John 6:22-71

CHAPTER 33

PUZZLE OF THE MULTITUDE

John 6:22-71. “On the following day the multitude, standing beyond the sea, saw that there was no other ship except one, and that Jesus did not go along with His disciples into the ship, but that His disciples departed alone. Other ships came from Tiberias, near the place where they ate the bread, our Lord giving thanks.” Tiberias is on the west coast, Bethsaida on the northwest, and Capernaum due north. The mountain park where He fed the multitudes is off the coast, in full view of the sea, and about equidistant from Bethsaida and Tiberias. Hence our ships soon set out from Tiberias to Capernaum, carrying many of the multitudes on the track of the disciples, as this was the best they could do, because Jesus having disappeared the preceding evening after sending away His disciples and dismissing the multitude, they knew not His whereabouts. “And when the multitude saw that Jesus is not there, nor His disciples, they embarked in ships, and came to Capernaum, seeking Jesus. And finding Him beyond the sea, they said to Him, Master, when did You come hither? Jesus responded to them, and said, Truly, truly, I say unto you, You seek Me, not because you saw the miracles, but because you ate of the loaves and were filled.” The multitudes did not know that Jesus, after spending a few hours in prayer alone in the mountain, had walked out on the stormy sea in the midnight darkness, and joined His tempest-tossed disciples, saving them and the ship from a watery sepulcher, consequently they were seriously puzzled when they find Him beyond the sea. You observe here He makes no answer to the question propounded by idle curiosity a profitable example for us all. His time was precious, and so is ours. Good Lord, help us to economize it! But He proceeds at once to preach to them the solid gospel truth they so much needed, reading the superficial and carnal motives which actuated them by thousands to follow Him for the loaves and fishes, as we see this day verified on all sides; e.g., immigrants into a city or village depositing their membership in the Church which presents the most capacious opening for the patronage of their business, thus going for the loaves and fishes instead of the Living Bread. “Labor not for the food that perisheth, but the food that endureth unto eternal life, which the Son of man doth give to you; for this the Father, God, hath sealed.” The reason why our bodies are mortal is because they receive their constituency from mortal food, consisting of many different elements, segregated by vital affinity, the chemical forces incessantly counteracting till they predominate over the vital, when death and disintegration ensue, this mortal returning to the dust whence it came; meanwhile, the human spirit, being a unit, is unsusceptible of this disintegration, as leaving no component parts, it is impregnable by the laws of chemical affinity. Therefore it is immortal, and can never die. This immortality, having been conferred by the Almighty, is forever perpetuated by our identity with Him.

THE WORKS NECESSARY TO SALVATION

“What must we do that we may work the works of God?” i.e., do the works which God requires in order to our salvation. To this important question, propounded by the multitude, our Savior's answer is clear, explicit, and unequivocal “Jesus responded and said unto them, This is the work of God, that you may believe on Him whom He has sent.” This answer dumbfounds all the ritualists and legalists of all ages and nations, illustrating the utter falsity of the great dogma of salvation by works, which enslaves Pagans, Moslems, Papists, and Protestants, deluding them with the silly infatuation that God needs something which we can give or do, oblivious to the grandeur, sublimity, and glory of His omniscience, omnipotence, and omnipresence, possessing millions of worlds, and ready to speak into existence millions more.

HEAVENLY MANNA

“And they said unto Him, Then what miracle do You perform that we may see and believe? Do what You may do? Our fathers ate manna in the desert; as has been written, He gave unto them bread from heaven to eat.” (Psalms 78:24.) The Jews always look back to the manna, which they ate forty years in the desert of Arabia, as the greatest miracle in their history. Now that Jesus is performing stupendous miracles, the recent multiplication of the loaves and fishes actually reminding them of the copious quantities of bread which so long fell nightly from heaven, sufficient to feed three millions of people, they now cut the matter short by asking Him to feed them incessantly, as Moses, His great predecessor, had done. “Then Jesus said to them, Truly, truly, I say unto you, Moses did not give you the bread from heaven, but My Father giveth to you the true bread from heaven. For the bread of God is He that cometh down from

