Bread of Heaven; Priority of Doctrine
John 6:22-40
John Lesson #048
May 9, 1999
www.deanbibleministries.org
We have seen the very tantalising statement in Mark that is not included in any of the other passages that describe this which said that after this, after Jesus got in the boat with them and they came to the shore, that the disciples hardened their hearts. Remember that in the Scriptures the word "heart," kardia [kardia] does not refer to the emotional centre. That means they were going on negative volition. They didn't understand any more than the multitudes did that Christ's mission was first spiritual, secondly political. They forgot that the cross had to come before the crown; the spiritual solution had to precede the political solution. So even the disciples were confused and did not understand the issue and were going on negative volition.
The crowd is completely divorced from reality. We have to understand what is going on here from a biblical perspective. If we go back to the Old Testament, in the Mosaic Law, especially as it is rearticulated in Deuteronomy, God ends the Mosaic Law. It starts with the ten words, i.e. the Ten Commandments, and that functions like a prelude, merely an introduction summarizing the fundamental principles of freedom which underlie the entire Mosaic Law code. Then there are another 603 mandates and commandments given to the nation. Then it ends with a blessing and a cursing section. In Leviticus God outlines five different cycles of discipline to the nation Israel. These are tied to the Mosaic covenant. There may be some application to other nations but remember Israel is a unique nation in history; they are the only nation God makes a specific covenant with. So they are a covenant nation and other nations in the church age that God uses for various purposes—like the US today, the UK in the 19th century, etc.: client nations, but they do not have a covenant with God, and while these principles may apply in various ways they are not exact.
The first cycle of discipline involved loss of health, a decline of agricultural prosperity, national terror, fear and death in combat, loss of personal freedoms due to negative volition to doctrine—Leviticus 26:14-17. The second cycle involved economic recession and depression, increased personal and individual divine discipline for continued negative volition, in spite of the first warnings from the first cycle of discipline. So it gets progressively worse—Leviticus 26:18-20. The third cycle includes violence, a breakdown of law and order and disintegration of order in the cities—Leviticus 26:21, 22. The fourth cycle of discipline involved military conquest and/or foreign occupation, a scarcity of food, and the separation of families—Leviticus 26:23-26. The fifth cycle of discipline was the destruction of the nation. The Jews were to be taken from the land that God had promised to give them and scattered among the other nations, and this is due to their rejection of biblical principles and rejection of God.
At this stage in Israel's history they are in the fourth cycle of discipline. They are under the boot of the Roman empire. The purpose of all of this, God says, is to wake them up to spiritual realities. If you find yourself under the domination of a foreign power the problem is not that you failed politically, God is saying, the problem is that you have failed spiritually. The solution is not a political solution, the solution is a spiritual solution—getting right with God and growing spiritually, and advancing to spiritual maturity. But the crowds have rejected that. They look at what happened, at the fact that they are under the control of the Roman empire, and instead of remembering what the Old testament says, that this means they are out of line spiritually and they need to turn back to God and obey the Law, they are saying what they need to do is have their own solution, find a political leader to unite the people and lead us in a revolt against Rome and then they would have freedom. So they are wanting the crown before the cross just as the disciples are, they have forgotten that true freedom is based fundamentally on spiritual realities and not on temporal and physical realities, and it is the inculcation Bible doctrine—regeneration first, then spiritual growth—that provides a culture with the norms and standards, the values necessary, in order to have the responsibility and the sense of responsibility upon which true freedom is built. Once you get away from the Lord you get away from virtue, from the absolute values of Scripture, and you begin to focus on relativism, you lose sight of the Lord and you are going to begin to deteriorate from the inside out. That happens in any culture at any time and we are saying that today in our particular culture.
We have now arrived at the bread of life discourse. Once again this is a very profound series of question and answer dialogue between Jesus and the crowd and those who are hostile to Him, and then it concludes with a private question and answer session with the disciples after the crowd has departed from Him, including both believers and unbelievers in the crowd. What Jesus taught in terms of the doctrine He communicates here was too much. Doctrine always drives people off. Most people don't want to think, they just want to emote, they want stimulation, excitement and to feel good; they don't want content. As we are going to see they are more impressed with the power of Jesus than the person of Jesus. They are more interested in the stimulation than the Scriptures; they want the messenger but they don't want His message. They are focused on the personality and His power rather than His person and His doctrine. The crowd want a political rather than a spiritual solution, and this is true today of most evangelical Christians.
