that ordinance. True, there are parallels that we could draw between the Lord's Supper as later instituted and the words of Christ. As one New Testament scholar put it, and I quote, "John 6 is not about the Lord's Supper, rather the Lord's Supper is about what is described in John 6, in terms of commemorating what Jesus did on Calvary's cross." By comparing parallel verses in John 6, we can determine what Jesus meant by the metaphor of eating His flesh and drinking His blood.
Secondly, eating Jesus' flesh and drinking His blood refer to—now we'll see what it actually means—as we saw prior to today, believing or appropriating Him personally, His death on the cross as your only hope for eternal life. Appropriating Him, believing in Him, taking Him as your Lord and your Savior, and receiving all that He did on Calvary's cross. Note these parallels. In verse 40 of this chapter, Jesus says, "For this is the will of the Father, of My Father, that everyone who sees, who beholds—we've covered that before—the Son, and believes in Him will have eternal life, and I Myself will raise him up on the last day."
The requirement—what is the requirement for eternal life? Jesus says to behold the Son, to see the Son, to believe in the Son, to believe in Him. The promised results are that every believer has eternal life, and Jesus promised that He will raise him up on the last day. Verse 54 says, "He who eats My flesh and drinks My blood," notice the language, "has eternal life, and I will raise him up on the last day." These are exactly the same results as in verse 40. But instead of seeing the Son or beholding the Son and believing in the Son, Jesus substitutes eating His flesh and drinking His blood.
So clearly then, eating Jesus' flesh and drinking His blood referred to believing personally in His death on Calvary's cross as your only hope for eternal life. That's what He's talking about. Now, why would Jesus use this graphic language—eating His flesh and drinking His blood—to describe believing in Him? Well, perhaps one reason is that He was making clear to these Jews, who wanted Him to be a political Messiah, an activist, that He wasn't that kind of Messiah. He wasn't that kind of Messiah. He came the first time to give His life as an offering for our sins, a ransom for many. He will come the second time as the conquering King to rule and reign in power and judge the nations, "Revelation 19."
So the first time He came, He was the Passover Lamb, the Lamb of God offered up so that His blood would protect those who applied it to their lives. The Jews were very familiar with eating the Passover lamb. And so, by shocking them with this graphic language and applying it to Himself, those who were true seekers, drawn by God—seekers for eternal life—would be jarred into realizing that their main need was not for a Messiah to give them literal bread, bread for life, free bread for life, but for One to give them the bread of eternal life. They needed Jesus Christ as their Passover Lamb.
Verse 55—Jesus says, "I am," verse 51, excuse me, "I am the living bread that came down from heaven. If anyone eats of this bread, he will live forever, and also the bread which I will give for the life of the world is My flesh." By giving His flesh, Jesus was referring to His upcoming death on Calvary's cross, His suffering. No one took His life from Him—no one.
Notice the language in verse 51: "Also the bread which I will give for the life of the world is My flesh." "I will give it." "I will lay down My life." "No one takes it by force from Me." "I will lay it down." He gave it on His own initiative (John 10:18). Also, the bread analogy pictures death, and as Jesus says in John 12:24, "Truly, truly, I say to you, unless a grain of wheat falls into the earth and dies, it remains alone, but if it dies, it bears much fruit."
You know, to make bread, the grain of wheat had to die, and then the fruit of the grain had to be plucked and crushed into powder and made into flour before it was baked into bread. Even so, Jesus Christ had to die, crushed under the anathema of God, in order to be the Bread of Heaven that gives eternal life to those who eat of it in faith. A. W. Pink suggests that eating looks back to Adam and Eve. Their eating of the forbidden fruit plunged the human race into sin and judgment. Now, eating Christ, the Bread of Life, liberates us from the curse that came on us with Adam's fall.
Perhaps another reason that Jesus uses this graphic language, especially the part about drinking His blood, is that it puts the offense of the cross in full view. Drinking or eating blood—eating His flesh and drinking blood—was highly offensive to a Jew. Genesis 9:4: "However, flesh with its life, that is, its blood, you shall not eat." Leviticus 7:26-27: "You shall not eat any blood, either of bird or animal, in any of your places of habitation. Any person who eats any blood, even that person shall be cut off from his people."
But when they start arguing among themselves about how—remember, "this man," no doubt, is probably used in an unflattering way. It's a derogatory term, the way they use it—how "this man" can give them His flesh to eat in verse 52, which was offensive enough, well, Jesus doesn't explain it in less offensive terms. He doesn't. Rather, it's like He takes it another step. He really cranks it up by adding to eating His flesh, in their mind, the gross picture of drinking His blood.
But the Bible is clear. Hebrews 9:22: "Without shedding of blood, there is no forgiveness." There is no remission of sin. Have you ever thought about how bloody the Jewish religion was? The slaughter of bulls and goats and rams? I mean, to be a priest—it was a bloody business. Blood had to be shed—blood. To be the complete and final sacrifice for our sin, the blood of Christ had to be shed. If Jesus is just your moral example but not your sacrificial Lamb, then He's not your Savior from sin. He's not my Savior from sin.
Now, one more thing I want us to make sure that we don't miss here, and it's that little word translated "for" in verse 51: "The bread which I will give for the life of the world is My flesh." See that little word "for"? It's a significant Greek word, ‘huper’ (ὑπέρ). It means "in behalf of." It means "for the sake of," and it pictures the substitutionary aspect of the sacrifice of Christ. In that little word ‘huper’, really bound up in it, is the substitutionary death of our Lord and Savior, Jesus Christ. The Bread of Life—divine, it came down from Heaven; life-giving, it's the living bread; all-sufficient, it was given for the life of the world; eternal, he that eats it will live forever; and it is to be offered indiscriminately to whoever.
So, to be clear, eating Jesus' flesh and drinking His blood refer to believing in and personally appropriating, assimilating, embracing His death on the cross as your only hope for eternal life. Nothing in my hands I bring, simply to Thy cross I cling. Eating Jesus' flesh and drinking His blood are how you obtain, how you receive eternal life. This is not just a matter of how to have a happier life. This is not just about how to improve your life a little bit. This is not just about how to reform your life a little bit. It's a matter of eternal life or eternal death—life and death.
In verses 49 through 51, Jesus contrasts the manna, which only fed the people physically for a while, and then, guess what? They died. He contrasts that with Himself as the living bread, the living bread from Heaven that came down out of Heaven to give eternal life to people through His flesh—His flesh given on behalf of, as the substitute for, sinners on the cross. These rituals cannot bring eternal life to anyone, and apart from the sacrificial death of the Lamb of God, Jesus Christ, you cannot be saved. Apart from His death on Calvary's cross and His shed blood, our Lord cannot be the bread that gives eternal life to us. There was no way to avoid the cross.
To obtain eternal life, you must eat Jesus' flesh and drink His blood, which means to believe in Him personally, to embrace Him in His person and finished work on Calvary's cross. That's why, if you recall, we underscored the significance back several weeks ago in verse 35. The imagery is so powerful here that it could be like a rushing torrent that would sweep you right off your feet into the error of transubstantiation. Let me remind us of the stake that Jesus drove into the ground so that you wouldn't be swept off your feet when the imagery got so powerful.
Verse 35: Jesus said, "I am the Bread of life; he who comes to Me..." You see, the issue is not eating. "He who comes to Me will never hunger, and he who believes in Me will never thirst." So, in this sermon, to eat is an image of coming to and believing in Jesus Christ—nothing more, nothing less.
