The Bread of Life

Today on Renewing Your Mind… Dr. R.C. Sproul walks us through these I AM sayings, and we'll learn how they reveal the story of Jesus' death. This course is not so much other people's views of Jesus, but we're going to be asking the question, who did Jesus say that He was?

And in declaring His identity to the people during His earthly ministry, He used a very unusual structure to identify characteristics of His person. These sayings are recorded for us in John's gospel and only in John's gospel, and these sayings are called the I AMs of Jesus because He introduces these statements by the words, I AM, things like I am the bread of life, I am the light of the world, I am the good shepherd, I am the door, and so on. And so, we'll be looking at each one of these statements of Jesus to see what they reveal to us about His own self-understanding. And the first one that we will look at today is the statement, I AM the bread of life, which is found in John's gospel, chapter 6. In verse 30 of the sixth chapter of John, we read these words, therefore they said to Him, What sign will You perform then, that we may see it and believe You?

What work will You do? Our fathers ate the manna in the desert. As it is written, He gave them bread from heaven to eat. Now, in this discussion that Jesus is having with His contemporaries, and they're discussing His identity, and they're asking for some sign that will prove to them the truth of the claims that He had been making about Himself. And they hearken back to the pages of the Old Testament where God manifested His presence with the children of Israel by providing for them food to eat supernaturally. It was the manna that God gave in the wilderness. And so, they're saying, God gave the people of old a sign.

Now, what sign are you going to give us to indicate your identity? Jesus answers by saying, Most assuredly, I say to you, Moses did not give you the bread from heaven, but My Father gives you the true bread from heaven. For the bread of God is He who comes down from heaven and gives life to the world. And they said, Well, Lord, give us this bread always. And Jesus said to them, I am the bread of life, and he who comes to Me shall never hunger, and he who believes in Me shall never thirst. So, this is the first I Am in which Jesus, in the context of this discussion of manna from heaven, says to those who are around Him, I am the bread of life.

Now, the thing that we notice that is extraordinary, not only in this I Am, but in all of the I Ams that are recorded for us in the Gospel of John, is the structure of Jesus' statements. Normally, in the Greek, when somebody wants to say I Am, they use the word ego. We get the English word ego, which is our personality or our personal identity. And so, that word simply means in Greek, I Am. But the Greek language has another form of the verb to be that also can be translated by the English I Am, and that is the word emi. Again, in the Greek, emi means I Am. Now, what is strange about this particular statement of Jesus that He doesn't say, ego, the bread of life, I am the bread of life, nor does He say, emi, the bread of life, I am the bread of life, but rather He puts these two verb forms together, saying, ego, emi, the bread of life.

It sounds like a redundancy. It sounds as if Jesus is stuttering because literally what He's saying here is, I Am, I Am, the bread of life. Again, what is so significant about this is that this structure of the verb is exceedingly rare. But one of the most important places where we find it elsewhere is in the Septuagint, which is the Greek translation of the Old Testament. And in the Greek translation of the Old Testament, when the Greek translators came to chapter 3 of the book of Exodus where God reveals His name to Moses in the burning bush when He says, I Am who I Am. The way in which that strange phrase that God uses to reveal Himself is rendered in the Greek is by this exact form, ego, emi. So, there's a thinly veiled reference back to the sacred name of God when Jesus says, the name of God, when Jesus refers to Himself with this language, ego, emi.

There's something else about the grammar. When this structure occurs, if I were to say, I Am the bread of life, I Am would be the subject, or I would be the subject, and bread of life would be the predicate. But when this occurs in the Greek language, that's reversed, so that really the literal translation would be, the bread of life is I, so that He is the focal point of the affirmation rather than the concept of bread. So, in any case, these statements in the Gospel of John have been used historically to call attention to Jesus' claims for deity, that He self-consciously uses language that is usually associated with divine pronouncements. And of course, that was not missed by His contemporaries. They were aware of that, and that's what provoked such hostility on many occasions when He talked in this manner.

But apart from the actual construction of the language, what I want us to look at in the I Am's is principally the content. What is it that He is saying about Himself, and what do these things that He says about Himself indicate about His identity? So, let's go back to the text then where Jesus said, first of all, to His contemporaries, in referring back to the manna of the Old Testament, He reminds His hearers that the manna in Israel was not provided by Moses. Moses was the mediator of the covenant people. He was the leader at the time when the manna was given. He announced the giving of the manna, but it wasn't Moses that provided the manna. It was God who sent the manna. The manna came not from earth. It didn't come from Moses. It came from God.

It came from heaven. And this is critical to Jesus' identification of Himself with this same kind of provision that God had made in the Old Testament when He said, "'Moses did not give you the bread, but My Father gives you the true bread from heaven. For the bread of God is He who comes down from heaven and gives life to the world.'"

