Jesus' description of Himself as the bread of life causes arguments among the Jews. Jesus continues and now discusses His flesh as food and His blood as drink and as a requirement for eternal life. After Dr. Sproul comments on that section, he brings up the subject of the Spirit and again discusses the inability to come to Jesus without it being granted by the father.

Today, we begin with John 6:51–71:

“I am the living bread which came down from heaven. If anyone eats of this bread, he will live forever; and the bread that I shall give is My flesh, which I shall give for the life of the world.”

The Jews therefore quarreled among themselves, saying, “How can this Man give us His flesh to eat?”

Then Jesus said to them, “Most assuredly, I say to 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 food indeed, and My blood is drink indeed. He who eats My flesh and drinks My blood abides in Me, and I in him. As the living Father sent Me, and I live because of the Father, so he who feeds on Me will live because of Me. This is the bread which came down from heaven—not as your fathers ate the manna, and are dead. He who eats this bread will live forever.”

These things He said in the synagogue as He taught in Capernaum.

Therefore many of His disciples, when they heard this, said, “This is a hard saying; who can understand it?”

When Jesus knew in Himself that His disciples complained about this, He said to them, “Does this offend you? What then if you should see the Son of Man ascend where He was before? It is the Spirit who gives life; the flesh profits nothing. The words that I speak to you are spirit, and they are life. But there are some of you who do not believe.” For Jesus knew from the beginning who they were who did not believe, and who would betray Him. And He said, “Therefore I have said to you that no one can come to Me unless it has been granted to him by My Father.”

From that time many of His disciples went back and walked with Him no more. Then Jesus said to the twelve, “Do you also want to go away?”

But Simon Peter answered Him, “Lord, to whom shall we go? You have the words of eternal life. Also we have come to believe and know that You are the Christ, the Son of the living God.”

Jesus answered them, “Did I not choose you, the twelve, and one of you is a devil?” He spoke of Judas Iscariot, the son of Simon, for it was he who would betray Him, being one of the twelve.

He who has ears to hear the Word of God, let him hear it. Let us pray.

Father, as we turn our attention to this text that we have read, which contains so many hard sayings, we pray that the Spirit of truth would intercede for our weakness and slowness of heart to understand and illumine these words, that we may grasp them in their fullness and be changed by them. For we ask it in Jesus’ name. Amen.

Difficult and Harsh Words

The theologians have a technical term for this. They are called the phrases duriora, or the “hard sayings.” Certain sayings that we encounter from time to time in Scripture are called “hard sayings” for two reasons. On the one hand, they are difficult for us to penetrate in our understanding, and in that sense, they are hard. The other way in which this phrase is used is that the words not only seem difficult but, at times, may actually appear harsh to our ears. Because we encounter these hard sayings so frequently in Scripture, and because they often come to us from the lips of Jesus, we need to approach them with a posture of humility so that we may be instructed by our Lord.

Let me give this warning to you: The discourse we are looking at throughout chapter 6, which I read this morning, provoked the hearers of Jesus to leave His company. We have seen throughout our study of the book of John how often the crowds that came to hear Him lecture or to witness His miracles would turn on Him with a certain fickleness when they did not like what He said. But in this discourse, we see that those who walked away from Him were His disciples.

We remember elsewhere in the text that Jesus commissioned seventy of His disciples to go to the cities and villages of Israel, proclaiming the coming of the kingdom. At least at one time in His public ministry, His disciples numbered seventy. Here, that number is reduced to the Twelve, one of whom, we are told, was a devil from the beginning, Judas. So, from the seventy—and that was a minimal number—the list dwindles to eleven who receive the teaching of Christ.

The reason I warn the congregation is that some of us may profess allegiance and loyalty to Jesus until we hear Him teach certain things that we do not like. We also may be inclined to walk away. I pray that that will not be the case with us.

Eat His Flesh

We pick it up with one of the “I AM” statements, in which Jesus said, “I am the living bread.” He had said that He was the bread of life. In this portion of the text, He said, “If anyone eats of this bread, he will live forever.” Then He said, “The bread that I shall give is My flesh, which I shall give for the life of the world.” At this point, the Jews quarreled. The Jews were skeptical, and they said, “How can this Man give us His flesh to eat?”

Jesus knew the murmuring that was going on, so He reinforced the declaration that He had made when He said, “Most assuredly, I say to you, unless . . .” Before I go any further, every time I run into that word in the text, I remind you that the word “unless” signals that something important is coming. This word introduces a necessary condition, a sine qua non for some desired consequence to take place: “Unless Tommy Maddox has a good game for the Steelers this afternoon, then we’re in deep trouble.” That is a necessary condition.