Augustine, the great theologian of the early church, writing in the middle of the fourth century, commented on this passage. He said this, and I quote, "Believe, and you have eaten already." Simple but very powerful. That's it. That gets it right. "Believe, and you have eaten already." That's the imagery.
Belief leads to the closest possible relationship with Jesus Christ—assimilation, internalization—that's the point. Belief in Christ leads to an internalization of Christ and assimilation of Christ all through your spiritual being, if you will. Let's follow the imagery step by step. You take a piece of bread, you eat it, your stomach breaks it down, breaks down the nutritional component of that bread, and what it does is that it sends those little life-giving bits and pieces of sustenance all throughout your body.
You assimilate that. That nutrition is assimilated into every cell in your body. Every cell in your body is affected by it, sustained by it, and strengthened by it. When you eat bread, the slice of bread, if you will, becomes one with you, a part of you. That's the picture that Jesus wants you and me to see here, to have in mind. To believe in Him is to have Him in you.
Jesus is speaking spiritually of consuming Him, taking Him as your all, as your life. In other words, He's saying, let Me, My person, what I did on the cross, become your nourishment, your permanent means of eternal life. And so in that, He's teaching really all the themes of this chapter. One, what you really need is eternal life, not temporal life. Two, to have this, you must believe biblically, properly. And three, you must believe in the right object—Me, from the Father, from Heaven, the true Messiah, the God-Man—and I can give you eternal life.
And again, let's think about this eating and drinking analogy further so that we understand what saving faith means. And again, indebted to Pink, first, eating is a necessary response to a felt need. When you eat, it's a necessary response to a felt need. You eat when you feel hungry, and you drink when you feel thirsty. If you go long enough without eating or drinking, you will what? Die eventually. But the world feeds us with all sorts of things that mask our true hunger and thirst. It feeds us with money, materialism, possessions, pleasure, under the illusion that these things will indeed satisfy us. But those things get left behind at death, don't they? Right? "For to me, to live is Christ, and to die is what? Gain." And if you say, "For to me to live is money, power, fame, pleasure," all of those things—to die is what? You can't take it with you. To die is loss, tragic loss.
It's much more than not taking these things with you. Sometimes the world deceives us with legitimately even good things like family and friends to make us feel full and happy. They're noble things after all, right? But the best family and friends will not do us any good when we stand before God on Judgment Day. Those things are not true food. They're blessings, but they're not true food. Jesus says, "My flesh is true food. My blood is true drink." The Holy Spirit has to impress on us the vanity of life apart from God and convict us of our true guilt, our utter bankruptcy, our destitution before God so that we will hunger and thirst for the eternal life that only Jesus can give.
So first, eating is a necessary response to a felt need. But secondly, eating and drinking only benefit you—now listen carefully—when you actually eat and drink, right? See, it doesn't do you any good to smell a good meal. "Oh, that smells amazing. That's great." Are you fed? Is your hunger satisfied? Yeah? No, no. It doesn't do you any good to smell a good meal or to analyze it chemically or to write a wonderful poem about how wonderful it is and how the aroma really sweeps you off your feet. No, no. You've got to eat it. You've got to drink it.
And also, it must be personal. You see, I can't eat it for you. Your mom can't eat it for you. Your dad can't eat it for you. Your brother, your sister, your spouse—it can't eat it for you. You must eat your own food. In the same way, you have to appropriate Christ for yourself by faith. You must not only believe that He is the Savior, but you must believe that He is your Savior. You must be able to say, "The Lord is not a shepherd or the shepherd, but the Lord is my shepherd." You must trust in His death on Calvary's cross as the penalty for not the sins of sinners, but for your sins. You must receive, you must appropriate Him into your innermost being, just like you eat food and drink water to live.
Feeding on Jesus by faith is necessary for eternal life. Furthermore, feeding on Jesus by faith is necessary for daily sustenance. Look at verse 56. Jesus states, "He who eats My flesh and drinks My blood"—what a marvelous verse—"abides in Me, and I in him." Wow. Here, Jesus mentions the intimate union that takes place between Him and the one who feeds on Him by faith. He'll explain this, by the way, further to His disciples in chapter 15: "I am the vine, you are the branches," right? The imagery is that if you consume Christ—this is in verse 56—believe in Him, appropriate Him by faith, He takes up residence in you. He filters all through you, affecting every cell in your spiritual body.
"He who eats My flesh"- ‘trógó’ (τρώγω), the Greek verb. This Greek verb, by the way, is a present participle. That's significant, looking at the ongoing close relationship between Jesus and the one who feeds on Him. He who continually eats. You see, when you eat food, it literally becomes a part of you. When you feed on Christ by faith, you become more like Him, and you enjoy a close relationship with Him. You see, the verb "abides"—"He who eats My flesh and drinks My blood abides" - ‘menó’ (μένω), abides in Me, ‘menó’ in Me. And look at the reciprocal nature of this: "And I in him." What Jesus is doing is emphasizing the oneness, the intimate fellowship, the communion every believer now has with Him forever. It's ongoing, it's unbreakable.
"Abides"—present tense—pictures our present supernatural, eternal union, communion. We call it ‘koinónia’ (κοινωνία), fellowship with our Lord Jesus Christ, intimate fellowship. The idea is the picture of the believer remaining where He is forever, where Christ is forever. To abide in Him and have Him abide in us speaks of the oneness that we experience when we enter the new covenant in His blood by grace through faith. To eat His flesh and drink His blood is to believe wholly in Him as our substitutionary, fully atoning, sacrificial Lamb. "Abides in Me." In the Greek, this phrase "in Me" is known as a locative of sphere. A locative tells us where something is; the sphere speaks of a thing's location in relationship to other things. It's being in the orbit, in the atmosphere. So when the Bible says that we are in Christ, it means that we live within the sphere of Christ, the orbit of Christ.
The Bible pictures believers as living in the atmosphere of Christ forever. Galatians 2:20 really sums it up beautifully: "I have been crucified with Christ," Paul says. "It is no longer I who live, but Christ lives in me; and the life which I now live in the flesh I live by faith in the Son of God, who loved me and gave Himself for me." It's in the atmosphere of Christ. You read the Pauline writings, and you have this again and again repeated in Ephesians, Colossians, and Philippians—"in Christ, in Christ, in Christ, in Christ"—in union with Christ, in the orbit of Christ, in the atmosphere of Christ. It's all within that atmosphere of Christ, abiding in Him.
In other words, Jesus is that which surrounds us. No matter where we go, we cannot step out of Christ. You can step out of a circle, but you cannot step out of a sphere. A sphere surrounds us, surrounds all that is within it. In like manner, Jesus Christ totally surrounds all those who are in Him. What a marvelous truth. What an encouraging truth. When you consider our location with regards to the area of our security, we are eternally safe because we cannot step out of the sphere of Christ. No matter where we run, we are still within His sphere. We cannot escape from Him, nor do we want to if we're truly His.
When we consider our position within the sphere of Christ with regards to our daily walk, it also reminds us, it reminds us—and may we cultivate that conscious awareness—that every step we take occurs within the sphere of our relationship to Jesus Christ. No matter where I am, what I'm doing, that's what happens. Every action, every thought, every deed, every motive should be considered in the light of who we are, whose we are, and where we are. We are in the sphere of Christ.
