Reflections on John 6 41-51

Answer 1

The Jews then murmured at him, because he said, "I am the bread which came down from heaven." They said, "Is not this Jesus, the son of Joseph, whose father and mother we know? How does he now say, `I have come down from heaven'?" Jesus answered them, "Do not murmur among yourselves. No one can come to me unless the Father who sent me draws him; and I will raise him up at the last day. It is written in the prophets, `And they shall all be taught by God.' Every one who has heard and learned from the Father comes to me. Not that any one has seen the Father except him who is from God; he has seen the Father. Truly, truly, I say to you, he who believes has eternal life. I am the bread of life. Your fathers ate the manna in the wilderness, and they died. This is the bread which comes down from heaven, that a man may eat of it and not die. I am the living bread which came down from heaven; if any one eats of this bread, he will live for ever; and the bread which I shall give for the life of the world is my flesh." ANSWER He is making an analogy between how bread (food) sustains the body, or gives it life when you partake of the bread or food, and so likewise when we partake of Christ (When we trust Jesus Christ as our Saviour who died for our sins), He gives us life eternal, and gives us a reborn spirit that is alive, and eternal. He further is our daily sustenance spiritually as we partake of His Word, The Bible, on a daily basis. In the Bible, Christ is called The Word of God (John 1:1). And the Bible is also called the "mind of Christ", this is because the Bible is the Written Word of God, it is the mind of Christ, in written form. To know it, is to know Christ, to know "His mind". The bible, the written Word of God, is elsewhere in the Bible compared to and called "bread",which in the Bible is a generic term that just means "food", period. So in other words, when we "partake" of or eat (spiritually) of the Word of God, the Bible, it is the same as partaking of Christ. The idea being that we are to get Christ's mind (the Word of God) in us on a daily basis, so that we may be transformed through the renewing of our minds, to be conformed to being like the mind of Christ, so that we think as Christ thinks, in total agreement with the Word of God, so that God can think His thoughts through us, and so likewise he can exercise His will through us, as we become at one in agreement with His will and His mind. He's not saying we literally eat His flesh or drink His blood, nor is He saying, like the Catholic ritual heresy, that when we partake of communion, that the bread we eat literally becomes the flesh of Christ and the wine or Grape Juice that we drink literally becomes the blood of Christ. That is an abominable, childish, and ridiculously superficial understanding of what the scripture is REALLY teaching We as newborn spiritual sons of God have a daily spiritual appetite that is pictured by our physical appetite for food, which of course we have, to remind us that we need to eat in order that the body might not starve to death. So likewise we have this spiritual appetite when we are reborn spiritually (born again) to cause us to desire our spiritual food. That spiritual food is the Word of God, which we are to partake of daily, and like physical food provides the energy for the body etc that it needs to function, so likewise does the Bible for the new spiritual man, it sustains our spiritual life, and allows the spiritual man to grow and get stronger. That is what Christ is speaking about in this passage of Scripture.