Posted on 10/18/2019 3:57:48 PM PDT by ebb tide
I take Jesus at His word, I believe He said what He meant and meant what He said. I don’t think He used a “metaphorical perception to convey a spiritual truth.” That’s just too complicated. He said we must believe as little children - and little children are not sophisticated enough to understand metaphors, etc. I think He meant exactly what He said: we must eat His flesh and drink His blood or we have no life in us. He also said we would remain in Him, if we do. He mentioned Himself as Living Bread in 8 verses in chapter 6.
Claret is a British term for any red wine from Bordeaux, and it seems to refer nowadays to Cabernet Sauvignon, too. Mr. Claret and I like Silver Oak Cab, but it’s pretty expensive. When he sips his Makers Mark, I like to have a little Cognac.
Read carefully what follows for there is a sequence of exchanges which reveal the hearts of the listeners who continued to demand of JESUS what THEY could do to earn something God was offering at no charge to them only to Him.
John 6:
24 When the crowd saw that neither Jesus nor his disciples were there, they got into these boats and went to Capernaum to look for Jesus. When they had found him on the other side of the sea, they asked him, “Rabbi, when did you get here?”
26Jesus replied to them, “Truly, I tell all of you emphatically, you are looking for me, not because you saw signs, but because you ate the loaves and were completely satisfied. Do not work for food that perishes but for food that lasts for eternal life, which the Son of Man will give you, because God the Father has set his seal on him.” [Notice here that Jesus is establishing the contrast between carnal bread for the stomach and spiritual bread for the soul and spirit. If you miss this entry He gave you will be tempted to focus upon just a carnal meaning.]
Then they asked him, “What must we do to perform God’s works?”
These were Jews steeped in doing the works of the law, and failing. To these Jesus came, to offer the Grace of God shown as Promise to forgive their sin for thousands of years through the sacrifice of animals, using the blood to atone. These were people who believed they could earn eternal life by doing, and Jesus was about to reveal the truth regarding their sacrifices and offerings, that these were pointing toward the Grace of God offered to them for one and only one act they could do.
John 6:29 Jesus answered them, “This is God’s work: to believe in the one whom he has sent.”
30So they asked him, “What sign are you going to do so that we may see it and believe in you? What actions are you performing? Our ancestors ate the manna in the wilderness, just as it is written, ‘He gave them bread from heaven to eat.’” [Ask yourself, were the Jews in the desert given eternal life by eating the manna? No, the entire denying generation except for Kaleb and Joshua died out there in the desert over a forty year period. God gave them the bread despite their refusal to accept HIS Promise of the Land they were to inhabit. They refused to accept GOD's Grace so they wandered for forty years in the desert being fed manna from God only to die out there.]
32 Jesus told them, “Truly, I tell all of you emphatically, it was not Moses who gave you the bread from heaven, but it is my Father who gives you the true bread from heaven. The bread of God is the one who comes down from heaven and gives life to the world.”
At this point the commands from GOD to not eat the blood were clear in the minds of these seekers after signs, this throng demanding to know what they could do -like trying to keep the Ten Commandments and the lengthy list of the Laws of Moses- and they were stuck in that rut of them working for eternal life! Pride of their works was in the hearts and they were demanding more signs and more of what they could do to earn ...
These seekers after signs and wonders had God as Jesus right there with them and refused to receive the lesson Jesus just gave them regarding eternal life ONLY by faithing in Him. They were stuck on the carnal so Jesus gave them a shock lesson, which I believe eventually caused some of them to give up and just Trust Messiah, but probably not a majority of them.
Because they knew the commands of God to not eat the blood, JESUS used that to confound their demands:
John 6:35 Jesus told them, “I am the bread of life. Whoever comes to me will never become hungry, and whoever believes in me will never become thirsty. I told you that you have seen me, yet you don’t believe. Everything the Father gives me will come to me, and I’ll never turn away the one who comes to me. I have come down from heaven, not to do my own will, but the will of the one who sent me. And this is the will of the one who sent me, that I should not lose anything that he has given me, but should raise it to life on the last day. This is my Father’s will: That everyone who sees the Son and believes in him should have eternal life, and I will raise him to life on the last day.”[There it is again, belief brings the spiritual gift, not the carnal eating. Jesu just repeated what He told them at the beginning of this series of exchanges, that faith in / belief in Whom God has sent is the means by which the Grace of God is active in the believers. That glorifies JESUS, never the doers and seekers of signs and wonders.
41 Then the Jewish leaders began grumbling about him because he said, “I am the bread that came down from heaven.”They kept saying, “This is Jesus, the son of Joseph, isn’t it, whose father and mother we know? So how can he say, ‘I have come down from heaven’?”