Because we are in Christ—that is, ever within the sphere of His presence, His influence, and His will—we conform every area of our lives to His will as a result. Simply stated, because we are in Him, we should live like we are in Him. Paul has a parallel thought, writing in Colossians 3:4, "Christ who is what? Our life. Christ who is our life." In Him, we live and breathe and have our being, now and forever. Blessed be God.
In verse 57, Jesus emphasizes the intimacy that we enjoy with Him: "As the living Father sent Me, and I live because of the Father, so he who eats Me, he also will live because of Me." Spurgeon comments on this verse, and I quote, "As God, man, mediator, the Lord Jesus lives by the self-existent Father who has sent Him, and in the same manner, we live by the Savior who has quickened us. He who is the source of our life is also the sustenance of it. Living is sustained by feeding. We must support the spiritual life by spiritual food, and that spiritual food is the Lord Jesus—not His life or death or offices or work or word alone, but Himself as including all these. On Jesus Himself we feed." End of quote.
In a word, listen carefully, beloved. The union between Christ and the true believer, the union between Christ and the true Christian, is as real and true and close and inseparable as the union between God the Father and God the Son. Bask in that today. Relish that truth. Treasure it.
The implication here is that we should eat often. Most of us eat three meals a day, sometimes with snacks in between. If you're a prisoner of war, you might survive on a cup of rice or a piece of bread or some water every day, but if you survived, you would come out of that camp emaciated, weak, vulnerable to disease. But to be healthy, you have to eat nutritious food every day, several times a day. And so the question is this: Do you feed your soul on Christ every day? Do you feed your soul on Christ every day?
Well, you know, I tried to read *Our Daily Bread* once in a while. Okay, okay, but you need more than that. You need more than that. You need a consistent diet of reading and meditating on God's Word, praying as you read, "Lord, reveal Yourself to my soul." Or as Moses dared to pray, even after all of the amazing miracles that he had seen, in Exodus 33:18, he says, "I pray You, show me Your glory." Feed on Christ, beloved. Feed on Christ often in His Word. Do not be satisfied with the fact that you ate last week or yesterday. You need manna for your soul today.
Also, it is helpful to eat at regular times—regular times. Don't wait until you're starving to eat, but eat at set times. Dietary experts say that breakfast is the most important meal not to skip. Likewise, it's spiritually healthy to spend at least a short time every morning feeding your soul on Christ. You say, "Well, I'm not a morning person. It's hard for me." Well, would you—and I say this lovingly—would you consider setting your alarm a half an hour earlier than you need to and spend that time reading God's Word and often praying that Word back to God?
One final thought before we move on, and I love this. Did you know that you can't overeat when it comes to feeding on Christ? You can't. When we sit down and there's a feast and a table full of delicacies and it all tastes so amazing, it's so easy for us to eat more than we should. How many times do you see people lean back and say, "I overdid it"? They lean back and say, "I overdid it," right? But with Jesus, you can eat and eat and eat and eat and eat, and it won't adversely affect your health. In fact, it is completely the opposite. So feed on Him. And when you're satisfied, eat all the more, because the more satisfied, the more dissatisfied you'll become, because you want more. So good. That's a holy dissatisfaction.
Feeding on Jesus by faith is necessary for eternal life. And finally, feeding on Jesus by faith is necessary for temporal and eternal satisfaction. In Matthew's account, Matthew 14:20, the feeding of the 5,000, he says, "And they all ate and were satisfied." Beloved, there's a satisfaction factor about eating, isn't there? That's why we overeat—because it tastes good and it's pleasurable. Good bread nourishes and sustains life, but also it's enjoyable. I mean, we've all been there, right? The smell of bread baking in the oven, and then you take it out, and it's so warm and hot, and you add butter, and you eat a warm slice, and you feel so good.
And so feeding on Christ by faith is enjoyable in this life, and it will continue in His eternal presence. As David exults, Psalm 16:11, "In Your presence is fullness of joy, and in Your right hand, there are pleasures forever." God, our exceeding joy. In fact, the more of Jesus that you feed on, the healthier, the stronger you will be. And you know what? The more you eat, the more satisfied you are, but the more you crave for more of Christ, as I said. You cannot have enough of Christ. Yet, as John Calvin laments, "'How few are those who are satisfied with Christ alone.'" End of quote.
How about you today? How about you? Are you satisfied with Christ alone? Do you feed on His death for you as your only hope of eternal life? Do you feed on Him daily in His Word as nourishment for your soul? Do you enjoy all that He is for you, both now and for eternity? If the answer is “no”, the answer then is fairly simple to your “no”. Change your diet. Change your diet.
Is He as real to you spiritually as something you can taste or handle? Is He as much part of you as that which you eat? Is He as much part of you as that which you drink? What's your diet like today? He's the Bread of Life. We are to feed upon Him, upon Christ Himself. Meditate, fellowship, talk to, walk with Christ. To feed upon our Lord Himself. Enjoy, enjoy the wonder of His doctrines and His teachings and His words. And fellowship with Him is just out of this world.
He is our all in all. He's everything. For the polluted, He is purity. For the weak, He is strength. For the faint, He is courage. For the dead, He is life—our Lord Jesus Christ Himself, the God-Man, Christ Jesus. But we don't worship or fellowship with a phantom or a dream. We fellowship with a living Christ, Jesus our Lord, who came for this purpose.
Whatever other purpose there may have been in the creation of this world, one of the purposes of God is that He should be "the Lamb slain from before the foundation of the world." Whatever other purpose of God in the creation of this planet and our life, with all of its majesty and mystery and the systems and suns and where every star is a burning light spelling His name—really, whatever other purposes of God in the creation of the earth, this is one that is towering over all. Before the world was made, that He, our Lord Jesus, would suffer and die to redeem us, to be the Bread of Life.
Our Lord Jesus did not come into the world with the purpose that He would be a social reformer, that He would be a supplier of the bread that perishes, that He'd be an example of what it means to be a noble citizen or noble manhood. But our Lord came into the world with an announced aim and goal, and that is to die for the sins of the people. The language here about bread, throughout this text, is really sacrificial. It's of the altar, the sacrifice of blood, atonement, intercessory grace. He came from Heaven, took upon Himself our nature.
Are you afflicted? He was afflicted. Do any weep? He wept. Are any troubled, burdened? He was troubled and burdened. Do any hurt? He hurt. Are any slandered, spit upon, despised, rejected? He was slandered and rejected. "He was pierced through for our transgressions, He was crushed for our iniquities; the chastening of our peace fell upon Him, and by His wounds we are healed" (Isaiah 53:5). That is the gospel of salvation. And God, praise be to His name, does not demand twice payment for the offense. Jesus paid it. He paid it all. He suffered in our stead that we might be free.
Let's pray:
Father, we thank You for the bread of life. We thank You for the bread of Heaven. We thank You for Jesus Christ, and we pray, Lord, for anyone here today who has not eaten of that bread, has not drunk of that blood. Lord, we pray that they would behold the Son today, that they would see Christ, that they would come to Christ, that they would believe in Christ, that they would appropriate Jesus Christ, His person and His finished work on Calvary's cross, that they would submit to Him as the Lord and Savior today.
That they would turn from chasing after the stuff of the world, thinking that all these things could satisfy that soul hunger. Lord, that they would turn to the only One who can truly satisfy, the bread of life. And for us, Your people, may we feed upon Christ every day, and we thank You that it is in that sphere of Christ that we live and move and have our being, and that we will always, always be within that sphere, now and forever.
