Jesus as the Bread of Life: Spiritual Nourishment for Eternal Life

In this sermon, Don Carson discusses Jesus’ declaration as the “Bread of Life” in John 6:25-59, focusing on how this metaphor represents Jesus as essential for spiritual sustenance and eternal life. He explains the context of ancient bread as a staple and draws parallels between the physical sustenance and spiritual nourishment provided by Christ. Carson also emphasizes the importance of seeking Jesus not just for physical needs but for the eternal life He offers through faith.

---

The last two or three nights we have assumed the best way of getting to know Christ and Christianity is to look at Christianity’s foundation documents. There are 66 of them, all of them reasonably short (some of them very short), and they’re bound together in one fat book that is just called the Book. That’s what Bible means. Thirty-nine of them make up the books that cover the period before Christ. We refer to them collectively as the Old Testament. The remaining 27 start with the earthly life of Christ and go on for about 100 years.

The first four of this second collection called Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John, after their authors, focus on Jesus’ earthly life, and we have been looking at passages from John’s gospel, the fourth in the set. To get at tonight’s topic, I’m going to come in through the side door. I want to ask some questions.

First, if you ask any 5-year-old Melbournian, “Where does food come from?” what will he or she say? “From Coles. From Woolworths.” But it’s a remarkable fact that people in industrialized societies entertain notions of food that almost no one in earlier or other cultures ever entertained, for you see, in a pre-industrial society, the answer would be, “From plants and animals,” or “From the farm.”

Another question. What is the staple diet of Australia? The question is bizarre, and the answers would be so incredibly diverse that you can’t even speak of a staple diet. Our tastes are diverse, our cultures are diverse, and our food supplies are so rich, it’s meaningless to ask, “What is the staple diet of Australia?”

But billions of people will answer with one or two words, rice and fish, or conceivably, yams and fish, depending on where they are. It’s a meaningful question to ask, “What is the staple diet?” In ancient Israel, the Israel in the time of Jesus and Palestine in the time of Jesus, the answer was bread or bread and fish. Those words had a different set of associations than they have for us today.

A third question. What happens to our food if there is catastrophic drought or ravaging flood? The answer? The prices go up a bit. That’s it. They have to be flown in from elsewhere, but for many, many people today and for virtually all people in earlier times their food has to come from not more than 50 miles away, and drought or flood conditions spell starvation.

Another question. Why do you work? Ask yourself the question, “Why do you work?” To earn money. Why? To buy stuff. In the first century at the eastern end of the Mediterranean, 85 percent of a day laborers’ wage went to buy food, so you worked in order to eat. We assume we’ll eat. Of course, we use some percentage of our money to buy food, but it’s a relatively small percentage. We’re also paying for mortgages, and depending on what stage we’re in, children’s Pampers and education and retirement and holidays and a motor car and so on. Eighty-five percent on food?

What’s your favorite snack food? “Snack food?” For billions of people, that question is meaningless. They don’t have a word for snack, and if we explained it to them, they’d think it was bizarre. Do not misunderstand me. I’m not suggesting for a moment (I’m not trying to induce a guilty complex on everybody here) we’re not supposed to have snacks. I’m not saying that.

By and large, our notions of food are appropriate for a Western industrialized culture, for any industrialized culture, but what we have to understand is when the Bible was written it was written in a culture that was a handcraft, agrarian culture with a different set of associations regarding food, and some of the symbolism that is in this chapter turns on getting those associations right.

In other words, to understand what Jesus means when he says, “I am the Bread of Life,” we must think our way into the associations of these sorts of words in the first century. Then we must do two other things. We have to remember the miracle that immediately precedes. Jesus turned a small quantity of food into enough to feed 5,000. It was, quite frankly, a miracle of creation, and that is part of the background, too.

There’s one more bit of background that needs to be mentioned, too. I mentioned the Bible is divided into two parts. The first two-thirds we call the Old Testament, the period before Jesus, and now this part in the New Testament starting with Jesus and on. In that older section, there is an account of God through Moses about a millennium and a half before Jesus actually providing food for his people in the desert. It was a kind of bread that they called manna. That’s all part of the background. It’s all presupposed. What do we mean when Jesus says, “I am the Bread of Life”? Four things.

