SPIRITUAL DIARY FOR 4/14/2016 9:52 AM
My Worship Time Focus: Introduction to John 6:51-59
Bible Reading &
Meditation Reference: John 6:51-59
Message of the verses: “51 “I am the living bread that came down out
of heaven; if anyone eats of this bread, he will live forever; and the bread
also which I will give for the life of the world is My flesh." 52 Then the
Jews began to argue with one another, saying, "How can this man give us
His flesh to eat?" 53 So Jesus said to them, "Truly, truly, I say to
you, unless you eat the flesh of the Son of Man and drink His blood, you have
no life in yourselves. 54 “He who eats My flesh and drinks My blood has eternal
life, and I will raise him up on the last day. 55 “For My flesh is true food,
and My blood is true drink. 56 “He who eats My flesh and drinks My blood abides
in Me, and I in him. 57 "As the
living Father sent Me, and I live because of the Father, so he who eats Me, he
also will live because of Me. 58
"This is the bread which came down out of heaven; not as the
fathers ate and died; he who eats this bread will live forever." 59 These
things He said in the synagogue as He taught in Capernaum.”
I want to
begin this SD with another quote from the sermon that I quoted from yesterday,
that of John MacArthur dated in early 1970 where he gives a paragraph on the
introduction to this passage. “Now John,
in true homiletical fashion, has three basic areas in these verses 51-59. We see the pronouncement, the perplexity and
the promises…the pronouncement Christ makes, the perplexity of the Jews in
response and then the promises that Christ gives. Notice the pronouncement, that’s verse 51 and
He begins by making a pronouncement that is exactly a reiteration of verse 33,
35, 47 and 48. The fifth time He says
this in verse 51, notice it, “I am the living bread that came down from heaven.’ Now you have two things there. You have the nature of Christ, living
bread. You have the source of Christ,
heaven. Very important statement.”
We can
begin our introduction to these verses in the sixth chapter of John by asking
some questions that have been asked for many thousands of years and then we
will give the answer that we all need to hear.
These questions are asked at the beginning of a quotation found in
MacArthur’s introduction written by William Lane Craig who asks “Who am I?’ man
asks. ‘Why am I here? Where am I going?’ Since the Enlightment, when he threw off the
shackles of religion, man has tried to answer these questions without reference
to God. But the answer that came back
were not exhilarating, but dark and terrible.
‘You are the accidental by-product of nature,’ he is told, ‘a result of
matter plus time plus chance. There is
no reason for your existence. All you
face is death.’
“Modern man
though that when he had got rid of God, he had freed himself from all that
repressed and stifled him. Instead, he
discovered that in killing God, he had also killed himself.
“For if
there is no God, he had also then man’s life became absurd…
“[Apart from God] mankind is a
doomed race in a dying universe. Because the human race will eventually cease
to exist, it makes no ultimate difference whether if ever did exist. Mankind is thus no more significant than a
swarm of mosquitoes or a barnyard of pigs, for their end is all the same. The same blind cosmic process that coughed
them up in the first place will eventually swallow them again. (Apologetics: An Introduction [Chicago Moody, 1984],
39, 41)”
If we then look into an Old
Testament book written by the wisest man who ever lived, the book of Ecclesiastes
we will see that Solomon, the author had the same kind of questions and as he
went through his life he had the resources to try about anything he wanted to
find fulfillment in life, and yet his conclusion was Ec. 12:13 “The conclusion,
when all has been heard, is: fear God and keep His commandments, because this
applies to every person.”
The Jews of Jesus’ day fell into a
similar category of not believing God as they got their so-called fulfillment
in life by a blinded study of the Word of God, a book that got very little out
of and now we will see in this second section of Jesus’ sermon to them that because
of their lack of knowledge of His Word that they could not understand what
Jesus was trying to tell them, and therefore rejected it and thus rejected
Him. Now I have to confess that when I
have read this section of verses the many times I have read it that I, too got
the wrong conclusion as to what Jesus was talking about. Newsflash:
“Jesus is not in any way speaking of ‘Communion’ in this passage and we
will explain this as we get into it.
We have the outline from the sermon
I quoted earlier “Jesus’ pronouncement, the Jew’s perplexity, and Jesus’ promises”
are what we will be looking at in this section of verses.
My Steps of Faith for
Today: Doing something about the
conviction that I received from the Lord this morning.
Answer to yesterday’s Bible question: “Sixty-six.”
Today’s Bible question:
How did God provide bread for the Israelites in the wilderness?”
Answer in our next SD.
4/14/2016 10:35 AM
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