We thank You. Help us to live in accordance with who we are in Christ. We thank You, Father, for Your word, and we pray that You continue to be with us as we gather around this table now to remember what happened on that day when the Lamb of God was suspended between Heaven and earth to give His life a ransom for many. In Christ.
If I had to ask you, why do you feel hungry? You might say, “Well, because I haven't eaten. I haven't eaten”. That's not actually why you feel hungry. The body, I'm told, has a hormone called ghrelin. Ghrelin. And by the way, it's often known as the hunger hormone. Ghrelin is a hormone that's produced when your stomach is empty, and at that point, it sends a signal. It dispatches a signal to your brain with a message. And the message is, your stomach is empty. It's time to eat. And when you eat, your stomach is full. Your stomach produces, well, another hormone called Leptin. And leptin tells your brain, “You're full. Stop”.
But as you know, there's more than one kind of hunger. There's a physical hunger, bodily hunger, but there's also soul hunger. The French philosopher and mathematician Blaise Pascal once compared the human heart to a deep, in fact, a bottomless hole. A bottomless abyss. He said, and I quote, "Man feels this emptiness inside himself, and he tries to fill that abyss, he tries to fill that hole with things. Stuff. The problem is that as he fills it with stuff, like pleasure, achievements, success, fame, wealth, relationships, whatever your particular pleasure may be or is, the problem is that as you do it, as you're trying to fill this hole, this abyss, the hole is never ever filled. You'll always come up empty."
And the problem with mankind is not that we have such great desires or our desires are too strong, but the problem really is that our desires are too weak. And let me explain, let me clarify this statement in context. It's not that our desires are too hard to satisfy, it's that they are so easily satisfied. Instead of being satisfied only when that hole is filled, really filled, we feel satisfied when we've satisfied smaller little hungers and when we've filled really little holes. And when we fill those holes with fame and fortune and power and pleasure, well, we ignore the gaping abyss in our hearts, which is soul hunger.
We ignore soul hunger by satisfying smaller hungers, and they kill our appetite for the real hunger—for food, real food. Blaise Pascal put it really well. He said this, and I quote, "The infinite abyss of the human heart can be filled only with an infinite and unchangeable object. In other words, God Himself." There's no other way to fill it.
You could try to fill it. You could try all you want, and maybe you are trying right now, and every time you try, you will come up empty. You will come up short, and you will strive for more, and you will try this and that and the other. Read the book of Ecclesiastes. It's all vanity. All of it.
Soul hunger requires something much greater than temporal things, fleeting things, passing things, things that decay and perish. Soul hunger requires something ultimate, permanent, eternal, a final ultimate thing that truly, really satisfies. And that's what John 6 really is all about—satisfying soul hunger. John 6 actually records an intense and lengthy discourse, but it's a discourse that took place between some so-called disciples of Jesus and Christ Himself.
And really, if you look at the entire passage, you will see that it is structured around exactly seven questions, as I mentioned a few weeks ago, and I think that's no accident. John loves the number seven. There are exactly seven questions that these so-called disciples ask, and as Jesus answers these seven questions, He teaches life-changing truth, and we can summarize it this way: real life, real faith, and the real Messiah. That's it. Real life, real faith, and the real Messiah.
He teaches us you can only get ultimate life by feeding on the ultimate food. The question that must be answered this morning is, what are you eating? What's your diet like? That's the question that our text implicitly wants us to consider. What are you eating? Not physically, but spiritually.
We hear a lot these days about the importance of a healthy diet. You are what you eat. You've heard that before, right? You are what you eat. A lot of us eat a lot of junk food, resulting in a lot of serious but avoidable consequences. A lot of people, in the society in which we live, that's how we live. Most of us could benefit from being careful about what we eat, and the same is true spiritually.
You see, if you gorge yourself on the latest entertainment available every single day—the latest movies every night, or the latest sports channels, and what have you—and you watch them, and you indulge in them, but you seldom go to feed on the Word of God, don't be surprised if you're not spiritually healthy. If there's an inordinate draw towards those things at the expense of eating real food. If your spiritual intake consists of a sugary devotional that you grab on the run, like a power bar, like a donut, or an occasional sermon—an occasional sermon when you aren't doing something else on Sunday—don't be surprised if you're feeling kind of spiritually sluggish, anemic.
The same thing—someone can attend church, you know, Sunday morning for an hour, an hour and a half, and that's it. The rest of the week, it's just nothing. Giving themselves to everything else under Heaven. This and that and the other. And I'm not talking about necessarily sinful things, but we're feeding on other things. You are what you eat.
In John 6, after He fed the 20,000-plus with five loaves and two fish, Jesus repeatedly offers Himself as the spiritual food that gives eternal life, eternal satisfaction to everyone who eats. Glance with me at this chapter. Look what Christ does. Look at verse 27: "Do not work for the food which perishes, but for the food which endures to eternal life, which the Son of Man will give to you, for on Him the Father, God, set His seal." Go down to verse 32: "Jesus said to them, 'Truly, truly, I say to you, Moses has not given you the bread from heaven, but My Father gives you the true bread from heaven.'" Verse 33: "For the bread of God is that which comes down from heaven and gives life to the world." Verse 35: "Jesus said to them, 'I am the bread of life. He who comes to Me will not hunger, and he who believes in Me will never thirst.'" Verse 48: "I am the bread of life." Verse 50: "This is the bread which comes down from heaven, so that one may eat of it and not die." And verse 51: "I am the living bread that came down from heaven. If anyone eats of this bread, he will live forever. And also the bread which I will give for the life of the world is My flesh."
A reference, obviously, to Calvary—dying in our place. And once again, we have a scene in John where the hearers just cannot penetrate below the level of the physical and the visual. They cannot grasp, they cannot see the spiritual meaning. Remember back in chapter 2 and verse 19, when Jesus said, "Destroy the sanctuary, and I will raise it up in three days." Then the Jews said, "It took forty-six years to build this sanctuary, and will You raise it up in three days?" But He was speaking about the sanctuary of His body.
It was like when He was talking to Nicodemus in John 3, and He said, "Unless you be born again, you cannot see the kingdom of Heaven." And Nicodemus goes, "Well, how can you get back into your mother's womb and be born again?" Well, of course, Jesus meant the new birth—spiritual birth. And you remember in chapter 4, talking to the Samaritan woman, He said, there's a kind of water that is self-replenishing, and if you get it, you don't need to drink ever again. And the woman says, "Where's this water? Can I get some so I will never be ever thirsty again and come back to draw water?" And of course, Jesus meant He Himself is that water of life.
So here again, you have that same situation where He's saying, "I am the food. I am what you eat and what you drink. I am your sustenance. I am the food that satisfies." And so, predictably, their fifth question is like those previous—total misunderstanding. But here, unlike the Samaritan woman and Nicodemus, it is utter unbelief. Look at question number five. Just to remind us, question number one was a question of curiosity back in verse 25. Question number two was a question of religiosity, verse 28. Question number three was a question of perversity, that's verse 30. Question number four was a question of identity, verses 41 and 42. And we get to question number five in verse 52—we can call it a question of incredulity, a question of unbelief.
Verse 52: "Then the Jews began to argue with one another, saying, 'How can this man, this man, give us His flesh to eat?'" They began to argue. ‘Machomai’ (μάχομαι)—the verb, strong word. It describes a serious conflict, to fight as in a war, a battle. It means they were fighting, they were quarreling, disputing with others of the same kind in a stand against Christ.