John 6:22 NASB "The next day the crowd that stood on the other side of the sea saw that there was no other small boat there, except one, and that Jesus had not entered with His disciples into the boat, but {that} His disciples had gone away alone." This is the day after the feeding of the 5000. When the sun went down on that previous day the crowd saw the disciples leave and head out toward Capernaum and that Jesus went out into the mountains. It would take them a couple of days to walk around the coast and when they woke up next morning Jesus was gone. They heard that He had gone to Capernaum and they wonder how He got there so quickly but they know that He seems to have a power that no one else has, so maybe He has the power to defeat the Roman legions, so they needed to go and see if they could get Him on to their program now, instead of His program.
John 6:23 NASB "There came other small boats from Tiberias near to the place where they ate the bread after the Lord had given thanks. [24] So when the crowd saw that Jesus was not there, nor His disciples, they themselves got into the small boats, and came to Capernaum seeking Jesus." The point here is that the masses want to use Jesus to give them their agenda. But remember, we don't use God. How many people try to manipulate God through prayer! We cannot pray: "God, save so and so." Christians do that all the time, but God is not going to violate somebody's volition. He is not going to go and tweak something to make somebody believe. We can pray that the Lord will make sure that the gospel is presented clearly to them, to put enough pressure on their life so that they are more inclined to respond positively. But God is not going to force somebody into salvation against their will.
John 6:25 NASB "When they found Him on the other side of the sea, they said to Him, 'Rabbi, when did You get here?'" Calling Him Rabbi indicates right away that they haven't quite caught the picture that He is the Lord. They don't say kurios [kurioj], they say Rabbi, recognising Him as a great teacher, that He has a tremendous amount of knowledge about the Old Testament and that He has some power, but they do not recognise Him to be Lord. They want to find out what is going on. They are curious about the power that got Him transported across the Sea of Galilee so quickly. They want to see if they can use this. Jesus, being omniscient, knows their agenda. He knows that they are trying to use Him and he wants to expose what is going on. He wants to make sure that the issue is clear. The crowd is works oriented, legalistic and have no understanding at all of the spiritual issues involved. They are not trusting God, even those among them that might be believers, they have no grace orientation, no faith and trust in God, no doctrinal understanding, and no capacity for freedom. Remember, the most basic operational spiritual skill is the faith-rest drill—actively trusting the promises of God. We have to know what God has said and then trust it, believe it, and implement it in our lives.
John 6:26 NASB "Jesus answered them and said, 'Truly, truly, I say to you, you seek Me, not because you saw signs, but because you ate of the loaves and were filled'." Truly, truly means to pay attention; that Jesus is going to give them a point of doctrine. It emphasises what is going to follow. "Not because you saw the signs" means that if they saw the signs and understood them, seeing them with understanding, i.e. that the signs signified who He was. Jesus did not come to heal people and to relieve suffering. That was not the purpose of the first advent. When He healed He did it to show He had the power over sickness and disease as the Messiah in fulfilment of the prophecies in Isaiah and Jeremiah, that the Messiah would come and the lame would walk and the blind would see. So His miracles were designed to be calling cards of His messianic role, He was not coming to alleviate suffering. If they saw the signs with understanding they would have realised that He was the Messiah, they would have had some spiritual discernment and would have responded and accepted Him as such. But they rejected that, they were simply glad because they were stimulated by His presence. Now He is talking to the same crowd that He fed the day before. He says they are just happy because He stimulated them. They want signs and wonders, miracles, entertainment, emotional stimulation, are more interested in the messenger than the message, in the power than the person, in the stimulation than the Scriptures. This is true in most churches.
