Two sailboats slice through the waves of a vast sea. Both are seeking the shore. The crew of one vessel turns against the wind, thinking to find harbor in that direction. But, unknown to them, they are headed for a life-threatening storm, and their little craft will not survive. The crew of the other boat chooses to sail with the wind, and before long they see the lights along the shore. And in time they are warm and dry and safe at home.
That’s what we have here at the end of John, chapter 6. We have would-be disciples who turn back from following Jesus because they are not convinced that He can give them the life they want. And we have the Twelve—minus one, of course—who remain with the Lord because they ‘have believed, and have come to know’ that the life they want, the only real life there is, is to be found in Him.
The contrast places a choice before us. Will we sail against the wind? Will we go against the witness of the Spirit, who ‘blows where [He] wishes’ (John 3:8), or will we sail toward Jesus, our safe harbor and our home? Or, to put it in the words of our text, will we believe and come to know that Jesus alone has the words of eternal life?
Let’s say our heart is set on this latter course. We desire Jesus. We yearn for the life He gives. How will it become ours? Or, more precisely, how will we become His? And how will we know that the life we want—the life we truly want—is in Jesus?
The answer? It is all of grace. Peter says to Jesus in verses 68 and 69, ‘Lord…, You have the words of eternal life, and we have believed, and have come to know, that you are the Holy One of God.’ It is only in Jesus that we will find the life we truly want. But how did Peter know? And how will we know? According to what we read here in God’s Word, we will ‘come to know’ through the grace of the Triune God—Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.
In John 6, the Spirit gets first mention. In verse 63, near the beginning of our passage, Jesus says, ‘It is the Spirit who gives life; the flesh is no help at all.’ You want life? The life you want is in Jesus, and you will ‘come to know’ that through the Spirit.
Not through ‘the flesh.’ It is ‘no help.’ And yet, that’s what the would-be disciples relied on. They were counting on human ability, on their own good judgment. They were trusting in their own sound reasoning. And look where it got them. They had chased Jesus all over the countryside. They had no doubt sensed something in Him for which their souls longed. But the clearer He got about who He was, where He had come from, and what He had come for, the fuzzier their thinking got. And they chose to sail against the wind.
You can see it happening in verses 60 and 61. ‘When many of his disciples heard it’—heard what? Heard the claims Jesus was making for Himself, that He is ‘the bread of life,’ that He has ‘come down from heaven,’ that the bread He will give for the life of the world is His flesh—when they heard this, ‘they said, “This is a hard saying; who can listen to it?” Who can listen to this stuff? ‘But Jesus, knowing in himself that his disciples were grumbling about this, said to them, “Do you take offense at this?”
We will take offense at this if we rely on the flesh, if we depend on our own unaided reason, our best judgment. If we rely on the flesh, we will place ourselves above Jesus, pass judgment on Him, and take offense at the claims He makes. Many do still to this day. Insist that Jesus is the only way to God, the only door to the sheepfold, the only One who has the words of eternal life, and people will take offense. “It is unreasonable,” they say. “It is unfair.” And they are thinking—they are relying on the flesh, on the purely human capacity to discern what is true and what is not. And they wind up placing themselves above Jesus.
But if we rely on the Spirit—if we sail with the wind—we will place ourselves below Jesus. Our Lord asks in verse 62, “What if you were to see the Son of Man ascending to where he was before?” Some would see that. The opening chapter of Acts recounts how the apostles—Peter and the rest—witnessed our Lord’s ascension. But what if the unbelieving world could see it? Would they then believe? No. They would rationalize it away because they rely on the flesh, on human ability. ‘It is the Spirit who gives life,’ Jesus says; ‘the flesh is no help at all.’ But when the Spirit breathes life into you, you grasp who Jesus is. You believe. You come to know. He is the Holy One of God. And you place yourself under Him.
So, we come to know through the Spirit that the life we want is in Jesus. And we come to know that, as well, through the Father. ‘I told you,’ Jesus says, ‘that no one can come to me unless it is granted him by the Father.’ That’s in verse 65. And there are two implications in Jesus’ words.
One is: Coming to Jesus is impossible unless the Father grants it. The would-be disciples in this passage came to Jesus, but they didn’t come to Him. You know what I mean? They were with Him on ‘the other side of the Sea of Galilee’ (6:1). They were part of the ‘large crowd’ that was ‘following him’ (6:2). They saw Him feed the multitudes with but a few loaves and fishes. They themselves ate ‘their fill’ (6:12). And then, when the Twelve left for Capernaum, ‘they themselves got into the boats and went to Capernaum, seeking Jesus’ (6:24). There was a life they wanted, and they thought they might find it in Him. Did they? No. In the end, they took offense at Him, grumbled against Him, and ‘turned back and no longer walked with him’ (6:66). Why? Because coming to Jesus is impossible unless the Father grants it.