Beloved, if you present truth to someone not interested in receiving truth, you cause people to become angry. They murmur, they argue, they want you gone. And keep in mind that Christ has been preaching that faith in Him alone is what can save one from sins, and of course, the people did not like this message. Now they were arguing about His metaphor of Him being the bread of life, and it's interesting how Christ responds to these Jews.
He does not change the metaphor. He does not water it down. He doesn't clean it up. He doesn't water down His teaching just because it made them mad or offended them. As James Montgomery Boyce said, and I quote, "He does not tone down the teaching just to make it more palatable," end of quote. He doesn't.
You see, rather than softening the analogy so as to be less shocking, less offensive, Jesus goes on to make it more shocking, more offensive. He changes the bread analogy to His flesh. He takes it up a notch in a statement that would have really offended just about every Jew. He added that not only did they need to eat His flesh, but they also needed to drink His blood.
Verse 53: "So Jesus said to them, 'Truly, truly, I say to you, unless you eat the flesh of the Son of Man and drink His blood, you have no life in yourselves.'" And again, notice the beginning of the statement. I mean, you remember from last time—"truly, truly"—this is what indicates the dogmatic certainty. Pay attention to this. It's absolutely certain, and you need to underscore this. Don't miss this. "Truly, truly, I say to you, unless you eat the flesh of the Son of Man and drink His blood, you have no life in yourselves."
And He follows that up—"truly, truly"—with that strong Greek conjunction, "unless." Unless. You know what this does? It makes this very narrow with absolutely no flexibility, no wiggle room whatsoever. There's no other way around this. This is not a multiple choice, not a buffet. There's no other way around it. Now remember, they are arguing about the problem of eating Christ's flesh, so Jesus adds more fuel to the fire by adding, "You must also drink His blood."
Verse 54: "He who eats My flesh and drinks My blood has eternal life, and I will raise him up on the last day." Verse 55: "For My flesh is true food, and My blood is true drink." Verse 56: "He who eats My flesh and drinks My blood abides in Me, and I in him." Verse 57: "As the living Father sent Me, and I live because of the Father, so he who eats Me, he also will live because of Me."
Any life connection that any person actually has with God the Father will be due to a relationship with God the Son. Life with the Father comes from having life from the Son—period, paragraph, end of story. There's no other way around it. No one comes to the Father except through the Son.
Then He goes on. He goes back to the bread analogy in verse 58: "This is the bread which came down from out of heaven, not as the fathers ate and died. He who eats this bread will live forever." Not talking about the kind of bread the fathers ate. This bread came from heaven—the living bread, the bread of life. Then John tells us in verse 59: "These things He said in the synagogue as He taught in Capernaum."
Interesting statement. You remember, you're familiar with the Gospel—at another time, Jesus lamented Capernaum. Matthew 11:23-24: "And you, Capernaum, will you be exalted to heaven? You will descend to Hades. For if the miracles had occurred in Sodom which occurred in you, it would have remained to this day. Nevertheless, I say to you that it will be more tolerable for the land of Sodom in the day of judgment than for you."
What an awful warning. Do you know what Christ is saying? There are certain places that are hotter in hell than others. If you have been the recipient of much light—week in and week out, day in and day out—and you're in a context where you've heard the glorious Gospel, you've heard about the offer of salvation again and again and again, and you keep rejecting it and you keep rejecting it and rejecting it and rejecting it, it will be more tolerable for Sodom and Gomorrah in the day of judgment.
That is why, today, if you hear His voice, do not harden your heart. What an awful warning. It's going to be worse for Capernaum on the day of judgment than for Sodom, because the people of Capernaum did not eat Jesus' flesh and drink His blood when it was offered repeatedly and freely and continually to them. And so we need to be clear about what Jesus means here, and we need to take all of that to heart so that we don't follow Capernaum into judgment.
If we could summarize the lesson here, the lesson is this: Feeding on our Lord Jesus Christ by faith is absolutely necessary for eternal life, for temporal sustenance, and for temporal and eternal satisfaction. We're going to unpack this together. This is an eternal life-or-death matter.
In John 6:50, Jesus says that if you eat of Him as the bread from Heaven, you will not die. He states the converse in verse 51: If you eat of this bread, you will live forever. In verse 53, He warns the Jews that unless they eat His flesh and drink His blood, they have no life in themselves. In verse 54, again He states the converse of verse 53, namely that the one who eats of His flesh and drinks His blood has eternal life. Again, He reinforces it in verse 57: "He who eats Me, he also will live because of Me." In verse 58, He again contrasts Himself with the manna which the Israelites ate and died, by saying that "the one who eats this bread," perhaps pointing to Himself, "will live forever."
So let's begin to unpack this. All of this was an introduction, by the way. Number one: feeding on Jesus by faith is necessary for eternal life. Now let me pause and again underscore this, and I underscore it again by way of repetition because it is repeated by our Lord Himself. Some interpret these verses to refer to partaking in communion, the Lord's Supper, the bread and the cup—the Roman Catholic Church, the Orthodox Church. They base their views on what we call transubstantiation, the view that the elements, the bread and the cup, actually become the body and the blood of Christ. In part, they base it on verse 53, where Jesus says that you must eat His flesh and drink His blood to have eternal life.
Well, before we examine what Jesus means, we need to look at what He does not mean. Eating His flesh and drinking His blood does not refer to partaking of the Lord's Supper. It doesn't. Let me share with you four reasons, and I'm indebted to A. W. Pink for this—four reasons that John 6 does not refer to communion.
First, communion had not yet been instituted. The Lord's Supper had not yet been instituted. Jesus instituted it on the night in which He was betrayed, so this couldn't have been referring to that. Secondly, Jesus was speaking here to unbelievers, and the Lord's Supper is for believers. Thirdly, the eating here is unto salvation or eternal life, while eating the Lord's Supper is for those already saved and points to fellowship. Fourthly, the Lord's Supper does not produce the results that are here attributed to eating and drinking.
If Jesus' words here refer to communion, the Lord's Supper, then you gain eternal life by partaking, which absolutely contradicts many other scriptures that show that salvation is through faith alone in Christ alone, not through participating in a ritual. J. C. Ryle puts it this way, and I quote: "We may eat the Lord's Supper and yet not eat and drink Christ's body and blood. We may eat and drink Christ's body and blood and yet not eat the Lord's Supper." End of quote. Very pointed.
The main problem with the Catholic and Orthodox view of transubstantiation—the elements actually becoming the body of Christ and the blood of Christ—is that it takes literally the words that were obviously meant as symbolic. True, Jesus said in Matthew 26, "This is My body," but He also said in John 10:9, "I am the door." He said, "I am the true vine." Nobody takes those statements literally; Jesus meant them clearly symbolically.
There are other reasons for rejecting the view that the elements actually become the body and the blood of Jesus, and that's not our topic of discussion, but simply to mention, for example, that in Hebrews 7:27 and Hebrews 9:25 and 27, it clearly indicates that Jesus' sacrifice on the cross was once and for all, never to be repeated. It happened once and for all. Jesus cried out from the cross in John 19, " Tetélestai (τετέλεσται) It is finished," and the tense of the verb means forever finished, never to be repeated again.
It's obvious that Jesus' words here in John 6 to these unbelieving Jews, spoken at least one year before He instituted the Lord's Supper, have nothing to do with that ordinance. True, there are parallels that we could draw between the Lord's Supper as later instituted and the words of Christ. As one New Testament scholar put it, and I quote, "John 6 is not about the Lord's Supper, rather the Lord's Supper is about what is described in John 6, in terms of commemorating what Jesus did on Calvary's cross." By comparing parallel verses in John 6, we can determine what Jesus meant by the metaphor of eating His flesh and drinking His blood.