John 6:27 NASB "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, has set His seal." Don't work for the temporal solution, the political solution. The temporal solution is no solution. What you need to work for, what the priority is, is the food which endures to eternal life. The political solution without the spiritual solution is a tragic solution. There is nothing more tyrannical in life, as is displayed in history, than when the religious crowd gains political control. The issue in the church age is not to establish a kingdom, a political kingdom; that is not the function of the church. Jesus Christ and Jesus Christ alone will establish a perfect political kingdom only when He returns at the second advent to establish the throne of David in Jerusalem and to establish the Millennial kingdom. That is the significance of the term "Son of Man." The Messianic kingdom will be ruled by the Son of Man in contrast to the beasts (Daniel 7). He is the only one who can inaugurate a perfect kingdom and perfect environment. This is the fundamental problem with religious liberalism and political liberalism. They believe that man is inherently good and perfectible and so is society, so they are out trying to achieve a perfect society and utopianism through socialism. Socialism always destroys freedom. The only equality in life is spiritual equality; we are not created equal. "…which the Son of Man will give to you." In other words, the solution is a grace solution, not a works solution. That is why Jesus said: "Do not work for the food which perishes." They want to work for it, they are caught up in legalism, in religiosity, thinking that man by man's effort is going to bring in perfect environment, and Jesus says it doesn't work that way at all, it is a grace solution and you have to get off your agenda and on to God's agenda.
Their response: John 6:28 NASB "Therefore they said to Him, 'What shall we do, so that we may work the works of God?'" Spiritually dead people are spiritually blind and they cannot understand the truth of God. Remember, they were just fed the day before, it was a free meal. It was a grace gift and they don't understand it. They reject it, want to do something to earn it, and somehow impress God that they were worthy of it. Notice the word "works" is plural.
John 6:29 NASB "Jesus answered and said to them, 'This is the work [singular] of God, that you believe in Him whom He has sent'." There is only one thing that we do. Faith alone in Christ alone is the only work that impresses God. It is not because we have done it but because faith is a non-meritorious system of thinking. It has no merit because all of the merit is in the object.
John 6:30 NASB "So they said to Him, 'What then do You do for a sign, so that we may see, and believe You? What work do You perform?'" Can we believe this? Just the day before all twelve thousand are sitting out on that mountain side hungry, and Jesus miraculously feeds them to abundance. Then they realise something miraculous has happened during the night because Jesus has made His way across the Sea of Galilee. And they stand there and say: "Give us a sign"! The point is, facts aren't the issue. They have more than enough data to show that Jesus is the Messiah. Te problem isn't empirical, it is not with man's IQ, the problem is spiritual, he is totally depraved, and he has a problem with his volition and has chosen to reject God at God-consciousness. Everybody in this crowd has become God-conscious at one point in their life and they are negative to it. They want God to function on their terms and don't want to function on God's terms. They are telling Jesus: "If you just gave us the right kind of sign; we are going to tell you what that sign is." That is arrogance. God, you can do whatever you want to do to prove you exist but you've got to do what we tell you to do in order for us to accept the fact that you exist. That is the height of arrogance. And no matter what you say it will be reinterpreted within the framework of their negative volition. That is why it is wrong to think that if you could just prove that the tomb was empty, show people, they would believe. They would not. They saw the miracles performed and they rejected them. There were thousands of people who knew that he was raised from the dead and they didn't believe it. Because the issue isn't IQ, it isn't data, it isn't facts; the issue is positive volition to God. Do you want to know God and accept His solution, or do you want to do it yourself?
They are really setting themselves up in a trap here, they are going to walk right into it, and the Lord is just going to devastate them. They have seen the miracles that He has performed and now they want to have Him duplicate an Old Testament miracle. He has partially done it already; He did it once, and they go back to the feeding the children of Israel with manna for forty years.
