"Loathing The Bread"

Well, I’ll tell you one of the reasons you usually won’t hear that kind of request. It is because there’s usually no such thing as a Wednesday evening doctrine class. Another reason is that in so many churches there’s never a call to repentance and never a hint made that perhaps our hearts need to be changed by Jesus at all.

Jesus saw right through them, didn’t He? “Rabbi, when did You get here?”

“Amen, amen, I say to you, you seek Me, not because you saw signs, but because you ate of the loaves and were filled” You spent the morning rowing across this big sea, just to get your belly filled…and if I feed you, in about 4 hours you’re going to be starving again and you still won’t be thinking about worshiping God in Jerusalem or any place else. You’ll be checking the gossip lines to find out where I’ve gone next, to get filled again.

Now I want you to get an idea of the dismissive attitude they have toward what Jesus has to say to them. He tells them in verse 29 that the only work God calls for is the work of belief. It is a form of obedience. Believe in Him whom God has sent. And how do they respond to this gracious offer?

They ask for a sign to prove Himself. What? What work do You perform?

Well, let’s see… He just fed them all miraculously out of a small lunch basket. That’s not enough? Now they say, ‘Before we believe in You we must see a sign’? What kind of a sign to you think they wanted?

Lunch!

“Our fathers ate the manna in the wilderness”. What are they saying? They are saying, ‘Moses gave the good stuff; can You match that?’

Again, Jesus makes His gracious offer. It wasn’t Moses who gave you manna, it was My Father who gave you manna, and it is My Father who gives the true bread from heaven that gives life to the world.

We see the manna as a type, don’t we? We understand it to be symbolic of the One who would come down from heaven and give life to the world. God gave them this miraculous bread in the wilderness to sustain them, and He gave Jesus, the Bread of Life, in the wilderness of this world of sin, that all who believe in Him will endure to eternal life, which the Son of Man gives.

But do you know what they did? They did the same thing their fathers in the wilderness did. I’ll show you. Look at verse 34.

“They said therefore to Him, ‘Lord, evermore give us this bread’.” They still weren’t getting it; they still thought He was talking about feeding their bellies.

How do I know? Because when He very clearly tells them, “I am the bread of life”, verse 41 says ‘The Jews therefore were grumbling about Him, because He said, “I am the bread that came down out of heaven”.

Why are they grumbling? Because they are finally realizing that He isn’t talking about bread they can physically eat, but that He is talking about Himself and the spiritual life He imparts if they would partake of Him, and they don’t want Jesus!