1. Jesus is the one who gives God’s life to us because he himself is God’s manna, God’s bread.

Jesus is the one who gives God’s life to us (he mediates the life of God to us) because he himself is God’s manna. How does that work out? Follow the flow from verse 25. This is where Jesus has already gotten to the other side of the lake, and now finally, the crowd realizes he’s not there.

They take boats, or whatever, and get to the other side of the lake, and they ask him, “ ‘Rabbi, when did you get here?’ Jesus answered, ‘Very truly I tell you, you are looking for me, not because you saw the signs I performed but because you ate the loaves and had your fill.’ ” In one sense, of course, they did see the signs. Of course, they saw the signs. They saw the miracles, but they didn’t see what they signified.

In other words, the miracles in John’s gospel are always presented not just as raw feats of power, some spectacular display, but symbol-laden, signifying something. What is this provision of bread supposed to signify? What is the sign power of it? What Jesus accuses them of is not seeing the sign at all. They had their tummies filled.

Think back now. This is a rural society. Somebody can provide them with food. If somebody could provide them with food miraculously everyday, their income just goes up by a fabulous amount. If 85 percent of their daily wage goes on food and now they don’t have to worry about that, that’s all money they can buy stuff with!

Suddenly, it’s possible to start looking at a mortgage and buying a house and doing other kinds of things, so from the point of view of a peasant society, this is fabulous wealth that could make a huge difference. But Jesus says to them in verse 27, “Do not work for food that spoils, but for food that endures to eternal life, which the Son of Man …” That was a self-designation he rather liked. “… which the Son of Man will give you. On him God the Father has placed his seal of approval.”

“Don’t work for food that spoils. That is temporary stuff that gives you life here but won’t give you the eternal life I can give you.” That’s what he is saying. When he says, “Don’t work for this but work for that,” he’s focusing on two different goals, but they hear the word work, and they say, “What must we do to do the works God requires?”

In other words, “If you’re going to talk about work, lay it on us. Just tell us what we have to do. If there are conditions.… If we have to act in a certain way, if we have to work out certain things, or if we have to come up to a certain mark, tell us what we have to do and we’ll do it.” Their naivetÈ is pretty profound, but in all fairness, there are an awful lot of people who view religion of any kind, more or less, that way.

A lot of people who go by the name of Christian quite mistakenly view religious ritual, religious commitments more or less in those terms: you scratch God’s back and God scratches your back. You know, you want to get cured of cancer, you want a good car, you want a fat baby, you want to pass your exams, or whatever it is you want, then you go through some motions and give God some stuff.

You promise to be good. “I promise I won’t do this, this, or this. I’ll be good. I’ll be good, and then you give me that.” It’s a tit-for-tat kind of thing, a swap deal, and if you can just do the works God requires then maybe you can get stuff from God. But John’s gospel as a whole, the New Testament as a whole, constantly says, “You don’t understand. You can’t do enough to meet this God who has no needs. This God is not like the pagan gods of old.”

The pagan gods of old all had their needs, so pagan religion in the first century (the religion of the Greeks and the Romans) was a kind of tit-for-tat arrangement. You scratch the gods back, and the gods scratch your back. If you give the right sacrifice to Neptune, you get a sea voyage that’s nice and safe. That’s what religion is. It’s a kind of swap deal.

Supposing you come to one God who has no needs, who is perfectly happy in eternity past, entirely self-sufficient.… We’ve seen in the last two or three night a complex God, not a simplex God, Father and Son and Spirit in a perfect harmony of love and with no needs. What are you going to offer him? What’s the barter deal?

Besides, when the Bible speaks so disturbingly about our death, our anarchy, because we have turned away from him and we’re dead to him, it’s not as if we’re focused on him. It’s not as if we love him. It’s not as if we cherish him. We just go to him in emergencies and try to arrange a swap, which treats him as if he’s sort of a reservoir to dump blessings on us when we need them.

Now, that’s the frame of reference out of which these people are thinking. “Okay. What does this God require? Tell us what he requires, and we’ll provide it and then look at this eternal life.” A lot of people view God as making a whole lot of demands. “We can meet most of them, and then if we can’t meet all of those demands, well, you know, God’s a pretty nice dude. He’ll forgive us for the rest of the stuff.”

