John 6:14

PROPHECY FULFILLED

‘This is of a truth that prophet that should come into the world.’

John 6:14

We may reverently take up the words of the admiring crowd as they beheld the miracle of multiplied bread, and expand them in the light of a fuller revelation. ‘This is of a truth that Prophet’ Who has come once in the mystery of the Incarnation; Who is coming again to gather together the elect saints to be partakers in His glory. We can confidently declare that He is the Prophet foretold; the Living Bread that came down from heaven. As a proof that He is Divine we point thankfully to His regenerating work, and exultingly to His power to satisfy the craving of human souls. We may examine and criticise His teaching, and comment upon the perfection of His example. We do it in the spirit of glowing pride, delighting in Him as servants in a powerful and generous master. Let us lovingly contemplate the result of His redeeming work, and pronounce Him in our hearts and with our lips to be the Messiah foretold and the King coming to judgment.

Those who lived in the days of the first Advent were conscious of a longing—of a void within the soul which all human systems had hitherto been unable to fill. No philosophy, no moral law, no mere device of man, could still the cry upon human lips, nor the tumult in human hearts.

I. Jesus differs from all human teachers, and the remedy, which He declares to be unlimited in its powers, is not a system or a code of morals, but a Person, God veiled in human flesh, Who was conceived by the Holy Ghost and born of the Virgin Mary. He presents Himself as our Redeemer and Restorer. He is not only the Priest, but the Victim, the Lamb of God that taketh away the sins of the world; He is not only the Mediator, but the ground of the mediation; not only the Teacher, but the sum and substance of all that is taught. If Jesus be within the human soul, purified for His temple, then and then only the longing is satisfied and the cry is hushed.

II. Jesus Christ presents Himself to man as a moral being, and is Himself the mainspring of the morality which He teaches. Roman and Jewish laws could not curb unbridled passion by the strong hand of power; but the foundations of Christian morality are loyalty and love, and the object of their rapturous devotion is Emmanuel—God with us. By love man is taken out of himself and raised into a higher and purer atmosphere; the once worshipped shrine of self is battered down, and in its place is reared and beautified a holier altar. Loyalty to Jesus lifts the soul from earth to heaven, and sustains it in the sincere worship of all that is pure. Thus is Jesus all in all to man as a moral being.

III. And man, as a spiritual being, beholds Jesus the Good Physician, and acknowledges that if he be willing he can be made whole. Man, at his best, has an insatiable longing to feel after God if haply he may find Him. In Jesus, God comes down from heaven to earth.

—Rev. W. E. Coghlan.

Illustration

‘Look out upon the world as it is and imagine what it would have been had not Jesus come, the Prophet foretold, had He not sealed with His death of agony the lessons of His self-sacrificing life. The spiritual world without Jesus Christ would be like the natural world without the sun: we should now be groping miserably in the dark without life and immortality brought to light. All that is best and purest in human society is the result, directly or indirectly, of the teaching of Jesus of Nazareth and the beauty of His undeviating example. Charitable institutions for the needy; hospitals for the sick in peace, and the wounded in war; the sanctity of the marriage vow; the purity of domestic life; the respect given to women; the abolition of slavery; mercy to the conquered foe; the bond of brotherly love; even-handed justice to rich and poor; forgiveness of injuries; the careful training of the young, and the keen anxiety for the salvation of other men’s souls; all these things are the results, directly or indirectly, of the life and death of Christ.’