What does Jesus use “unless” for in this text? He is emphasizing the certainty of this necessary condition by saying, “Most assuredly, I say to you, unless you eat the flesh of the Son of Man and drink His blood, you have no life in you.” No life. You might have biological life, but you do not have the life that Christ has come to give to the redeemed. Jesus continues:

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 food indeed, and My blood is drink indeed. He who eats My flesh and drinks My blood abides in Me, and I in him. As the living Father sent Me, and I live because of the Father, so he who feeds on Me will live because of Me. This is the bread which came down from heaven—not as your fathers ate the manna, and are dead. He who eats this bread will live forever.

“Therefore”—that is, because of these words—“many of His disciples, when they heard this, said, ‘This is a hard saying; who can understand it?’” I am not sure I do. If you consult the commentaries and the scholars of church history seeking to understand this discourse, you will find a divided house.

Many biblical scholars through the ages have thought that Jesus here is giving a discourse on the meaning of the Lord’s Supper, and He is saying that unless a person partakes of the real body and blood of Christ in the sacrament of holy communion, he cannot be redeemed. I do not agree with that position, and I am happy that the majority of scholars hold the same position as I do with respect to this text, although with less than dogmatic certainty.

It seems that what Jesus is speaking about here is not the Eucharist. It is not the sacrament of the Lord’s Supper—though certainly, the Lord’s Supper calls attention to the significance of this text. Rather, Jesus is speaking in the same way in which He spoke earlier to the woman at the well, when He talked about the living water that He would give to those who drank from Him. In a similar fashion, He will say in a later “I AM” statement, “I am the vine, and you are the branches” (John 15:5).

The point our Lord is making is that He is the giver of supernatural life. He is the living Redeemer who is sent by the living God to impart eternal life to all who put their trust in Him. What He is saying, in words that may seem crass to our ears today, is this: “You have to come into Me, be united to Me, feast upon Me, not just have a tangential, cavalier relationship to Me. But if you’re going to be mine, if you’re going to participate in the life that I have come to give, you have to devour My flesh and drink My blood.”

Jesus is calling for a wholehearted pursuit of union with Him, without which there is no spiritual life. In a word, religion will not do it. Church attendance will not do it. The only thing that gets us into the kingdom of God, by which we participate in the gift of eternal life, is being in Christ Jesus. To emphasize that, our Lord says, in essence, “You have to take all of Me, just as if you were ingesting Me, just as the branch can only survive if it remains in the vine, because it is the vine that gives life to the plant.”

So, we have to feast upon this bread of heaven. The bread that came in the Old Testament nurtured the people of Israel. They ate it every day, and it kept them alive in the wilderness, but they all still died. But this is the bread of eternal life that comes in the person of Christ Himself.

Offense at the Truth

We now come to another aspect of the hard sayings that are found in this text. In verse 61, we read: “When Jesus knew in Himself that His disciples complained about this, He said to them, ‘Does this offend you?’”

There is an important distinction in Christian ethics that we all need to master, and that is the difference between an offense given and an offense taken. Many times, we take offense at things people do or say when no offense was given. We just did not like it. That happens in the Christian life, it happens in the church, and it happens all the time. We may feel insulted when nobody insults us. The wicked flee when no man pursues. The pagan trembles at the rustling of a leaf. We are sometimes easily offended by things that should not offend us. As a Christian, I am commanded not to give offense, not to violate people, and not to do harm to other people. We should try not to do those things. But sometimes, you can be doing exactly the right thing and offend people because they take offense.

No one ever spoke more perfectly or inoffensively than our Lord did in this encounter with His own disciples. But what happened? They were offended. If people take offense at Jesus, who was perfect, how often do you think they are going to take offense at us, who are not perfect? Jesus says, “Does this offend you?” Maybe it does—but just wait.

Jesus says, “What then if you should see the Son of Man ascend where He was before?” In essence: “What if you see Me clothed in glory, rising to heaven on the mount of ascension, surrounded by the angels? If you watch Me going in My glory, will that offend you? Of course not. You’ll be delighted.” Our Lord is saying here that there are many things He says to us during this life at which we take umbrage. But those are all forgotten when we see the truth, when we see His perfection made manifest before our eyes.

The Flesh Profits Nothing

Then Jesus goes on to say some more hard sayings: “It is the Spirit who gives life; the flesh profits nothing.” Jesus is not saying here: “Eating My physical flesh and drinking My physical blood, that’s not going to give you the life I’m talking about. I’m talking about a spiritual eating and a spiritual drinking.”

Jesus is talking about a spiritual eating and a spiritual drinking, but in this text, He is not talking about His body. He is not talking about His physical being. He is talking about our flesh, because this is a major motif that we see throughout the Bible. We have already seen it in Jesus’ discourse with Nicodemus, where He told Nicodemus that unless a man is born of the water and the Spirit, he cannot see, let alone enter, the kingdom of God.