Many years ago, I was studying in Germany trying to improve my German, and once I got tired of the language.… You have so much language learning and you’re up to here. There was another fellow in the class from French West Africa, and because I was reared in French and obviously his education was in French and both of us were studying German, we used to go out once a week and speak a civilized language like French.

At least, that’s the way we viewed it at the time. All of you Germanophiles please forgive me, but that was certainly the way we viewed it at the time. As I got to know him, I discovered he had a wife who was in London working on her medical degree. He was trying to improve his German so he could finish his PhD in engineering.

We’d go out and talk and so on. As I got to know him a little more, I discovered once a week or so he would go to the red light district in town, pay his money, and have his woman. By this time, I got to know him well enough, and I said to him, “Tell me. What would you say if you discovered your wife were doing the same thing in London?”

He said, “Oh, I’d kill her!” I said, “That doesn’t seem very evenhanded.” He said, “Oh, you don’t understand. From my tribe, the men have the right to sleep around but the women don’t.” I said, “But you told me you were brought up in a Christian school. You know God doesn’t have two different curves: one for men and one for women.”

“Ah, le bon Dieu; il doit nous pardonner; c’est son mÈtier. God is good. He’s bound to forgive us. That’s his job.” He was quoting Catherine the Great, of course, but he was reflecting a common view of God. “You do your best to be nice and do the works he requires, and the stuff that’s leftover.… Well, God is good. He’s bound to forgive us. That’s his job.”

It is so alien to what the Bible says. This God who demands we love him with heart and soul and mind and strength and our neighbors as ourselves, where we fall so far short of those kinds of standards, and then we turn to him in an emergency. Jesus says, “Okay. If you’re going to talk about the work of God (that is, what God demands), let me put it this way. The work God demands is to believe in the one he has sent,” and the one he has sent, of course, is Jesus.

Jesus is saying, “What God demands is that you believe me, that you trust me, and that you commit your life to me. That’s what he demands.” Immediately, they say, “Well, if you’re going to start focusing so much attention on yourself, you have to do something to inspire this sort of confidence, this sort of trust. What sign, then, will you give, that we may see it and believe you?” In other words, “What have you done to inspire trust like that? Let us give you a little hint. Let us tell you what you might do,” they say. (Hint, hint)

“Our ancestors ate the manna in the wilderness; as it is written: ‘He gave them bread from heaven to eat.’ ” They even have a verse to prove it. In other words, they remember the accounts of Moses providing food for the people by God’s own power, and now they’ve seen Jesus do something similar the day before. “If you really want us to trust you, do it again. Do it again. Then tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow, and, boy, you’ve doubled our income.”

The trouble is, of course, if you treat Jesus like that, if you treat God like that, then what you’re not asking from him is the sovereign gracious supply of a generous God; you’re asking for a trained poodle or a trained monkey. That is, if you start saying to him, “Okay. I’ll worship you provided you give me this,” so God gives it to you. The next day you up the ante. “Okay. I’ll worship you today if you give me that.” The next day, “I’ll worship you this day too if you give me the next thing.”

Suddenly, God is sort of bribed into being the supreme benefactor to feed all my wants and desires which, of course, makes me the center of the universe. God is merely the supplier of all the things I want, the feeder of all my greed, and God just won’t play that game. Jesus won’t play that game.

Jesus corrects them just a wee bit. They’ve drawn a comparison with Moses. “I tell you the truth, it is not Moses who gave you that bread (that manna), but it was my Father. Indeed, it’s my Father now who gives you the true bread from heaven.” There was a sense in which God provided that, but nobody who got that bread lived forever. They still died in the desert.

“The true bread God gives now, the true bread that comes down from heaven which my Father gives, this true bread gives eternal life. It comes down from heaven and gives life to the world.” They still don’t see that he’s talking about a different plane, a different order of things. Not the bread that comes from wheat or barley but that which gives eternal life. They say, “Sir, always give us this bread! That’s what we’re asking for. You gave it to us yesterday; do it again. Give us some more!” Jesus declares, “I am the Bread of Life.”