‘heaven, and giveth life to the world. Then they said to Him, Lord, always give unto us this bread. Then Jesus said to them, I am the Bread of Life; he that cometh unto Me may never hunger, and he that believeth on Me shall never thirst.” The manna, with which God kept them from starving to death forty years, while following the pillar of cloud by day and fire by night through the vast burning deserts of Arabia, is the magnitudinous type of Christ, who, by His omnipotent grace, momentarily administered by the Holy Spirit, perpetuates our spiritual life, while we roam through this desert-waste of sin and sorrow, verifying our probation till duly tested and tried, when the Master will say, “Come up higher.” Hence we have here the significant affirmation, “I am the Bread of Life.”

ELECTION

“But I said unto you, That you have seen and you do not believe;” i.e., they had seen the wonderful miracle of feeding the multitudes, so vividly illustrating the mysterious sustenance of the human spirit by the Holy Spirit. “Every one which the Father giveth unto Me, shall come unto Me; and him that cometh unto Me, I will in nowise cast out, because I have come down from heaven; not that I may do My own will, but the will of Him that sent Me. But this is the will of Him that sent Me, that everything which the Father bath given unto Me, I shall lose nothing of the same, but I will raise it up in the last day. For this is the will of My Father, that every one seeing the Son and believeth on Him, may have eternal life, and I will raise him up in the last day.” Here our Savior goes down into the deep and incomprehensible truth of election, so prominently revealed in many Scriptures. There are really two sides to the atonement. While Christ died for all objectively i.e., evolving the gracious possibility of universal salvation; subjectively, the atonement only reaches the elect, whom the Father has given Him, and whom He draws to Him by His Spirit. There is no confliction between this election and human free agency, though finite minds may not be able to reconcile these two distinct cardinal truths of Revelation.

“Will the men of Keilah deliver me up into his hand? Will Saul come down as Thy servant bath beard? O Lord God of Israel, I beseech Thee, tell Thy servant. And the Lord said, He will come down. Then said David, Will the men of Keilah deliver me and my men into the hand of Saul? And the Lord said, They will deliver thee up.” (1 Samuel 23:11-12.)

This notable item in the history of David's flight from Saul throws light on the apparent irreconcilability of the Divine sovereignty and human agency. David, with his six hundred braves, takes refuge in the city of Keilasi, the men receiving him with fulsome flattery, and promising to stand by him under every emergency. David enjoyed that gift so important to us all, “discernment of spies” (1 Corinthians 12:10), which enabled him to read men like books. Suspicious of their fidelity, he falls on his knees, and talks to the Lord about the matter, as you see in the above Scripture. Do you not observe the answer God gives him in reference to the coming of Saul and the perfidy of the Keilites “He will come down;” “They will deliver thee up.” David understood the Word of the Lord, and knew that, while no conditions were expressed, they were implied. So he, that moment, blows his bugle, rallies his men, and gives marching orders for a “double quick,” assuring them that they are among traitors, and the enemy is close on their track. Consequently, Saul, constantly posted as to the movements of David, hearing that he had left Keilah, never came, but took a shorter route on his track; while, of course, the Keilites did not deliver him up, as he was not there, and Saul did not come to receive him. Thus we see that even the Divine decrees are not incompatible with human agency. The thing for us to do is to heed the warning, “Make your calling and election sure.” We can all enjoy the blessed consolation of identity with God's elect, and that is certainly enough for us. Let us do our utmost to prevail on all of the non-elect to become candidates for life, salvation, sanctification, and heaven, assuring them that God will, in mercy, elect them. This deep and mysterious truth, evolved by our Lord in that memorable sermon in the synagogue of Capernaum, not only puzzled and appalled the multitude, but, with other profound and immutable realities, deep-seated in the Divine economy, actually deflected many of His disciples. “Therefore the Jews continued to murmur concerning Him, because He said, I am the Bread having come down from heaven; and they said, Is not this Jesus, the son of Joseph, whose father and mother we know? How now does He say, That I have come down from heaven?” You see, the great difficulty on the part of the people was to comprehend the Divine hemisphere of His Christhood, prone, in their carnal cogitations, to turn incessantly to the human. “Jesus responded and said to them, Do not murmur with one another. No one is able to come unto Me unless the Father who sent Me may draw him, and I will raise him up in the last day.” The Holy Spirit has been in the world from the beginning, drawing to the Son all whom the Father has given Him; so that, in a mysterious way, the elect of all nations, heathen, Mohammedan, Greek, Latin, and Anglican, will all get there, and stand on the right hand of the Judge, acquitted in that great day. God forbid that we should stumble over the deep truths of His kingdom! Like little children at the feet of Jesus, taught by the Holy Ghost, let us receive them by simple faith, having time and eternity in which to explore and comprehend them.

