The Bread of Life, Part 3 - This Bread is My Flesh
John 6v43-58
27th June 2025
Two weeks ago we saw how Jesus offered the crowd food that endures to eternal life (verse 27) and told them "I am the bread of Life" (verse 35). Last week we read Jesus's promise that "All those the Father gives me will come to me, and whoever comes to me I will never drive away." (verse 37) and His assurance that "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." (verse 39). We saw that, sadly:
John 6v41-42
At this the Jews there began to grumble about him because he said, "I am the
bread that came down from heaven."
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'?"
We continue:
John 6v43-44
"Stop grumbling among yourselves," Jesus answered.
"No one can come to me unless the Father who sent me draws him, and I will raise him
up at the last day."
Jesus knew Who He was. He didn't need their approval. They needed Him. We need Him. They needed to listen to what He says about Himself. We need to listen. He's telling us that no-one can choose to come to Jesus Christ without God's help. Whether we're saved, whether we inherit eternal life, depends on the sovereign will of God.
God draws some people to Jesus and not others. As Paul says in Romans 9v18, "God has mercy on whom he wants to have mercy, and he hardens whom he wants to harden". If God is calling you, you can be absolutely assured that Jesus will receive you. If you've responded to God's call with repentance and faith, you can be absolutely assured that Jesus will never reject you, and when He returns, you’ll rise to meet Him and you'll be with Him for ever. He says:
John 6v45
"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."
God calls all people everywhere to repent (Acts 17v30) but some people don't listen. The ones God has chosen listen. They alone respond to His call. As Jesus said in Matthew 22v14, "many are called by few are chosen".
Then Jesus says:
John 6v46
"No one has seen the Father except the one who is from God; only he has seen the
Father."
Jesus came down from heaven. He's the only person to have seen God the Father. He knows the mind of God better than the Pharisees, better than the crowd, better than us, better than anybody. He’s uniquely qualified to speak about these things. The crowd then – and now – should listen to Him. Most don't. Please do. He tells us:
John 6v47-51a
Very truly I tell you, the one who believes has eternal life.
I am the bread of life.
Your ancestors ate the manna in the wilderness, yet they died.
But here is the bread that comes down from heaven, which anyone may eat and not die.
I am the living bread that came down from heaven. Whoever eats this bread will live
forever."
He's saying this a second time so we don’t miss the amazing grace of the Gospel. But it's still a little veiled. What does Jesus mean by "eating of this bread"? Jesus explains by saying:
John 6v47-51b
"This bread is my flesh, which I will give for the life of the world."
I suspect that His audience that day, whose minds were almost entirely on earthly things, imagined that Jesus was telling them to commit cannibalism. They wouldn't accept that, of course. Unsurprisingly:
John 6v47-52
Then the Jews began to argue sharply among themselves, "How can this man give us
his flesh to eat?"
Jesus doesn't back down from controversy. He continues this teaching in even more vivid terms:
John 6v53-55
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.
Whoever eats my flesh and drinks my blood has eternal life, and I will raise him up at
the last day.
For my flesh is real food and my blood is real drink."
We can see why the crowd didn't understand then what Jesus was saying. They didn't know what we know. But here's a question: If God says something, which usually means if the Bible says something, which we don’t understand, will we reject it because we don't understand it, or will we believe it because it's the word of God, even though we don't understand it? God knows more than we do. He's wiser than we are.
Jesus was using figurative language, of course. After His death and resurrection, we understand that He was speaking about His crucified body and His shed blood on the cross. We don't literally feed on Jesus’s flesh, but we benefit from His sacrifice because we know by faith that His sacrifice paid the penalty for our sins, so we could be forgiven, saved and adopted as God’s children.
Unless we accept that Jesus died for us, we’ll never experience eternal life. We'll never be born again, filled with the Holy Spirit and destined for heaven. But if we do accept Jesus's sacrifice for us, we are guaranteed these things. How glorious! Whoever believes in Christ's atoning sacrifice can be certain that Christ will raise him up on the last day. And we will be with Him for ever.
Jesus says "my flesh is real food and my blood is real drink." Not the sort of bread that we can eat today and be hungry again tomorrow – bread that lasts for eternity. The things of heaven are a great deal more real than the things of earth.
I need to say that we don't literally eat Jesus's body. When we break bread to celebrate the Lord's Supper, or Communion, we eat bread and we drink wine to remind us of Jesus's blood sacrifice. As John Calvin put it, we "feed on Christ in our hearts by faith". Remembering His sacrifice for us does us good. It feeds us, strengthens our faith, and helps us to grow.
Jesus continues:
John 6v56
"Whoever eats my flesh and drinks my blood remains in me, and I in him."
This raises and answers an important question, that may have been in some of our minds for some time: If Jesus is the true bread, and if eating of the true bread by faith means we will never be spiritually hungry or thirsty again, why do I feel so empty?
The answer is simply that we're supposed to continue feeding on Christ by faith. It's not enough to accept the truth of the Gospel intellectually. It's not enough to just remember the day we were born again. We can feed on Christ by faith every day, when we share communion, when we read our Bibles, when we pray, when we worship, when we fellowship together. Jesus promises that we will never be spiritually hungry. By that, He means that God ensures that our spiritual fridge is always full of food, but we do have to open the door and take the food out.
Jesus reassures us:
John 6v57-58
"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.
This is the bread that came down from heaven. Your forefathers ate manna and died,
but whoever feeds on this bread will live forever."
God the Father is eternally alive. He sent Jesus to earth to teach us, to die for our sins, and to rise from the dead to give us eternal life. Jesus has the everlasting life of God within Him, and He can both promise and deliver eternal life to those who believe in Him.
Jesus is the only source of eternal life. No-one comes to the Father except through Him (John 14v6). We cannot know true peace or fulfilment without Him. We have no hope of eternal life without Him. He died and rose again so we can be united with God, now and for ever.