In other words, Jesus is the one who gives God’s life to us because, somehow at some metaphorical level (we still haven’t figured out exactly how yet), he himself is God’s manna. That’s what the sign was about. That is, Jesus not only provided bread the day before, but he himself is the bread. This is the way so many strands right through the Bible actually run. Yes, God did provide manna in the Old Testament, this bread, and it points forward to the ultimate manna, the ultimate bread from God.

Those of you who were here a couple of nights ago, Jesus refers back on another occasion to an incident in the book of Numbers, the fourth book of the Bible, where there is a bronze serpent that is put up on a pole and people look to the bronze serpent and are healed from the venomous snake bites. Jesus says, “In exactly the same way, I have to be put up on a pole.” He’s talking about his own death and his own cross work. He has to put be up, and those who look to him receive life and escape from the poison of evil itself.

There are many, many times when Jesus looks back to Old Testament institutions and rites and patterns and says, “If you understand how the Bible is put together properly, they’re pointing forward, and the manna pointed forward to me, the living bread. This miracle I performed points forward to me, the living bread. What you have to understand is that I myself am God’s gift of bread.”

That is stunning. You just cannot imagine, dare I say it, a mere prophet saying something like that. This is claiming that somehow Jesus himself is the very source of eternal life. That brings us to the second bit.

2. Jesus is the one who gives God’s life to us because he does his Father’s will.

Pick up again in verse 34. They say, “Give us this bread,” and Jesus declares, “I am the Bread of Life.” Now, for the first time he’s beginning to show the metaphorical power of what he is saying. He says, “Whoever comes to me will never go hungry, and whoever believes in me will never be thirsty.” Well, that ought to be a big hint. A light bulb goes on that he’s not talking about real bread.

These two weeks I’ve been staying with Peter O’Brien, the principal at Moore. He’s a very friendly chap, but he is of the opinion that people should eat breakfast on their own, so he tells me where everything is. Whenever he gets up, he goes and eats his breakfast, and whenever I get up, I go and eat my breakfast.

I go into the freezer and pull out some good, thick bread he has, get a couple of pieces broken off and put them in the toaster. When that bread comes out of the toaster and I start buttering it and putting something on it, I don’t say, “Bread, I believe in you.” I’ve been here two weeks and not once have I said, “Bread, I come to you.”

But this is what Jesus says. He says, “I am the Bread of Life. Whoever comes to me will never go hungry, and whoever believes in me will never be thirsty.” Apparently, the way this bread is absorbed, received, or ingested is bound up with coming to him on Jesus’ terms and trusting him, believing him. That’s something of what it means.

He’s going to unpack it a lot more than that, as we’ll see, but that’s what he means. It’s a metaphorical use of bread. You feed on him in some sense, but in what sense exactly? Then he says, “But as I told you, you have seen me and still you do not believe. You don’t come to me. You don’t accept my word. You don’t believe me. You don’t trust me, but let me tell you this. All whom the Father gives me will come to me, and whoever comes to me I will never drive away.”

Do you hear that? Jesus is not devastated by the rejection. He understands it. In fact, at some level, he fully expects it because he knows there’s going to be so much rejection that eventually the rejection will nail him on a cross, but he still knows God is sovereign, God is in charge of this operation, and there will be many, many people who will come to Jesus.

They are designated as those the Father gives to the Son, and those who the Father gives to the Son will come to Jesus. They will believe, and once they have come to the Son, Jesus isn’t going to drive them away and say, “Not you. I don’t like your face.” No. “Because I have come down from heaven to do, not my will but the will of him who sent me, and this is the will of him who sent me, that I shall lose none of those he has given me but raise them up on the last day.”

In other words, “The Father has given some people to me, and whether you come or not, whether you believe or not, whether you bow the knee or not, whether you trust him or not, some will come,” and those who come to Jesus, he not only receives, he protects, he keeps because he came to do his Father’s will, and this is his Father’s will, that of all those the Father truly gives him, he will keep them.

We saw last night as were exploring another passage (John 5) how the Father loves the Son and is determined that everybody should worship and honor the Son even as they worship and honor the Father. The Son loves the Father so much so that everything the Father gives him to do, he does, even going to the cross, which is why he cries in Gethsemane, “Not my will but yours be done. If it is possible to take this cup from me, if it is possible there can be some other way, I would love it to be some other way. I don’t want the cross, but not my will but yours be done.”