John 6:31 NASB "Our fathers ate the manna in the wilderness; as it is written, 'HE GAVE THEM BREAD OUT OF HEAVEN TO EAT.'" They are quoting a psalm and the psalm refers to God, but they are not referring to God. We know that because of how Jesus corrects them. The "HE" there, in their thinking, is Moses. What they are saying is that Moses gave them bread out of heaven. They are putting their focus on the physical-political leader and not on the ultimate spiritual reality of God. We know this because there is a non-canonical book, Baruch, which was read at that time, and in 2 Baruch 29:8 we read: "It shall come to pass that a treasury of manna will be sent from on high and they will eat of it again in those years." This is a messianic prophecy. Remember, this is not an inspired book, it is not canonical. But this was popular teaching in Judaism that when the Messiah came then He would send manna from heaven again just as Moses did. "As the former redeemer, Moses, caused manna to descend, so will another redeemer cause manna to descend." So they want a duplicate miracle. They have just seen the feeding of the 5000 so they are spiritually blind and don't understand the dynamics that are going on here. And they want to make their case, they really want to prove to Jesus that although he has done okay He really hasn't met the standard. Now the standard is a religious standard. It doesn't come from the Scripture, the standard they are quoting from 2 Baruch comes from non-canonical literature. They knew it wasn't canonical but this was a tradition that they had accepted in Judaism.
"He gave them bread out of heaven to eat" is a quote from Psalm 78. And they are going to quote and say: "See, this is what the Bible says, and you're just not good enough." And Jesus is just going to say, Okay if you want to play the exegetical game, let's go back and see what Psalm 78 says.
Psalm 78:1 NASB "Listen, O my people, to my instruction; Incline your ears to the words of my mouth. [2] I will open my mouth in a parable; I will utter dark sayings of old, [3] Which we have heard and known, And our fathers have told us [Bible doctrine]. [4] We will not conceal them from their children, But tell to the generation to come the praises of the LORD, And His strength and His wondrous works that He has done." So purpose of the psalm is to show the wonderful works which God performed in the Old Testament and to rehearse God's miracles. [7] "That they should put their confidence in God And not forget the works of God, But keep His commandments." So the purpose of this is to strengthen the confidence of believers in God. The miracles of God are not an end in themselves, they are simply to reinforce the message of God so that we are obedient to God. [8] "And not be like their fathers, A stubborn and rebellious generation, A generation that did not prepare its heart [mentality of the soul] And whose spirit was not faithful to God. [9] The sons of Ephraim were archers equipped with bows, {Yet} they turned back in the day of battle." Why does he say the sons of Ephraim? Ephraim was one of the two sons of Joseph. The tribe of Ephraim in the Old Testament settled around the Sea of Galilee. So Jesus is going to Psalm 78 and He is saying: "Your ancestors exemplify your negative volition today." The sons of Ephraim turned back in the day of battle, they did not keep the covenant of God and refused to walk in His law. So the theme of Psalm 78 that they are quoting in order to try to nail Jesus is the theme of their own rebelliousness and rejection of the provision of God. It shows that the Galileans have rejected God, have rejected salvation, rejected grace, rejected the divine solution in favour of a temporal human solution.
Verses 11-17 list God's works, and then there is a reflection upon man's response to those miracles. Psalm 78:11 NASB "They forgot His deeds And His miracles that He had shown them." This is what the Galileans are doing. It was only 24 hours before! Then the psalm rehearses all of the Exodus and how they forgot. [17] "Yet they still continued to sin against Him, To rebel against the Most High in the desert." This is their negative volition to God's miracles. [18] "And in their heart they put God to the test By asking food according to their desire." How did they put God to the test? By asking food according to their desire. Now what do their descendants do in Jesus' time? They are asking food according to their desire. [19] "Then they spoke against God; They said, 'Can God prepare a table in the wilderness?'" So they are quoting this psalm to try to prove that Jesus doesn't fit the model, and He is just going to turn it right back on top of them. [20] "Behold, He struck the rock so that waters gushed out, And streams were overflowing; Can He give bread also? Will He provide meat for His people? [21] Therefore the LORD heard and was full of wrath; And a fire was kindled against Jacob And anger also mounted against Israel." Here it is being referenced to Israel instead of Ephraim. [22] "Because they did not believe in God And did not trust in His salvation. [23] Yet He commanded the clouds above And opened the doors of heaven; [24] He rained down manna upon them to eat And gave them food from heaven." There is our quote from John 6:31. Who is the "He" in v. 24 of Psalm 78? It is God. But when the Galileans used it in John 6 they are referring to Moses.