But the Twelve—did they also want to go away? No. Why not? Because coming to Jesus is possible if the Father grants it. It is in fact inevitable. Jesus makes this point repeatedly in this chapter. He says in verse 37, ‘All that the Father gives me will come to me, and whoever comes to me I will never cast out.’ Again, He says in verse 44, ‘No one can come to me unless the Father who sent me draws him. And I will raise him up on the last day.’ And now, in verse 65, our Lord says, ‘No one can come to me unless it is granted him by the Father.’
Frankly, I don’t know how anyone can read the Gospel of John and not believe the Doctrines of Grace: the total inability of anyone to save themselves, the sovereign choice of God to save some without them qualifying themselves in some way, the fact that Jesus would ‘lose nothing of all that [the Father] has given [Him] (6:39), the effectual call of God that the sinner cannot resist—‘to whom shall we go?’ Peter asks Jesus—and, finally, God’s preservation of His people—‘they will never perish,’ Jesus says (10:28). How can anyone read John and not see this?
So we come to know through the Spirit and through the Father that the life we want is in Jesus. And we wouldn’t want life in Him did not the Spirit enliven us and the Father call us. It is all of grace. It is the work of the Triune God. And therefore we see, in addition, that we come to know through the Son as well that the life we want is in Jesus.
Verse 66 brings sadness to my heart. It says that ‘many of his disciples turned back and no longer walked with him.’ Their choice, for which they will eternally be responsible. The offer of the gospel was there. The invitation was given, but they refused it. Jesus had told them—He said, ‘The words that I have spoken to you are Spirit and life’ (6:63b). Believe what I say and you will find the life you want, the life for which you truly yearn, a supernatural life, the life that only the Spirit gives. But they did not believe. Jesus knew they wouldn’t. Verse 64 says, ‘Jesus knew from the beginning who those were who did not believe.’
But the Twelve were not among that group—except for the one, of course, except for Judas. So when Jesus turned to them and asked, ‘Do you want to go away as well?’ Simon Peter spoke for the group and said, ‘Lord, to whom shall we go? You have the words of eternal life, and we have believed, and have come to know, that you are the Holy One of God’ (6:68-69, emphasis added).
Look at that phrase, ‘the Holy One of God.’ It is an echo of the Old Testament and one of its cherished titles for Yahweh. It occurs twenty-seven times in the book of Isaiah alone, once in 2 Kings (19:22), three times in the Psalms (71:22; 78:41; 89:18), twice in Jeremiah (50:29; 51:5), and once in Ezekiel (39:7). In Isaiah 54:5 we read, ‘The LORD of hosts is his name…; the Holy One of Israel is your Redeemer, the God of the whole earth he is called.’ This is what the would-be disciples took offense at. This is what they were grumbling about—that Jesus is ‘the bread that came down from heaven’ (6:41), that He will ascend ‘the where he was before’ (6:62), and that, in between, He will give His flesh for the life of the world (cf. 6:51).
But the Twelve—minus one—were not offended. The Twelve—minus one—did not grumble. No. They knew who Jesus is, and knowing who Jesus is keeps His own from walking away. We say with Peter, ‘To whom shall we go?’ (6:68). There is no one else to turn to. ‘There is no other name…given among men by which we must be saved’ (Acts 4:12). Knowing who Jesus is keeps us from walking away. And then there is this: knowing who Jesus is keeps us walking His way. Again with Peter we say to Jesus, ‘You have the words of eternal life.’ The life we want is in You, Jesus.
There will come those moments, no doubt, when the thought of going away will pass through our minds. Others have ‘turned back.’ Others still will. And in the heat of temptation or in the dark of doubt or the fog of discouragement we may be enticed just this once to look for the life we want somewhere else, some place else but in Jesus. We will hear other voices beckoning to us to grumble and perhaps just for a brief moment ‘take offense.’ What will we do? Will we also go away? May it never be. Let us at those points along the way call to mind that ‘it is the Spirit who gives life,’ that it is the Father who grants us to ‘come to’ Jesus, and that there is really no one else to whom to go, for Jesus—and Jesus alone—has ‘the words of eternal life.’ He is the Way, and the Truth, and the Life—the life we really want.
The wind is blowing across the vast sea on which our little vessel floats. The Spirit is moving in the hearts of His people. The Father has charted for us the way to shore. And the Son, the light shining in the darkness, is signaling the way. Others will take a different course from ours, but the Triune God—Father, Son, and Holy Spirit—has charted for us the way home, the way to safe harbor and to the life we want.