“It has been written in the prophets, They shall all be taught of God; every one hearing from the Father, and learning, cometh unto Me.” Millions who have never heard the gospel, taught by the Holy Ghost, will, in some mysterious way, reach the kingdom. We must not depreciate human agency, nor lay too much emphasis on it. “Not that any one has seen the Father, but Him who is with God, the same bath seen God.” The present tense here reveals the fact that Jesus was with God while on earth. We must not lean unduly to the human side of the Messiahship, thus obscuring the grand fact of His omnipresence, simultaneously in heaven, earth, and all other worlds. “Truly, truly, I say unto you, That he that believeth bath eternal life.” Wonderful simplicity of the redemptive scheme, faith being the isolated and only condition of receiving eternal life! N.B. This saving faith is neither intellectual nor creedistic, but spiritual. (Romans 10:10.) “I am the bread of life. Your fathers ate manna in the wilderness, and are dead; He is the bread who cometh down from heaven, in order that whosoever may eat of Him, indeed, may not die.” Here He is leading their minds away from the temporal side of salvation, illustrated by the manna, which their ancestors had eaten and died, to the spiritual, involving the grand, fundamental truth of soul-life, maintained and perpetuated by the Omnipotent Creator and Mediator. “I am the living bread, having come down from heaven; if any one may eat of Me, the bread, he shall never die; but the bread which I will give for the life of the world is My flesh.” Beginning with the exceedingly familiar history of the manna, which they, in their carnal diagnosis, apprehended in a simple material sense, but which was really the greatest type of Christ in Old Testament symbolism, He now endeavors to lead them on from the type to the Antitype. Here they stumble, and many of His disciples fall.

EATING HIS FLESH & DRINKING HIS BLOOD

“Therefore the Jews continued to contend with one another, saying, How is this Man able to give unto us His flesh to eat? Then Jesus said to them, Truly, truly, I say unto you, Unless you may eat the flesh of the Son of man, and may drink His blood, you have no life in yourselves. He that eateth My flesh, and drinketh My blood, bath eternal life, and I will raise him up in the last day. For My flesh is the true nutriment, and My blood the true drink.