Secondly, eating Jesus' flesh and drinking His blood refer to—now we'll see what it actually means—as we saw prior to today, believing or appropriating Him personally, His death on the cross as your only hope for eternal life. Appropriating Him, believing in Him, taking Him as your Lord and your Savior, and receiving all that He did on Calvary's cross. Note these parallels. In verse 40 of this chapter, Jesus says, "For this is the will of the Father, of My Father, that everyone who sees, who beholds—we've covered that before—the Son, and believes in Him will have eternal life, and I Myself will raise him up on the last day."
The requirement—what is the requirement for eternal life? Jesus says to behold the Son, to see the Son, to believe in the Son, to believe in Him. The promised results are that every believer has eternal life, and Jesus promised that He will raise him up on the last day. Verse 54 says, "He who eats My flesh and drinks My blood," notice the language, "has eternal life, and I will raise him up on the last day." These are exactly the same results as in verse 40. But instead of seeing the Son or beholding the Son and believing in the Son, Jesus substitutes eating His flesh and drinking His blood.
So clearly then, eating Jesus' flesh and drinking His blood referred to believing personally in His death on Calvary's cross as your only hope for eternal life. That's what He's talking about. Now, why would Jesus use this graphic language—eating His flesh and drinking His blood—to describe believing in Him? Well, perhaps one reason is that He was making clear to these Jews, who wanted Him to be a political Messiah, an activist, that He wasn't that kind of Messiah. He wasn't that kind of Messiah. He came the first time to give His life as an offering for our sins, a ransom for many. He will come the second time as the conquering King to rule and reign in power and judge the nations, "Revelation 19."
So the first time He came, He was the Passover Lamb, the Lamb of God offered up so that His blood would protect those who applied it to their lives. The Jews were very familiar with eating the Passover lamb. And so, by shocking them with this graphic language and applying it to Himself, those who were true seekers, drawn by God—seekers for eternal life—would be jarred into realizing that their main need was not for a Messiah to give them literal bread, bread for life, free bread for life, but for One to give them the bread of eternal life. They needed Jesus Christ as their Passover Lamb.
Verse 55—Jesus says, "I am," verse 51, excuse me, "I am the living bread that came down from heaven. If anyone eats of this bread, he will live forever, and also the bread which I will give for the life of the world is My flesh." By giving His flesh, Jesus was referring to His upcoming death on Calvary's cross, His suffering. No one took His life from Him—no one.
Notice the language in verse 51: "Also the bread which I will give for the life of the world is My flesh." "I will give it." "I will lay down My life." "No one takes it by force from Me." "I will lay it down." He gave it on His own initiative (John 10:18). Also, the bread analogy pictures death, and as Jesus says in John 12:24, "Truly, truly, I say to you, unless a grain of wheat falls into the earth and dies, it remains alone, but if it dies, it bears much fruit."
You know, to make bread, the grain of wheat had to die, and then the fruit of the grain had to be plucked and crushed into powder and made into flour before it was baked into bread. Even so, Jesus Christ had to die, crushed under the anathema of God, in order to be the Bread of Heaven that gives eternal life to those who eat of it in faith. A. W. Pink suggests that eating looks back to Adam and Eve. Their eating of the forbidden fruit plunged the human race into sin and judgment. Now, eating Christ, the Bread of Life, liberates us from the curse that came on us with Adam's fall.
Perhaps another reason that Jesus uses this graphic language, especially the part about drinking His blood, is that it puts the offense of the cross in full view. Drinking or eating blood—eating His flesh and drinking blood—was highly offensive to a Jew. Genesis 9:4: "However, flesh with its life, that is, its blood, you shall not eat." Leviticus 7:26-27: "You shall not eat any blood, either of bird or animal, in any of your places of habitation. Any person who eats any blood, even that person shall be cut off from his people."
But when they start arguing among themselves about how—remember, "this man," no doubt, is probably used in an unflattering way. It's a derogatory term, the way they use it—how "this man" can give them His flesh to eat in verse 52, which was offensive enough, well, Jesus doesn't explain it in less offensive terms. He doesn't. Rather, it's like He takes it another step. He really cranks it up by adding to eating His flesh, in their mind, the gross picture of drinking His blood.
But the Bible is clear. Hebrews 9:22: "Without shedding of blood, there is no forgiveness." There is no remission of sin. Have you ever thought about how bloody the Jewish religion was? The slaughter of bulls and goats and rams? I mean, to be a priest—it was a bloody business. Blood had to be shed—blood. To be the complete and final sacrifice for our sin, the blood of Christ had to be shed. If Jesus is just your moral example but not your sacrificial Lamb, then He's not your Savior from sin. He's not my Savior from sin.
Now, one more thing I want us to make sure that we don't miss here, and it's that little word translated "for" in verse 51: "The bread which I will give for the life of the world is My flesh." See that little word "for"? It's a significant Greek word, ‘huper’ (ὑπέρ). It means "in behalf of." It means "for the sake of," and it pictures the substitutionary aspect of the sacrifice of Christ. In that little word ‘huper’, really bound up in it, is the substitutionary death of our Lord and Savior, Jesus Christ. The Bread of Life—divine, it came down from Heaven; life-giving, it's the living bread; all-sufficient, it was given for the life of the world; eternal, he that eats it will live forever; and it is to be offered indiscriminately to whoever.
So, to be clear, eating Jesus' flesh and drinking His blood refer to believing in and personally appropriating, assimilating, embracing His death on the cross as your only hope for eternal life. Nothing in my hands I bring, simply to Thy cross I cling. Eating Jesus' flesh and drinking His blood are how you obtain, how you receive eternal life. This is not just a matter of how to have a happier life. This is not just about how to improve your life a little bit. This is not just about how to reform your life a little bit. It's a matter of eternal life or eternal death—life and death.
In verses 49 through 51, Jesus contrasts the manna, which only fed the people physically for a while, and then, guess what? They died. He contrasts that with Himself as the living bread, the living bread from Heaven that came down out of Heaven to give eternal life to people through His flesh—His flesh given on behalf of, as the substitute for, sinners on the cross. These rituals cannot bring eternal life to anyone, and apart from the sacrificial death of the Lamb of God, Jesus Christ, you cannot be saved. Apart from His death on Calvary's cross and His shed blood, our Lord cannot be the bread that gives eternal life to us. There was no way to avoid the cross.
To obtain eternal life, you must eat Jesus' flesh and drink His blood, which means to believe in Him personally, to embrace Him in His person and finished work on Calvary's cross. That's why, if you recall, we underscored the significance back several weeks ago in verse 35. The imagery is so powerful here that it could be like a rushing torrent that would sweep you right off your feet into the error of transubstantiation. Let me remind us of the stake that Jesus drove into the ground so that you wouldn't be swept off your feet when the imagery got so powerful.
Verse 35: Jesus said, "I am the Bread of life; he who comes to Me..." You see, the issue is not eating. "He who comes to Me will never hunger, and he who believes in Me will never thirst." So, in this sermon, to eat is an image of coming to and believing in Jesus Christ—nothing more, nothing less.
Augustine, the great theologian of the early church, writing in the middle of the fourth century, commented on this passage. He said this, and I quote, "Believe, and you have eaten already." Simple but very powerful. That's it. That gets it right. "Believe, and you have eaten already." That's the imagery.