So, what is He saying here? He's speaking about His own origin, and this is a point that is critical for our understanding of Jesus' self-consciousness, that Jesus doesn't say, hey, I come from Bethlehem, or I come from Nazareth. Rather, He is saying, I come from heaven. I am the one that the Father sent from heaven Himself.

I am the true bread, the bread that gives life to all who partake of it. Again, the New Testament is very much concerned about the exaltation of Christ after His death and resurrection and about His entering into His glory, and at the heart of that concept of the exaltation of Christ is His ascension into heaven. And the word ascension does not simply mean going up somewhere, although there are times when the verb to ascend means to go up simply. People ascended to Jerusalem. They went up to Jerusalem, but when the New Testament speaks about the ascension of Jesus, they're not talking simply about a point that's elevated to which Jesus goes.

They're talking about His going to a particular place for a particular reason so that His ascension is to go to the right hand of the Father where He then has His coronation as the King of the kings and as the Lord of the lords and where He enters into the heavenly sanctuary as our great High Priest. That's why Jesus can say, no one ascends into heaven. Now when He says no one ascends into heaven, He's not saying that His people will not follow Him in the resurrection.

In fact, we are all promised that at some time we will go up to heaven at the time of our death and so on. So when Jesus says no one ascends into heaven, He doesn't mean no one else will go there. He means that no one will ascend in this unique sense that He ascends to that place of cosmic authority. But when He talks about the uniqueness of His ascension, what does He say? No one ascends into heaven except He who has descended from heaven. So that in Jesus' understanding, His ascension is linked to His prior descension. When He ascends into heaven, He's merely returning to the place from whence He came in the first place. And so here in this discourse, Jesus is calling attention to His heavenly origin, that the place from which He has come is heaven itself.

So let's continue then with our examination of the text. When He says, the bread of God is He who comes down from heaven and gives life to the world, they say, Lord, give us this bread. And He said, I am the bread of life. He who comes to Me shall never hunger. He who believes in Me shall never thirst.

But I said to you that you have seen Me, and yet you do not believe. All that the Father gives Me will come to Me, and the One who comes to Me I will by no means cast out. For I have come down from heaven, not to do My own will, but the will of Him who sent Me.

And this is the will of the Father who sent Me, that of all that He has given Me, I should lose nothing, but should raise it up at the last day. And this is the will of Him who sent Me, that everyone who sees the Son and believes in Him may have everlasting life, and I will raise Him up at the last day. Now at this point, the Jews begin to complain, and they say, He said, I am the bread which came down from heaven.

They said, isn't this Jesus, the Son of Joseph, whose father and mother we know? How is it then that He says, I have come down from heaven? And so Jesus answers and says, Don't murmur.

No one can come to Me unless the Father who sent Me draws him, and I will raise him up at the last day. Now in the historic dispute between Augustinian theology and Pelagian theology, John chapter 6 has been a focal point of the discussion with respect to the dependence of the believer upon the grace of God for salvation. In other words, the sixth chapter of John in general, and this passage in particular, reeks of the doctrine of predestination.

And it's interesting to see how many commentators, when they come to John chapter 6, dance all around this. But at the heart of these sayings that Jesus makes here is His affirmation that He repeats in His high priestly prayer in John 17 that there is a body of people that the New Testament calls the elect that the Father gives to the Son. And Jesus says here that all who the Father gives to Him will do what? Will come to Him, because God is determined that Christ will have an inheritance.

We go back to Isaiah 53, where we hear the statements in chapter 53 of Isaiah that He will see the travail of His soul and be satisfied. And so God the Father sends the Son into the world as the bread of life to provide life for His people, for the ones whom the Father gives to Him. And every one of those persons that the Father gives to the Son comes to the Son. And all of those who come to the Son are in no wise cast out. They receive their nourishment from the one whom the Father sent in their behalf.

Now this, as well as His statement of His origin, is provoking no small amount of discussion. And so when Jesus says in verse 43, "'Do not murmur among yourselves. No one can come to Me unless the Father who sent Me draws Him.'" Twice in the sixth chapter of John, Jesus speaks about man's natural ability to respond to Jesus on their own. And elsewhere Jesus says, "'No man, no one can come to Me unless it is given to him of the Father.'" Now we have the assumption in our day that Jesus was sent into the world by God as a potential Savior for everybody, and everybody in the world has the ability to come to Jesus or not come to Jesus. And we struggle when Jesus Himself says, "'Wait a minute. Nobody is able to come to Me unless.'"

