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In the name of Jesus, Amen.
Dear Saints, in the wilderness, when the Lord Jesus is feeding the 5,000 people, He is doing much more than just providing for them the food that they need. He is, in that miracle, and in His life, and in His teaching, and in His death, and in His resurrection, He is undoing the original sin of Adam and Eve, fighting back the curse and sin, death, and the devil, and bringing about the restoration of all things for you and for me.
I think this is why John spends so much time given to the sermon that Jesus preaches about the feeding of the 5,000, about how He is the bread of life that comes down from heaven. Because the Lord Jesus, in His flesh and blood, in His life and death and resurrection, is bringing us to life eternal. We’ve got to go back to the beginning to see what the Lord is fixing. Remember in the Garden of Eden, the Lord had planted there two very special trees. One was the Tree of Life, and Adam and Eve were to eat from that tree, and you, by the way, were supposed to be eating from that tree now also, they’re supposed to eat from that tree and live forever.
There’s also the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, the tree that was forbidden. In fact, the Lord forbade it with the clearest possible terms saying that on the day you eat of it, it says in English, surely you will die, better in Hebrew like this, dying you will die. Now, there is, in fact, a double death that the Lord promised, connecting to the eating of this fruit, and that double death was the death not only of the body, but also the death of the soul. And that would be the punishment for eating it. The punishment for Adam and Eve, the punishment for all of their children, the punishment for all of the world.
We might ask why the Lord put the tree there in the first place, and I think the answer—we don’t know the answer, but I think the answer is that the Lord always wants to be worshipped by faith, so that Adam and Eve could go to that tree and walk by faith and not by sight. They could believe in death but never see it, never taste it, never know it. But instead of believing the promise of God, Adam and Eve reached out and grasped that which God had not given, and they brought into themselves and into the world and into you and to me a double death, so that now the world is full of dying, full of cemeteries, full of hospitals, full of doctors, full of courts, full of war and violence and sickness and everything else that followed.
It was not supposed to be this way, but it is. I think the result of the fall is a two-fold groaning that every person feels. There’s a groaning of our bodies. It’s the groaning of hunger. It’s the groaning of cold. It’s the groaning of sickness, it’s the groaning of death; it’s the groaning that knows that there’s something that’s wrong in this life and that we need something more. And then there is the groaning of the heart, the groaning of the conscience, the groaning that feels this alienation and strangeness from God and from the neighbor, and it shows up in different ways too. It shows up sometimes in guilt, or in shame, or in fear, or in loneliness, and all the sorts of other troubles that we face in this life.
And we have these two deep, profound groans, and we oftentimes don’t know how to fix it. I think this is the human condition. I think that, and I was talking with a vicar about this just between the services, it’s sometimes masked because we feel like we’re content in this life and we don’t feel the troubles of life. I was thinking that it’s kind of like Adam and Eve when, remember, they realize that they’re naked and they’re ashamed, and so they go and they make fig leaves to cover the shame of their nakedness. I think if you could have just gone to talk to them there in the bushes with the devil or the dragon who’s there with them and said, well, okay, how are things now? Now, that they would say, well, we thought it was going to be big trouble, but now we’ve fixed the problem. Look at these fig leaves. We’ve solved the trouble. We’re okay. We can still see the tree of life. We haven’t eaten from it yet. We can still see it, though. I think it’s going to be all right. I think we’ve fixed the problem.
And here’s where we see death actually enter into the picture, until they hear the sound of the Lord walking in the garden in the cool of the day. And rather than being filled with joy—can you imagine this? Rather than being their heart leaping that the Lord is near and Adam saying to Eve, I think I hear God, I think He’s coming, let’s get ready, let’s go find Him. Instead of that, there’s a fear. Oh, what have we done? I hope he doesn’t find us. And they’re running from the Lord, and they’re hiding from him in the bushes, and they’re holding their breath, and they’re trying to stop their heart from beating so loud so that maybe the Lord won’t find them.