Belief leads to the closest possible relationship with Jesus Christ—assimilation, internalization—that's the point. Belief in Christ leads to an internalization of Christ and assimilation of Christ all through your spiritual being, if you will. Let's follow the imagery step by step. You take a piece of bread, you eat it, your stomach breaks it down, breaks down the nutritional component of that bread, and what it does is that it sends those little life-giving bits and pieces of sustenance all throughout your body.
You assimilate that. That nutrition is assimilated into every cell in your body. Every cell in your body is affected by it, sustained by it, and strengthened by it. When you eat bread, the slice of bread, if you will, becomes one with you, a part of you. That's the picture that Jesus wants you and me to see here, to have in mind. To believe in Him is to have Him in you.
Jesus is speaking spiritually of consuming Him, taking Him as your all, as your life. In other words, He's saying, let Me, My person, what I did on the cross, become your nourishment, your permanent means of eternal life. And so in that, He's teaching really all the themes of this chapter. One, what you really need is eternal life, not temporal life. Two, to have this, you must believe biblically, properly. And three, you must believe in the right object—Me, from the Father, from Heaven, the true Messiah, the God-Man—and I can give you eternal life.
And again, let's think about this eating and drinking analogy further so that we understand what saving faith means. And again, indebted to Pink, first, eating is a necessary response to a felt need. When you eat, it's a necessary response to a felt need. You eat when you feel hungry, and you drink when you feel thirsty. If you go long enough without eating or drinking, you will what? Die eventually. But the world feeds us with all sorts of things that mask our true hunger and thirst. It feeds us with money, materialism, possessions, pleasure, under the illusion that these things will indeed satisfy us. But those things get left behind at death, don't they? Right? "For to me, to live is Christ, and to die is what? Gain." And if you say, "For to me to live is money, power, fame, pleasure," all of those things—to die is what? You can't take it with you. To die is loss, tragic loss.
It's much more than not taking these things with you. Sometimes the world deceives us with legitimately even good things like family and friends to make us feel full and happy. They're noble things after all, right? But the best family and friends will not do us any good when we stand before God on Judgment Day. Those things are not true food. They're blessings, but they're not true food. Jesus says, "My flesh is true food. My blood is true drink." The Holy Spirit has to impress on us the vanity of life apart from God and convict us of our true guilt, our utter bankruptcy, our destitution before God so that we will hunger and thirst for the eternal life that only Jesus can give.
So first, eating is a necessary response to a felt need. But secondly, eating and drinking only benefit you—now listen carefully—when you actually eat and drink, right? See, it doesn't do you any good to smell a good meal. "Oh, that smells amazing. That's great." Are you fed? Is your hunger satisfied? Yeah? No, no. It doesn't do you any good to smell a good meal or to analyze it chemically or to write a wonderful poem about how wonderful it is and how the aroma really sweeps you off your feet. No, no. You've got to eat it. You've got to drink it.
And also, it must be personal. You see, I can't eat it for you. Your mom can't eat it for you. Your dad can't eat it for you. Your brother, your sister, your spouse—it can't eat it for you. You must eat your own food. In the same way, you have to appropriate Christ for yourself by faith. You must not only believe that He is the Savior, but you must believe that He is your Savior. You must be able to say, "The Lord is not a shepherd or the shepherd, but the Lord is my shepherd." You must trust in His death on Calvary's cross as the penalty for not the sins of sinners, but for your sins. You must receive, you must appropriate Him into your innermost being, just like you eat food and drink water to live.
Feeding on Jesus by faith is necessary for eternal life. Furthermore, feeding on Jesus by faith is necessary for daily sustenance. Look at verse 56. Jesus states, "He who eats My flesh and drinks My blood"—what a marvelous verse—"abides in Me, and I in him." Wow. Here, Jesus mentions the intimate union that takes place between Him and the one who feeds on Him by faith. He'll explain this, by the way, further to His disciples in chapter 15: "I am the vine, you are the branches," right? The imagery is that if you consume Christ—this is in verse 56—believe in Him, appropriate Him by faith, He takes up residence in you. He filters all through you, affecting every cell in your spiritual body.
"He who eats My flesh"- ‘trógó’ (τρώγω), the Greek verb. This Greek verb, by the way, is a present participle. That's significant, looking at the ongoing close relationship between Jesus and the one who feeds on Him. He who continually eats. You see, when you eat food, it literally becomes a part of you. When you feed on Christ by faith, you become more like Him, and you enjoy a close relationship with Him. You see, the verb "abides"—"He who eats My flesh and drinks My blood abides" - ‘menó’ (μένω), abides in Me, ‘menó’ in Me. And look at the reciprocal nature of this: "And I in him." What Jesus is doing is emphasizing the oneness, the intimate fellowship, the communion every believer now has with Him forever. It's ongoing, it's unbreakable.
"Abides"—present tense—pictures our present supernatural, eternal union, communion. We call it ‘koinónia’ (κοινωνία), fellowship with our Lord Jesus Christ, intimate fellowship. The idea is the picture of the believer remaining where He is forever, where Christ is forever. To abide in Him and have Him abide in us speaks of the oneness that we experience when we enter the new covenant in His blood by grace through faith. To eat His flesh and drink His blood is to believe wholly in Him as our substitutionary, fully atoning, sacrificial Lamb. "Abides in Me." In the Greek, this phrase "in Me" is known as a locative of sphere. A locative tells us where something is; the sphere speaks of a thing's location in relationship to other things. It's being in the orbit, in the atmosphere. So when the Bible says that we are in Christ, it means that we live within the sphere of Christ, the orbit of Christ.
The Bible pictures believers as living in the atmosphere of Christ forever. Galatians 2:20 really sums it up beautifully: "I have been crucified with Christ," Paul says. "It is no longer I who live, but Christ lives in me; and the life which I now live in the flesh I live by faith in the Son of God, who loved me and gave Himself for me." It's in the atmosphere of Christ. You read the Pauline writings, and you have this again and again repeated in Ephesians, Colossians, and Philippians—"in Christ, in Christ, in Christ, in Christ"—in union with Christ, in the orbit of Christ, in the atmosphere of Christ. It's all within that atmosphere of Christ, abiding in Him.
In other words, Jesus is that which surrounds us. No matter where we go, we cannot step out of Christ. You can step out of a circle, but you cannot step out of a sphere. A sphere surrounds us, surrounds all that is within it. In like manner, Jesus Christ totally surrounds all those who are in Him. What a marvelous truth. What an encouraging truth. When you consider our location with regards to the area of our security, we are eternally safe because we cannot step out of the sphere of Christ. No matter where we run, we are still within His sphere. We cannot escape from Him, nor do we want to if we're truly His.
When we consider our position within the sphere of Christ with regards to our daily walk, it also reminds us, it reminds us—and may we cultivate that conscious awareness—that every step we take occurs within the sphere of our relationship to Jesus Christ. No matter where I am, what I'm doing, that's what happens. Every action, every thought, every deed, every motive should be considered in the light of who we are, whose we are, and where we are. We are in the sphere of Christ.
Because we are in Christ—that is, ever within the sphere of His presence, His influence, and His will—we conform every area of our lives to His will as a result. Simply stated, because we are in Him, we should live like we are in Him. Paul has a parallel thought, writing in Colossians 3:4, "Christ who is what? Our life. Christ who is our life." In Him, we live and breathe and have our being, now and forever. Blessed be God.