John 6:32 NASB "Jesus then said to them, 'Truly, truly, I say to you, it is not Moses who has given you the bread out of heaven, but it is My Father who gives you the true bread out of heaven. [33] For the bread of God is that which comes down out of heaven, and gives life to the world'." It is not a physical bread, it is a spiritual bread. They still don't understand. Their response: [34] "Then they said to Him, 'Lord, always give us this bread'." That sounds good. But "give" is in the aorist tense. In other words, don't continually give us this bread. When God gave the bread to the children of Israel He gave it to them every morning, day after day, just enough for the day because God wants us to trust Him day by day. He doesn't give it all to us at once because then we are going to relax and stop trusting Him, we are going to abuse it and misuse it and squander it. But they say, Give it to us, aorist tense. If it was present tense it would be, Continually give us this bread. The aorist tense indicates, Give it to us right now, all of it, and we will figure out how to use it. They have not changed their attitude one little bit: You give it to us but we are going to use you for our agenda still. They are still, like most people, wanting to use God to accomplish their will in their lives and not to submit their will to God's will.
John 6:35 NASB "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'." So He is claiming to provide absolute and total nourishment salvation to everybody, not a little bit and not partially. There is an interesting phrase in the Greek here. In English if we say "will never thirst," that means never at any time will never thirst. If we put a negative in front of it, "not never," it changes the meaning. Two negatives make it a positive. But in Greek you can intensify your negative by piling them up. Jesus uses the two negatives ou [o)u] and me [mh] together, and the best translation is, You will never ever thirst. "Come[ing]" is in parallelism with believing. What He means by coming is trusting Him. Just a side point here: Who is doing the inviting in the next phrase? Jesus. "He who comes to me." This is not the stupid, supercilious, silly evangelical, "invite Jesus into your heart." You do not invite Jesus anywhere. Jesus is the one who says, "Come to me all you whom labour and are heavy laden." It is Jesus who invites us to Him, we do not invite Jesus into the cesspool of our totally depraved soul. Besides, inviting Jesus anywhere is not a synonym in Scripture for believing in Jesus.
John 6:36 NASB "But I said to you that you have seen Me, and yet do not believe." In other words, you have more than enough facts and you don't believe. [37] "All that the Father gives Me will come to Me, and the one who comes to Me I will certainly not cast out." God in His omniscience in eternity past knows all the knowable. In His foreknowledge he knew that there was only going to be one course of action and that when he created Adam and Eve and gave them volition, He knew exactly what would happen, and only one course of action would transpire as a result of that. And no matter how the situation was changed it would always come out the same. That does not mean that there is necessity, it just means that no matter what happens it is always going to be the same, that man would fail and disobey God. Under that scenario knowing exactly what would transpire He provided a solution, and that solution was Jesus Christ. He knew who would be positive no matter what. He knew who would be negative, and He provided that which was necessary for those who were positive, who would respond, and then God is the one who causes them to be saved. This is not overriding their volition, but He causes us to be saved because once we have expressed faith alone in Christ alone it is God who saves us.
John 6:38 NASB "For I have come down from heaven, not to do My own will, but the will of Him who sent Me. [39] This is the will of Him [God's plan] who sent Me, that of all that He has given Me I lose nothing, but raise it up on the last day." No loss of salvation. This is the doctrine of eternal security. [40] "For this is the will of My Father, that everyone who beholds the Son and believes in Him will have eternal life, and I Myself will raise him up on the last day."
So Jesus makes the gospel very clear to the crowd and they are going to reject it. He makes sure that they understand that the solution is not a political solution, not a temporal or physical solution, it is a spiritual solution and it starts with regeneration. Until there are people saved and people advancing to spiritual maturity, and people learning doctrine to develop a capacity for freedom and for life and happiness, they are just whitewashing the devil's world. Dr. Vernon McGee used to call it polishing brass on a sinking ship. The cross must precede the crown.