This, I think, is that sense of the groaning of the heart and the conscience sneaking up on us and telling us that there’s something fundamentally wrong, not only with our bodies, but also with our hearts. There is a deep and profound hunger that drives all of us, all the time. And this is then our human predicament that it’s trying to make that groaning go away. I mean, by cooking dinner, by going to the grocery store, by going to the gym, by taking your vitamins, by checking in with your doctor, you’re trying to make that groaning body stop groaning so loud.
And then the groaning soul. I imagine that every religion in the world in one way or another is trying to stop that groaning soul, trying to bring some kind of balm to the hurting heart and troubled conscience. But it all falls short. We are all like the fathers who ate the manna in the wilderness and died. All of our own efforts to bring about a body that does not die and a soul that is not condemned, all of them fail. You cannot live forever, and you cannot, by your own efforts, prepare yourself to face the holiness of God on the judgment day. That’s the bad news.
But our Lord Jesus Christ comes into this valley of the shadow of death and brings us a fruit, a food that will give eternal life, that will sustain us through the weariness of this life, and even through the pain and agony of death, and bring us at last to life eternal. It’s fifteen times in John chapter 6 that Jesus mentions life, I think like six times in our text. If anyone eats of this bread, he will live forever. Whoever feeds on my flesh and drinks my blood has eternal life. Whoever feeds on this bread will live forever. It is the Spirit who gives life. The words that I have spoken to you are Spirit and life.
And Peter gets it. He confesses with us, in fact, for us and then with us when Jesus says, are you going to leave also? And he says, no, Lord, to whom shall we go? You have the words of eternal life. Here we are in the midst of death and sorrow and guilt and shame and sickness and dying and loneliness and trouble and affliction and all of it. And Jesus comes into the midst of it, and he says, here, now, I’m giving you food that’s going to undo that first bite. It’s going to undo what Adam and Eve did in the garden. I’m bringing the antidote.
And it’s not just a food that’s gonna kind of add extended life like the tree of life in the garden, but it’s a food that’s gonna, if you can imagine it, it’s gonna take all of the poison from you with all of the dying, all of the guilt, all of the shame, which Jesus does in his flesh and blood—taking all that you’ve done wrong and all that you’ve deserved and all of the curse of Adam and Eve and bearing it in his flesh and pouring it out in his blood so that he is now the food that gives eternal life, and that is for you.
And dear saints, I want to speak of this in two ways this morning: the joy of this food of eternal life, because it is not just for you, but it’s also for the person that’s sitting next to you, and in front of you, and behind you, and all around you. We have the confidence that when the Lord brings us to the end of our lives, and our heart beats its last beat, that we will close our eyes to sleep the sleep of death, and we will open them to see the face of Jesus, who is our eternal life, who is bringing us through the shadow of death to stand before Him in glory.
We have this confidence, and I want you to know, I mean this is what Jesus is preaching for us, to have that joy, to know that you have Jesus, He has you, you will live forever. You will not die forever, but live forever. That you’ll die and go to heaven, you’ll see Him face to face, and on the last day He’ll call you out of the grave, and He’ll perfect your body and soul, and you’ll be with Him forever. And that’s not only true for you, but it’s true for all of us.
Singing about it a lot this week. Singing how there’s a pretty good chance that either I will be at your funeral, or you will be at mine. And that we will be one or the other at each other’s funeral. Maybe we’ll be laying here up front in the casket, or maybe we’ll be sitting there in the pew. And this is the joy that the Lord Jesus gives to all of us on this march of death, that he is bringing all of us through death to life eternal. So that we not only have joy as we face our own death, but we have joy as we face the deaths of our brothers and sisters in Christ and confidence that the Lord Jesus is bringing all of us through the wilderness to paradise so that we rejoice in whatever it is that the Lord Jesus gives. His flesh is true food. His blood is true drink.
And as he calls us to feast on this good news by faith in his promises, he has delivered us and each one of us and all of us to this promise that we have eternal life. So we with boldness confess with Peter. Jesus says, do you want to leave also? And Peter answers, Lord to whom shall we go? You have the words of eternal life, and we have believed and have come to know that you are the Holy One of God. In life and in death, this is our confidence and this is our peace. In the name of Jesus, amen.
The peace of God which passes all understanding, guard your hearts and minds through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.