But they continued in their unbelief, so Jesus made it even plainer:
John 6:43 Jesus answered them, “Stop grumbling among yourselves. No one can come to me unless the Father who sent me draws him, and I will raise him to life on the last day. It is written in the Prophets, ‘And all of them will be taught by God.’ Everyone who has listened to the Father and has learned anything comes to me. Not that anyone has seen the Father except the one who comes from God. This one has seen the Father. Truly, I tell all of you emphatically, the one who believes in me has eternal life. I’m the bread of life. Your ancestors ate the manna in the wilderness and died. This is the bread that comes down from heaven, so that a person may eat it and not die. I’m the living bread that came down from heaven. If anyone eats this bread, he’ll live forever. And the bread I will give for the life of the world is my flesh.” [Note here that one does not receive a spiritual gift by physically eating it. JESUS emphasizes that BELIEVING / faithing is the way a spiritual gift is received! The manna did not impart spiritual life to the Jews in the desert. That is Jesus teaching them in John 6.]
52 Then the Jewish leaders debated angrily with each other, asking, “How can this man give us his flesh to eat?” [These were stuck on the carnal and unable to see the spiritual! The Catholic command to eat the real flesh is a living example of the same stuck on the carnal which Jesus gave them over to in their unbelief!]BECAUSE they continued to murmur in UNBELIEF refusing to FAITHE in / trust in / believe in HIM WHOM GOD SENT FOR THEIR DELIVERER, Jesus confounded their unbelief by speaking of a spiritual mystery HE KNEW they would take literally as a physical thing, in their refusal of HIM because they wanted to earn what can only be received by GRACE. JESUS gave them over to their carnal:
John 6:53 So Jesus told them, “Truly, I tell all of you emphatically, unless you eat the flesh of the Son of Man and drink his blood, you don’t have life in yourselves. Whoever eats my flesh and drinks my blood has eternal life, and I’ll raise him to life on the last day, 55because my flesh is real food, and my blood is real drink. The person who eats my flesh and drinks my blood remains in me, and Iin him. Just as the living Father sent me and I live because of the Father, so the one who feeds on me will also live because of me. [Ask yourself, did Jesus eat the flesh of the Father? NO! The sustenance was SPIRITUAL from The Father to Jesus! Jesus faithed in the Father. The bread from the Father was the will of the Father for what HE would do through / by Jesus. The words of the Father, the works of The Father were the meat to Jesus. In a moment Jesus would confirm this to those who stayed with Him who were not stuck in the carnal, stuck at carnal like catholiciism because they wanted to have their works approved. They could not disobey the commands against eating the blood, so they turned away because they wanted their carnal pride to count in God's calculus!] 58This is the bread that came down from heaven, not the kind that your ancestors ate. [It cannot be any plainer than that; Jesus tells them this bread from Heaven is not like the kind you eat into your bellies![ They died, but the one who eats this bread will live forever.” He said this while teaching in the synagogue at Capernaum.The 'eating this bread' refers to a spiritual consuming, as in the remembrance carried out by breaking bread and sipping the wine showing belief in Him Whom GOD sent for eternal life. The eating is a physical act using common substances BUT showing a spiritual belief connection to JESUS.
The noting of where these teachings happened is significant. Capernaum had cliffs with many burial holes in them, where paganized believers brought foods to the dead. It was a place of great superstition and mythical beliefs connected to physical acts enjoining the pagans to mysteries. Jesus just sorted sheep and goats: the sheep remained and the goats departed ...
John 6:60 When many of his disciples heard this, they said, “This is a difficult statement. Who can accept it?”
61 But Jesus, knowing within himself that his disciples were grumbling about this, asked them, “Does this offend you? 62What if you saw the Son of Man going up to the place where he was before? It’s the Spirit who gives life; the flesh accomplishes nothing. The words that I’ve spoken to you are spirit and life. 64But there are some among you who don’t believe {Judas remained with the disciples yet he was not a believer, but most of the followers left because they too were stuck in the carnal mind. Judas believed, he believed Jesus would establish the physical kingdom, but Jesus was teaching all of them spiritual matters, Truths no carnal mind understands even today right here on this thread!)
By what authority do you teach this? And what version of the Bible do you use? I can see that you spent a lot of time on this, and I appreciate your efforts, but your explanation is too complicated for me. Jesus is carnal Himself. That’s why he came to earth, to be Incarnated. As the Second Person of the Trinity, He was fully God and Fully Man. A such, I take Him at His word, that He is the Living Bread.
You cannot ingest GOD through your alimentary tract. The Father is Spirit and must be worship in spirit and truth, not via your belly. Jesus told you that what goes in the mouth comes out in the draught. What comes out of the spirit/heart defiles. Salvation is by faith in Whom God has sent, not in works or sacraments or theeating of things. The word of God proclaimed over and over that eating blood is condemned. Before He went to the Cross, Jesus woud not defile the Passover by having Jewish men eat blood. Period. Listen to Augustinian reasoning as quote above. You claiming to take Jesus at His word mocks His Word from Genesis onward, right up to John 6. Do you imagine God could contradict himself since He knows the end from the beginning?