He that eateth My flesh, and drinketh My blood, abideth in Me, and I in him. As the living Father sent Me, and I live through the Father, truly, he that feedeth on Me shall also live through Me. He is the bread who came down from heaven; not as the fathers ate, and are dead; he that eateth this bread shall live forever. He spoke these things, teaching in the synagogue in Capernaum.” Our Savior is just now winding up the second year of His ministry, which has been a sweeping revival from the beginning, starting out from that greatest revival the world had seen, under the preaching of John the Baptist, but soon far transcending it, not only shaking all Israel with the tread of a spiritual earthquake, but with the meager news facilities of that day, so far as the heathen nations heard the paradoxical and joyful news, they actually came from the ends of the earth, to see His mighty works, and hear His inimitable preaching. As a rule, in a great, spreading revival, the majority evanesce, and only the faithful minority hold on. The time has come in our Lord's ministry when bottomrock truth must be preached, though it will sift His following like the hurricane, weeding out of the forest every dead and fragile tree, and only leaving the tough and thrifty, to receive new impetus in their enlarged capacity, and grow into gianthood. They now hear from His lips this profoundest truth that has ever rung in their ears; i.e., eating His flesh and drinking His blood. Now what is meant by drinking His blood? N.B. Faith is the spiritual organ receiving everything from God. We read that the blood redeems, cleanses, and sanctifies. Therefore we conclude that drinking His blood is spiritually, through faith, involving entire consecration, so apprehending and appropriating the infallible promises of God, to thoroughly and radically expurgate our spirits by the cleansing blood, as to sanctify us wholly, keep us under the blood, clean, pure, and spotless, amid all the contaminations of this dark, wicked, God-forgetting world, robed and ready to meet our Heavenly Bridegroom when He shall descend and call His saints. What do we understand by eating His flesh? In a similar manner, spiritually, through faith, we are so to receive the great truths of God's Word, appertaining to the glorification of our Lord's body, when He flew away to heaven, that we not only have faith for entire sanctification in the blood, but for the glorification of our bodies similitudinously to the glorious body of our ascended Lord, culminating in our translation, when He comes for His saints, or our felicitous participation of the first resurrection. (Revelation 10:6.) And thus our transformation, soul and body, into the blessed similitude of the risen and glorified Jesus, our only Paragon, Exemplar, and glorious Prototype. Thus, by faith, we are to live momentarily in the spiritual and faithful diagnosis, apprehension, and appropriation of these transcendent realities, whose normal effect is to make us unselfish, unworldly, angelic, and Christ-like in our meditations, conversation, and deportment, always abounding in the work of the Lord, daily and hourly watching and waiting for His return.

THE GREAT APOSTASY

“Therefore many of His disciples, having heard, said, This is a hard speech; who is able to hear it? And Jesus, knowing in Himself that His disciples are murmuring concerning this, said to them, Does this offend you? Therefore, if you may see the Son of man ascending up where He was formerly [Here is an ellipsis: “What would you do?”] It is the Spirit that createth life; the flesh profiteth nothing. The words which I have spoken unto you are spirit and life.” Popular religion is pre-eminently materialistic, and to that extent utterly worthless, illusory, and fatal to its deluded votaries, who look at fine houses, eloquent preachers, robed clergy, pipe-organs, fantastical choirs, pompous ceremonies, and all sorts of Church machinery, and thus lose sight of the meek and lowly Jesus, who had not a place to lay His head, but went about doing good. Here you see, from the plain words of Jesus, the pure spirituality of His religion..

He positively affirms that it is the Spirit who creates in us spiritual life, and that “the flesh profiteth nothing,” thus utterly abnegating the essentially of water baptism, Eucharist, Church ordinances, edifices, and everything else appertaining to the body, and constituting ecclesiastical rights, ceremonies, and ruachinery. Do not understand us to depreciate any of these temporal institutions. They are all right in their place, a miniature survival of the symbolic dispensation, having their place in the educational department of the gospel. They are like clothes on the man, which are no essential part of the human organism. When these temporalities monopolize our affections, and become substitutes for saving grace, Satan always transforms them into idols, and turns them into greased planks, on which he slides their poor deluded followers into hell. The deliverances of the Savior at this point are so decisive and explicit as forever to sweep all controversy from the field. The Jewish Church at that time, ministry and membership, were spiritually dead, and utterly bewildered in the fogs of ritualism, locked tight in dead formality and hollow hypocrisy, with a noble exception here and there. Consequently this deep, spiritual teaching threw bombshells in all directions.

