OUR FATHER WHO GAVE US THE BREAD OF LIFE

The Lord Jesus, continuing to talk to the crowd who were seeking truth from Him, had an interchange with them where He revealed to them the permanent nature of the bond He would form with those who would believed in Him.  John chapter 6 verses 35 - 59 records the conversation in the town of Capernaum this way;

 35 Then Jesus declared, “I am the bread of life. Whoever comes to me will never go hungry, and whoever believes in me will never be thirsty. 36 But as I told you, you have seen me and still you do not believe. 37 All those the Father gives me will come to me, and whoever comes to me I will never drive away. 38 For I have come down from heaven not to do my will but to do the will of him who sent me. 39 And this is the will of him who sent me, that I shall lose none of all those he has given me, but raise them up at the last day. 40 For my Father’s will is that everyone who looks to the Son and believes in him shall have eternal life, and I will raise them up at the last day.”

41 At this the Jews there began to grumble about him because he said, “I am the bread that came down from heaven.” 42 They said, “Is this not Jesus, the son of Joseph, whose father and mother we know? How can he now say, ‘I came down from heaven’?”

When the people heard Jesusˋ assertions of being the one through whom everlasting life came, they were perplexed because they knew Jesus and the family from which He came. When He claimed to have come down from heaven, they complained because they thought they knew from where He had come. Jesus, perceiving their discontentment with His claims, told them to stop grumbling about what He was saying because He was the focal point of Godˋs plan of salvation. Anyone who was to be saved would be drawn to Jesus the Father and anyone who believed in Jesus having been drawn to Him, would obtain eternal life.

43 “Stop grumbling among yourselves,” Jesus answered. 44 “No one can come to me unless the Father who sent me draws them, and I will raise them up at the last day. 45 It is written in the Prophets: ‘They will all be taught by God.’ Everyone who has heard the Father and learned from him comes to me. 46 No one has seen the Father except the one who is from God; only he has seen the Father. 47 Very truly I tell you, the one who believes has eternal life. 48 I am the bread of life. 49 Your ancestors ate the manna in the wilderness, yet they died. 50 But here is the bread that comes down from heaven, which anyone may eat and not die. 51 I am the living bread that came down from heaven. Whoever eats this bread will live forever. This bread is my flesh, which I will give for the life of the world.”

52 Then the Jews began to argue sharply among themselves, “How can this man give us his flesh to eat?”

53 Jesus said to them, “Very truly I tell you, unless you eat the flesh of the Son of Man and drink his blood, you have no life in you. 54 Whoever eats my flesh and drinks my blood has eternal life, and I will raise them up at the last day. 55 For my flesh is real food and my blood is real drink. 56 Whoever eats my flesh and drinks my blood remains in me, and I in them. 57 Just as the living Father sent me and I live because of the Father, so the one who feeds on me will live because of me. 58 This is the bread that came down from heaven. Your ancestors ate manna and died, but whoever feeds on this bread will live forever.” 59 He said this while teaching in the synagogue in Capernaum.

The Lord  pressed the controversial point that people would have to partake in His flesh and His blood in order to have life in the same way that the ancestors of the Jews ate manna in the desert in order to survive.

The distinction that Jesus made was that those who ate manna in the desert ultimately died but those who ate the bread that came down from heaven, would live forever.

Ingesting bread by physically eating it was a representation of the way that those who believed in Jesus when He gave His body to be broken and shed His blood, would  have Jesus abiding in them.

Amen.

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