Now that little word unless underscores what we would call a necessary condition, a condition that must be met for a desired consequence to occur. And so Jesus reminds these people, He said, "'You can't come to Me. You won't come to Me because you can't come to Me, not because you don't have a will, not because you don't have a mind, not because you don't have a heart, but you are dead in sin. You are in bondage to your sin. And just like the leopard that can't change his spots and the Ethiopian the color of his skin, so you in your natural state, in your fallen corruption are powerless to come to Me unless God does something, unless God gives it to you to come, unless God gives you a gift.'"

Now some people say that's true, but God gives that gift to everybody. But remember Jesus is saying all that the Father gives to Him comes to Him. And now He reinforces this statement in this segment of the text when He says, "'Again, I say to you, nobody can come to Me unless the Father draws him.'" And I can't believe how much debate has gone on in church history over the significance and meaning and application of the word that Jesus used here, which is the word to draw.

I've always been fascinated that that's even the English word that is chosen in most English translations because the same word is used elsewhere when people are thrown into prison. And the Theological Dictionary of the New Testament translates the word draw as the word to compel. When I think of drawing, I think of enticing, wooing, you know, trying to persuade people to come. And we could interpret this by saying that Jesus is saying, that Jesus is saying, nobody can come to Me unless the Father woos Him, unless He entices Him, unless He persuades Him.

But the verb is much stronger than that. The wooing, if you will, the drawing that God does is effective. When God, the Holy Spirit, actively draws a person to Jesus, that person comes to Jesus.

Let me say it again. The person that God, the Holy Spirit, draws to Jesus comes to Jesus, not because He's raped, not because He's coerced, not because He's dragged, kicking and screaming against His will, but because God, the Holy Spirit, in that act of effectual drawing, changes the heart of the person. Where that person previously was blind to the things of God, now the scales of the eyes have been removed, and that which was unpleasant to the soul now is shown to be sweet, attractive, and something that is altogether desirable. So the heavenly drawing of God is one by which God changes the attitude or the inner disposition of the soul of the person so that when the Father draws them to His Son, they come to His Son.

And they eat this bread that gives them the spiritual life that is forever. No one can come to Me unless the Father who sent Me draws him, and I will raise him up the last day. It is written in the prophets, and they shall be taught by God. Therefore, everyone who has heard and learned from the Father comes to Me. All that the Father teaches, all that the Father opens, as it were, come to Jesus. Not that anyone has seen the Father except He was from God.

He has seen the Father. And most assuredly, I say to you, He who believes in Me has everlasting life. I, again, I am the bread of life. Your fathers ate the manna in the wilderness, and they are dead.

That is, the manna in the wilderness sustained them from day to day or from week to week, but eventually they died. This bread is different. This is the bread that comes down from heaven that one may eat of it and not die. I am the living bread which comes down from heaven. And if anyone eats of this bread, he will live forever, and the bread that I shall give is My flesh, which I will give for the life of the world.

This is seen by some as obviously linked to the Lord's Supper. I don't think it was intended at that time, but you can't help but draw parallels from this discourse on the bread of life to what Jesus teaches in the upper room when He said, of His own body. And when He and when He refers to the bread, this is My body which is given for you, because the bread from heaven gives His flesh as a sacrifice for His sheep. And those who partake of this heavenly bread, those who partake of the bread of life, of Jesus Himself, have life everlasting. So, in summary, Jesus is saying, I'm a heavenly being. I'm sent from the Father. I come to nurture you, to feed you, to give you the life that is eternal. There is no other source for that anywhere under heaven than in Christ Himself.

There is really no need to wonder who Jesus is. He told us precisely who He is and what He came to accomplish. We're glad you've joined us for the Monday edition of Renewing Your Mind as we begin Dr. R.C. Sproul's series, Knowing Christ—The I Am Sayings of Jesus. In eight messages, R.C. examines the Apostle John's record of these metaphors that our Savior uses. We'll send you the DVD for your donation of any amount to Ligonier Ministries.

You can reach us by phone at 800-435-4343 or online at renewingyourmind.org. You know, when R.C. and Vesta Sproul began to gather students at a small study center there in the Ligonier Valley of western Pennsylvania, R.C. knew that our greatest need was to know who God is. Only then can we truly know who we are and why we're here and how we're called to live in this world. That continues to be our mission today, and when you give to this ministry, you're helping us make this teaching available to listeners around the world. And today, when you give a donation of any amount, we will be glad to send you Dr. Sproul's series, Knowing Christ.

Our phone number again is 800-435-4343, and you can also find us online at renewingyourmind.org. Tomorrow, R.C. returns to this series to explore another I am saying of Jesus. Isn't it interesting that in our popular vocabulary, when somebody becomes converted, we use the expression, they've seen the light, because before they were blinded to the things of God, and all of a sudden when your eyes are opened and you see the full orb sweetness of the radiance of Christ, everything changes. Jesus as the light of the world. That's tomorrow, here on Renewing Your Mind.