“But there are certain ones of you who do not believe.” For Jesus, from the beginning, knew that “there are some who do not believe, and there is one who is about to betray Him.” This is the first insinuation against Judas Iscariot, one of the Twelve. “And He said, On this account, I have said to you, That no one is able to come unto Me unless it had been given unto him from the Father.” We see from this statement that there was no bogus about Judas. God, who is no respecter of persons, had given unto him the grace to come to Jesus, and we see that he was one of those who “had been given of the Father.” N.B. This date of our Lord's ministry is at the expiration of two years, during which the enemy had been pulling on Judas, through the office of apostolical treasurer, to corrupt the simplicity of his heart with the love of money. The visitation of the Spirit to Judas, his call to the discipleship, and even to the apostleship, did not vitiate his spiritual freedom, nor discontinue his probation. “Therefore from that, many of His disciples went back, and walked no more with Him.” The revelation at this point favors the conclusion that the apostasy was really enormous, actually bringing the problem face to face with the inspired Twelve. You see the reason why this great apostasy took place, cutting down the ranks of discipleship to the faithful few. It was because our Lord evolved those deep and magnitudinous truths of entire sanctification and coming glorification, at the same time elucidating the pure spirituality of His kingdom. A modern critic, in a parallel case i.e., a preacher offending and alienating the majority of his members by proclaiming, expounding, elucidating, and enforcing the great doctrine and precious experience of entire sanctification would say, “He made a great mistake.” If so, he is in good company, as, you see, Jesus made the same, alienating the multitude of His disciples, so they “went back, and walked no more with Him.” Thus you see this was a finality with those disciples. John, our inspired author, lived to be a hundred and one years old, thus surviving nearly all of those apostatizing disciples. He, with the inspiration of the Holy Ghost, tells us that this was a finale with them, and “they walked no more with Him.” Let this incident be duplicated in any of our Churches, and tempests of censure will be poured on the preacher from pulpits and pews, and, in all probability, ecclesiastical decapitation supervene. Yet the man is faithfully walking in the footprints of Jesus. I would have been run away from almost every Church to which I ever went to preach, if God had not vindicated His truth with earthquakes and volcanoes of convicting power, thus, in the majority of cases, revealing hell and the devil so awfully to the people that, affrighted and appalled, they fell and cried for mercy, even the magnates of the Church piling down at the mourners-bench. I am happy to say that this obtained in the majority of cases in my ministry of forty-six years; the minority, running me off, and in one instance actually hauling me out of my circuit for a crazy man. This is a notable, exemplary case, which every preacher would do well to consider. The Preacher of all preachers actually upset the multitude of His members by preaching the deep truths of entire sanctification, so “they turned back, and walked no more with Him.” The man who does the same at the present day is denounced for making an awful mistake. Who will dare say that Jesus made a mistake? Not one. He knew all about those people. They had followed Him two years in a superficial, slipshod way. He told them nothing but the truth, which they all had to see and experience if they ever got to heaven. He had waited on them two years to get ready for this profound and telling sermon on entire sanctification. He knew they would never get to heaven on that shallow- water religion. When we were in the harbor at Athens, Greece, and getting ready to land, my comrade exclaimed, “Brother Godbey, they are going away as fast as they can.” It was a Russian ship on which we had. sailed from Asia in our homeward bound voyage, and we could not speak their language. So we were in quite a dilemma till a man, in broken English, notified us that a storm was coming, and they were making for deep water, and would land us after the storm passed by. As in time of storm all ships go for deep water, so should the Christian voyager on time's stormy ocean make for deep water all the time, forever avoiding shoals and quicksands. Jesus knew that those people would never reach the kingdom, and it was not worth while to carry them any longer as dead weights on the gospel- wheel, so He went down to bottom-rock truth, and alienated a host of them. Do you not know that the very same results would follow the same preaching throughout Christendom today? Yet you know it is the very thing that ought to be done, as the people who will not receive these deep, spiritual truths are sure to make shipwreck this side the pearly gate.