Do you remember what Jesus said to Nicodemus? “That which is born of the flesh is flesh, and that which is born of the Spirit is spirit” (John 3:6). The flesh cannot produce spiritual reality. If we would just get that principle into our heads it would help us understand that, in our natural condition, we cannot do the things of God. We have no strength for spiritual things, no inclination toward the things of heaven, until God first, by His Holy Spirit, changes the disposition of our hearts and raises us from that state of pure flesh, which the Bible says is spiritual death.

This is what engaged Luther in his ancient debate with Desiderius Erasmus of Rotterdam. Erasmus had written his diatribe against Luther and, frankly, against Luther’s doctrine of predestination. Erasmus held on to the idea that even though we are fallen, there remains a little island of righteousness in the soul of fallen humanity by which we can incline ourselves to come or not to come to the kingdom.

Jesus had already told these people that no one could come to Him unless God did something first, because the flesh cannot do it. “The flesh profits nothing.” When Luther exegeted that passage to Erasmus, he said, “Dr. Erasmus, that nothing is not a little something.” If you are resting on the strength of your righteousness, you have missed what our Lord is teaching here. In your flesh dwells no good thing, and your flesh cannot get you into the kingdom of God. It is the Spirit who brings life, who raises us from spiritual death.

His Words Are Life

“The words that I speak to you are spirit, and they are life.” Do you hear that? How does the Spirit make us alive? Through the Word. The Spirit comes with the Word. He takes the Word to pierce our hearts, to change the disposition of our souls. It is by the Word of God that the universe was brought out of nothing. It is by the Word of God that you are rescued from spiritual nothingness and made alive unto the things of God. It is the power of the Word.

How do you feel when I ask you to stand all that time while I am reading twenty verses of Scripture? Does it make you uncomfortable? I have to tell you, I love it. I love to hear the very Word of God coming out of the Scripture. I love to hear these words read aloud.

I remember one of the most difficult pastoral duties I had when I was very young, only in my second year of teaching. I was teaching at a school in Massachusetts, and one of the men who had called me to come there became sick unto death. I used to go to Massachusetts General Hospital every day and sit by his bed and watch him die, a day at a time, until we finally came down to those last few hours. All I could do was take some ice and put it on his parched lips and wipe the sweat from his forehead.

This man could not speak anymore, but I knew what he wanted. I would sit there and read the text of Scripture to him. That is how I want to die: listening to the Word of God, because the Word is life. Jesus said, “My words are life,” and look at these people. They just walked away. They did not want to hear it.

Jesus is saying: “There are some of you who do not believe. That’s why I said no one can come to Me unless it’s been granted to him by My Father.” There is predestination again. Verse 66: “From that time many of His disciples went back and walked with Him no more.”

Where Can We Go?

Finally—let us not miss this—Jesus watched the exodus. I do not know, fifty-eight of them, sixty of them, seventy of them. Who knows how large the number of disciples was at that point? But all those who had taken offense at the teaching of Jesus walked away. It was a wildcat strike. They left, and He watched them as they departed. He turned to the Twelve, and like Caesar in his dying moment, said, “Et tu, Brute?” “You too? Will you also go away?”

Listen to this great confession of faith by Simon Peter. Simon does not say: “Oh no, Lord. We’re never going away. We love these hard sayings that You’ve been laying on us today.” No, listen to Simon. He basically says: “Where can we go? You’re the best we have. We don’t have anywhere else to go, because we understand that You alone have the words of life.”

Are you ever tempted to leave? I certainly have been, many times, and I do not know how many times these words of Simon Peter have echoed through my own mind. Where can I go? Am I to go to Mohammed and join the jihad? I am not going to find the words of eternal life there. I will not find them with Immanuel Kant or Jean-Paul Sartre. I will not find them in the lyrics of contemporary music. If I want the words of eternal life, there is only one place I can go to get them: to the One who set His table for us this morning, the One who has given to us His body and His blood, and has given us His life, that we may live.

That is why I invite all of you who are Christians to come, you who acknowledge that you cannot come to the Father apart from Him, you who understand that you are helpless in your sin apart from Christ and that apart from Him you can do nothing. All who believe that and have examined yourselves, acknowledge your sin, and come now into His presence, seeking forgiveness and the newness of life.

All who are not currently banned from the Lord’s table by church discipline, you are not only welcome to come to His table, but you are urged to come. This is the Master’s table, who gave His body and blood and who descends, even this morning, by the power of the Holy Ghost and through His divine nature, to be truly present at this table, so that when we come to Him we will be strengthened by His resurrected body. Let us pray.

Take now, O God, these common elements of bread and wine. Consecrate them to an uncommon, supernatural use, that they may signify to us Your very presence here this morning to touch us at our point of need. We come to your table with our guilt, our burdens, and our fears, that we may leave them there as we may be touched by Your presence. For we ask it in Jesus’ name. Amen.

This transcript has been lightly edited for readability.