The Catholic Eucharist mocks God.
The religion of Catholiciism answers the seekers after signs --the Jews seeking what they could do to gain eternal life-- telling you to come and eat Jesus at a Catholic Altar where they tell you their priest brings Jesus from Heaven to feed His body blood soul and DIVINITY to you in a magical wafer. That is the most demonic inveiglement of paganization in all of Catholicism. The pagans believed they brought food to their idols and the idols inhabited the food then and they ate the food gaining the essence of their idol. Wake up! Stop lending your soul to this blasphemy! By contradicting the clear command from God, repeated in so many places in His Word, you mock God.
And don't dare weasel back that God can do anything. He cannot contradict His nature, His character. In His commands we see a glimpse of His character.
Do you have the teaching on the blood handy. Someone might read it to good effect.
There is no requirement that we abandon the ordinary use of direct metaphor to believe what Jesus is teaching in John 6. The fact is, the fair weather followers of Jesus who abandoned Him in John 6 did so precisely because they rejected the metaphor and went to a literal sense. That literal sense jarred them because it seemed to go against Moses. They didn't have enough faith in Him personally to realize He would never lead them into rejecting the divine law. They didn't have enough faith to realize that when He was gone back to Heaven, they would have still been able to continue feeding on Him by faith, simply by believing on Him, and feeding on His words.Therefore you are not correct. Jesus in this passage does not insist on "literal" meaning for spiritual teaching, but rather confirms the opposite.
(2) The Catholics take these words to mean what they say ("my flesh is meat indeed: and my blood is drink indeed") and don't reach for hidden meanings to the opposite.
The spiritual meaning is not hidden at all. As I have said repeatedly, Jesus states explicitly He is teaching about faith in Himself, and at a spiritual not a fleshly level. And Peter demonstrates the right response at the end of the discourse, not in an effort to literally eat Jesus, or to secure transformed bread and wine, but from out of his heart proclaim his faith in God's chosen Messiah. The meaning, so far from being hidden, could not be more plain if it were written across all the starry host, "come to Jesus, and you will hunger no more, believe on Jesus, and you will never thirst again."
But those who wanted to understand him literally, because after all, the fishes and loaves were literal, they were blinded by their literalism. It was their literalism that drove them to reject the words that might have led them to eternal life.
we are not asked to be theologians alongside St. Thomas, but we are asked to take Christ's words on faith even when they are "hard teaching".
And indeed it was very hard teaching. The rabbinical teachers had concocted various stories of how Messiah when He came would provide literal bounty, literal freedom from oppressors such as Rome, a literal and outward kingdom that the power brokers could walk into with all their worldly glory, yet with uncircumcised hearts. Messianic utopia without the new birth that changes a person from the heart. This sort of literalism was a dodge, a way to avoid the pain of remorse for sin. It was central to the spiritual problem of the Pharisees. Outwardly, they were lovely tombs, but inside was the stench of death. Throughout all of Jesus' ministry, He is teaching by parable, by metaphor, about truths that get past the superficial outside, and cut down into the deepest parts of the human heart, where the real problem resides. It is a spiritual matter, and it always has been.
And that is what made Jesus' teaching so hard. On the heels of one of the most spectacular and game-changing physical miracles in human history, a miracle that promised the elimination of hunger for all time, He turns it upside down and drives them to think about the true hunger all men and women face. What will satisfy that? Fishes and loaves? No literal food can satisfy a spiritual hunger such as that. But those who ingest Jesus by faith, who feed on every word that proceeds from His mouth, their hunger will be satisfied. He is the manna from Heaven, but He can only be consumed by faith. It is not enough to tag along for the miracles. There must be a change of heart.
It was too big a shift for most of them. They refused to see it in spiritual terms. All they had left was the literal, and they couldn't figure out how that could work. Yet there was Peter, to whom the Father had revealed the Son, demonstrating the very faith of which Jesus speaks. Hard, yes, but all things are possible with God.
Peace,
SR
462 posted on 2/28/2016 8:06:39 PM by Springfield Reformer
I have on file a few of his posts because they were so spot on and more eloquent than I could hope for.
Right here He states in unequivocal terms that He was NOT talking about LITERAL eating and LITERAL drinking.
He tells us that LITERAL eating and drinking of Him does NOT give spiritual life.
John 6:63 It is the Spirit who gives life; the flesh is no help at all. The words that I have spoken to you are spirit and life.
"the flesh is no help at all".
I do not understand how much clearer He could make it.
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