“Then Jesus said to the twelve, Do you also wish to go back? Simon Peter said to Him, Lord, to whom shall we go? You have the words of eternal life. We have believed, and we know that Thou art the Holy One of God.” Peter was a great, big, club-fisted, Herculean rustic, illiterate, having been brought up amid the rough-and-tumble life of those hardy fishermen, who, like a hippopotamus, could live in water or on land, and hardly know the difference, never having gone to school a day in his life, and utterly destitute of what the world calls culture and refinement; but he had a great, big head, full of good, natural, common sense. Therefore he was a suitable speaker for the apostolical cohort. When a dying infidel, surrounded by the cultured members of the club, was exhorted to “hold on,” he replied,

“Why, I have nothing to hold to!” How significantly true! If infidelity is true, we need not bother ourselves about it, because we are just as safe as those who spend their lives in the study and advocacy of their skeptical dogmatism. The same we may say of Universalism. A Universalist preacher met his appointment in a strange community, showing up (in his own estimation) no hell for any and heaven for all; winding up, asked his audience if he should make another appointment. After a moment of profound silence, an old man, rising, said, “If you have preached the truth, we do not need any more of it; if lies, we do not want any more of them.” So, in either case, his work was done. Peter abundantly vindicates his own good, solid, common sense when he answers, “Lord, to whom shall we go?” “There is none to whom we can go, if we give You up, except hell and the devil, and we do not want them; so we will stay with You, and abide our destiny.” O that all the preachers and members of the present generation would emulate the practical intelligence of the fisherman! What a stampede this deep, spiritual preaching now makes in the Churches, the people literally stullifying themselves, and becoming laughing-stocks for devils! If they can't stand Scriptural holiness on earth, what will they do in heaven? If they can not stand a heart-searching holiness preacher, how will they stand before the Judge of quick and dead?

“Jesus said to them, Have I not chosen you twelve? And one of you is devilish. And He was speaking of Judas Iscariot, the son of Simon; for he was about to betray Him, being one of the twelve.” We see here what Jesus had chosen Judas as well as all the balance, and (verse 65) He had actually been given to Him by the Father. This is a delicate and controverted point, on which we merely give you the revealed Word as we have it, and forbear an elaborate exegesis. N.B. Two years of our Lord's ministry have rolled away before we hear a solitary word impeaching the Christian character of Judas. Jesus had actually sent him out, with his apostolical comrades, to preach the gospel of the kingdom throughout all Israel. He had been honored of God in casting out devils and healing of the sick. Diabolos, which reads “devil,” E.V., is primarily an adjective, meaning “devilish,” as I here translate it. We have no date of his apostasy, which culminated in betrayal and suicide. The presumption is that Jesus exposed his guilt very soon after his lapse. It is certain that at this date i.e., the end of two years' ministry Satan has so pulled on him that he is leaning off in that way, and has become “devilish.” This warning should have convicted and restored him; but unfortunately for him, he continued to lean more and more to worldliness, and especially the love of money, during the ensuing year of our Lord's ministry, till he finally so yielded, at the Last Supper, that “Satan entered into him,” precipitating him away to perpetrate the dark crimes of betrayal and murder.

We have now followed our Lord through two years of His ministry; which normally began at the Passover, April 14, A. D. 30; after which, returning to Galilee, His native land, He preached till the next Passover, which He visited, soon afterward coming back to Galilee. Now, as we have already seen, the multitude, being determined to take Him with them to Jerusalem, and there crown Him King, He evaded them, going alone into the mountain at nightfall, and walking over the sea, joining His disciples in the ship at midnight. So this Passover He declines to attend, spending the time in the North; this being the third Passover of His ministry, having begun at one; returned to Jerusalem, and attended the second; and now intermits the third, remaining in Galilee; finally at the fourth, winding up His ministry on the cross. So we now start out at the beginning of the third and last year of our Savior's ministry.