For he came to do his Father’s will, and he does it perfectly, even to the point of keeping all of these people whom the Father gives him. Then he repeats it. “For I have come down from heaven not to do my will but to do the will of him who sent me. And this is the will of him who sent me, that I shall lose none of those he has given me, but raise them up at the last day. For my Father’s will is that everyone who looks to the Son and believes in him shall have eternal life.”

Notice that. Looking to the Son, looking to the bread and believing in him shall have not just life for this world but eternal life, “And I will raise him up at the last day.” In other words, this is picking up on a theme we first saw last night, too. That is, the life he is giving is not just the natural life we all experience now in our bodies, but it’s the life that is connected again to God.

We become alive to him. We have new birth. We have a new origin. By his Spirit, we have something new pulsating in us so we’re alive to God as we were not before, and ultimately, this issues at the end in resurrected existence in a new heaven and a new earth. This is the life he’s offering, not just the bread that will increase their income by 85 percent.

Jesus is the one, then, who gives God’s life to us because he does his Father’s will. In terms of the narrative as a whole, the way this life comes to us is because Jesus goes to the cross and pays for our death. He dies our death, pays for our sin, and he does that because he came to do his Father’s will. This is God’s plan, and he does it. It takes him all the way to the cross. In other words, he is able to be the one who gives us new life precisely because he observes so perfectly his Father’s will out of love for his Father and, indeed, out of love for us.

3. Jesus is the one who gives God’s life to us because he reveals God to us.

Verse 41: “At this, some of the people there (some of the Jews) began to grumble about him and said, ‘What’s he saying here? “I’m the bread that came down from heaven?” I mean, the metaphor was bad enough (“I am the Bread of Life”), but now “I am the bread that came down from heaven”? It’s a bit much. We know him. He’s one of us. We know his family, for goodness’ sake. We know Mary.’ ” She’s still alive.

“We know Joseph. We know him as Jesus’ father.” He wasn’t Jesus’ father, but that’s the way they knew him. They accepted him as Jesus’ father. “He belongs to the carpenter’s family. We know him. What is this chap doing putting on so many pretensions? How can he say, ‘I came down from heaven’?”

Jesus replies, “Stop grumbling among yourselves. No one can come to me unless the Father who sent me draws them, and I will raise them up at the last day. It is written in the Prophets: ‘They will all be taught of God.’ ” You see, they’re offended now not by the metaphor but by a personal claim, not by his offer to give bread but by his claim to be bread, to come from God, and Jesus recognizes their grumbling is not merely a sign of unbelief. In some ways, it’s really dangerous.

It presupposes God’s revelation could be sorted out by talking the matter over and evaluating him. There is a sense, of course, in which the Bible does come to us and say things like, “Come now, let us reason together,” but there are many people who want to approach God and say, “I’m in the market for a god. I am. I mean, I believe in spirituality. I’m in the market for a god. These are the characteristics I’d like to see in my god. This is the sort of god I can believe in.”

But the Bible really isn’t interested in the god we can believe in; it’s interested in the God who is there, and as long as we think we have the right to define God, do you know what happens? We define him so that he scratches all the places where we itch. He serves us. He might be very powerful. He’s like the genie in Aladdin’s lamp, very powerful and can give you all your wishes, but he’s under the control of whoever rubs the lamp, and the God who is there doesn’t act like that. He just doesn’t.

No. If people really come to him, it’s not because they have made a kind of careful evaluation and on balance of probabilities they consider this is, perhaps, a god they could live with. Rather, instead they find themselves grabbed by God. Their hearts are strangely drawn. Jesus quotes another Old Testament passage. “They will all be taught by God.”

This drawing is an insight. It’s a teaching. It’s an illumination implanted within the individual in fulfillment of this promise from the prophet Isaiah almost eight centuries before Christ. It’s not the savage constraint of a rapist. It’s the wonderful wooing of a lover. This God draws people to himself.