In verse 57, Jesus emphasizes the intimacy that we enjoy with Him: "As the living Father sent Me, and I live because of the Father, so he who eats Me, he also will live because of Me." Spurgeon comments on this verse, and I quote, "As God, man, mediator, the Lord Jesus lives by the self-existent Father who has sent Him, and in the same manner, we live by the Savior who has quickened us. He who is the source of our life is also the sustenance of it. Living is sustained by feeding. We must support the spiritual life by spiritual food, and that spiritual food is the Lord Jesus—not His life or death or offices or work or word alone, but Himself as including all these. On Jesus Himself we feed." End of quote.
In a word, listen carefully, beloved. The union between Christ and the true believer, the union between Christ and the true Christian, is as real and true and close and inseparable as the union between God the Father and God the Son. Bask in that today. Relish that truth. Treasure it.
The implication here is that we should eat often. Most of us eat three meals a day, sometimes with snacks in between. If you're a prisoner of war, you might survive on a cup of rice or a piece of bread or some water every day, but if you survived, you would come out of that camp emaciated, weak, vulnerable to disease. But to be healthy, you have to eat nutritious food every day, several times a day. And so the question is this: Do you feed your soul on Christ every day? Do you feed your soul on Christ every day?
Well, you know, I tried to read *Our Daily Bread* once in a while. Okay, okay, but you need more than that. You need more than that. You need a consistent diet of reading and meditating on God's Word, praying as you read, "Lord, reveal Yourself to my soul." Or as Moses dared to pray, even after all of the amazing miracles that he had seen, in Exodus 33:18, he says, "I pray You, show me Your glory." Feed on Christ, beloved. Feed on Christ often in His Word. Do not be satisfied with the fact that you ate last week or yesterday. You need manna for your soul today.
Also, it is helpful to eat at regular times—regular times. Don't wait until you're starving to eat, but eat at set times. Dietary experts say that breakfast is the most important meal not to skip. Likewise, it's spiritually healthy to spend at least a short time every morning feeding your soul on Christ. You say, "Well, I'm not a morning person. It's hard for me." Well, would you—and I say this lovingly—would you consider setting your alarm a half an hour earlier than you need to and spend that time reading God's Word and often praying that Word back to God?
One final thought before we move on, and I love this. Did you know that you can't overeat when it comes to feeding on Christ? You can't. When we sit down and there's a feast and a table full of delicacies and it all tastes so amazing, it's so easy for us to eat more than we should. How many times do you see people lean back and say, "I overdid it"? They lean back and say, "I overdid it," right? But with Jesus, you can eat and eat and eat and eat and eat, and it won't adversely affect your health. In fact, it is completely the opposite. So feed on Him. And when you're satisfied, eat all the more, because the more satisfied, the more dissatisfied you'll become, because you want more. So good. That's a holy dissatisfaction.
Feeding on Jesus by faith is necessary for eternal life. And finally, feeding on Jesus by faith is necessary for temporal and eternal satisfaction. In Matthew's account, Matthew 14:20, the feeding of the 5,000, he says, "And they all ate and were satisfied." Beloved, there's a satisfaction factor about eating, isn't there? That's why we overeat—because it tastes good and it's pleasurable. Good bread nourishes and sustains life, but also it's enjoyable. I mean, we've all been there, right? The smell of bread baking in the oven, and then you take it out, and it's so warm and hot, and you add butter, and you eat a warm slice, and you feel so good.
And so feeding on Christ by faith is enjoyable in this life, and it will continue in His eternal presence. As David exults, Psalm 16:11, "In Your presence is fullness of joy, and in Your right hand, there are pleasures forever." God, our exceeding joy. In fact, the more of Jesus that you feed on, the healthier, the stronger you will be. And you know what? The more you eat, the more satisfied you are, but the more you crave for more of Christ, as I said. You cannot have enough of Christ. Yet, as John Calvin laments, "'How few are those who are satisfied with Christ alone.'" End of quote.
How about you today? How about you? Are you satisfied with Christ alone? Do you feed on His death for you as your only hope of eternal life? Do you feed on Him daily in His Word as nourishment for your soul? Do you enjoy all that He is for you, both now and for eternity? If the answer is “no”, the answer then is fairly simple to your “no”. Change your diet. Change your diet.
Is He as real to you spiritually as something you can taste or handle? Is He as much part of you as that which you eat? Is He as much part of you as that which you drink? What's your diet like today? He's the Bread of Life. We are to feed upon Him, upon Christ Himself. Meditate, fellowship, talk to, walk with Christ. To feed upon our Lord Himself. Enjoy, enjoy the wonder of His doctrines and His teachings and His words. And fellowship with Him is just out of this world.
He is our all in all. He's everything. For the polluted, He is purity. For the weak, He is strength. For the faint, He is courage. For the dead, He is life—our Lord Jesus Christ Himself, the God-Man, Christ Jesus. But we don't worship or fellowship with a phantom or a dream. We fellowship with a living Christ, Jesus our Lord, who came for this purpose.
Whatever other purpose there may have been in the creation of this world, one of the purposes of God is that He should be "the Lamb slain from before the foundation of the world." Whatever other purpose of God in the creation of this planet and our life, with all of its majesty and mystery and the systems and suns and where every star is a burning light spelling His name—really, whatever other purposes of God in the creation of the earth, this is one that is towering over all. Before the world was made, that He, our Lord Jesus, would suffer and die to redeem us, to be the Bread of Life.
Our Lord Jesus did not come into the world with the purpose that He would be a social reformer, that He would be a supplier of the bread that perishes, that He'd be an example of what it means to be a noble citizen or noble manhood. But our Lord came into the world with an announced aim and goal, and that is to die for the sins of the people. The language here about bread, throughout this text, is really sacrificial. It's of the altar, the sacrifice of blood, atonement, intercessory grace. He came from Heaven, took upon Himself our nature.
Are you afflicted? He was afflicted. Do any weep? He wept. Are any troubled, burdened? He was troubled and burdened. Do any hurt? He hurt. Are any slandered, spit upon, despised, rejected? He was slandered and rejected. "He was pierced through for our transgressions, He was crushed for our iniquities; the chastening of our peace fell upon Him, and by His wounds we are healed" (Isaiah 53:5). That is the gospel of salvation. And God, praise be to His name, does not demand twice payment for the offense. Jesus paid it. He paid it all. He suffered in our stead that we might be free.
Let's pray:
Father, we thank You for the bread of life. We thank You for the bread of Heaven. We thank You for Jesus Christ, and we pray, Lord, for anyone here today who has not eaten of that bread, has not drunk of that blood. Lord, we pray that they would behold the Son today, that they would see Christ, that they would come to Christ, that they would believe in Christ, that they would appropriate Jesus Christ, His person and His finished work on Calvary's cross, that they would submit to Him as the Lord and Savior today.
That they would turn from chasing after the stuff of the world, thinking that all these things could satisfy that soul hunger. Lord, that they would turn to the only One who can truly satisfy, the bread of life. And for us, Your people, may we feed upon Christ every day, and we thank You that it is in that sphere of Christ that we live and move and have our being, and that we will always, always be within that sphere, now and forever.
We thank You. Help us to live in accordance with who we are in Christ. We thank You, Father, for Your word, and we pray that You continue to be with us as we gather around this table now to remember what happened on that day when the Lamb of God was suspended between Heaven and earth to give His life a ransom for many. In Christ.
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