Some of you tonight will feel that tug from God. He draws people to himself. You have to understand, according to Jesus, if people actually do close with Christ, if they actually do come to them, it’s not finally because they’re doing God a favor. “Yes, I’ll become a Christian. You’ve got a really hot one with me, Jesus.”

We come as beggars. We want his forgiveness. We want life from him, and we discover even our ability to come and believe in him and trust him is because he is drawing us in his mercy, because such people are quietly taught by God. God reveals himself to us in Christ Jesus. Jesus is the bread from heaven because he reveals God to us.

That’s why he goes on to say, “Everyone who has heard the Father and learns from him comes to me. No one has seen the Father except the one who is from God; only he has seen the Father.” He’s talking about himself. “Very truly I tell you, whoever believes has eternal life. I am the Bread of Life.”

4. Jesus is the one who gives God’s life to us because he gives his life on our behalf.

If you’re still thinking at a purely materialistic level, these next verses are, frankly, bizarre. They sound cannibalistic. Listen to them. “ ‘I am the living bread that came down from heaven. Whoever eats of this bread will live forever. This bread is my flesh, which I will give for the life of the world.’ Then the Jews began to argue sharply among themselves, ‘How can this man give us his flesh to eat?’ ”

Jesus doesn’t back down. He has already explained this is a metaphorical sort of thing, but he pushes it all the way to the nth degree, and there’s a reason for it. “Very truly I tell you, unless you eat the flesh of the Son of Man and drink his blood, you have no life in you. Whoever eats my flesh and drinks my blood has eternal life, and I will raise them up at the last day. For my flesh is real food and my blood is real drink. Whoever eats my flesh and drinks my blood remains in me, and I in them.”

This is very strong language. You take it purely literally and it sounds cannibalistic, doesn’t it? There are some people over the history of the church who have argued what Jesus is talking about there is Holy Communion. If you have no Christian background and you don’t know what I’m talking about, tune me out for about 30 seconds and then come back in. I’m talking to those now who have been reared in Christian homes and Christian churches at some level and they’ve been exposed to Holy Communion and baptism and things like that.

Although there are some wonderful elements in Holy Communion, I don’t think that is what Jesus is talking about here at all. Where there are the words that institute Holy Communion, the Lord’s Supper, then, “This is my body which is broken for you.” It’s always the word body all through the New Testament right into the second century. It’s always the word body. It’s never the word flesh.

Moreover, this utterance is given before that rite has been introduced. It’s given during the days of Jesus’ ministry. Moreover, Jesus, in this chapter, has already explained that eating him is in some sense believing in him, coming to him, trusting him. It’s not a question of eating something and getting a bit of magic food down in your tummy and then everything will be all right. It just doesn’t understand the use of bread in the first century.

Okay. Now you can all tune back in. Let me come in again through the side door. Supposing tonight when you leave this place you find yourself a bit hungry, so you go to Hungry Jack’s across the street or maybe you go somewhere a little up market and go to a really nice restaurant in the eastern suburbs. What will you sit down and eat?

Or supposing you go really, really Lower Slobbovia and go to McDonald’s. What will you eat? Well, you’ll eat dead cow, dead tomatoes, dead barley or dead wheat, and dead lettuce. Everything you eat there will be dead, absolutely everything except for a few minerals, like sodium chloride, of which there may be too much.

Do you know what? Unless that dead cow, that dead tomato, that dead lettuce, and that dead barley dies, you die, and that is as plain as a pikestaff. It’s as plain as the nose on your face to anybody brought up on a farm, to anybody reared in an agrarian society. It’s not so obvious to us because we got to Coles. Food is stuff wrapped in plastic or in a tin maybe, but anybody brought up on a farm knows we live because other things die. Either they die or we die. Those are the choices. Life is sustained by living organisms that have given their life for you.

I’m not suggesting they’ve done it voluntarily; nevertheless, they have given their life for you, or quite frankly, you die. That’s why Jesus is pushing this imagery so hard. In the first century, bread was not one of 86 varieties in different colored packages depending on how much wheat there was and whether it’s good for toasting or for making sandwiches and what color it is and whether it has preservatives in it or not. It wasn’t that.

Bread was the staple of life, and you live because it dies. Fish was the staple of life, and you live because it dies. Jesus pushes this imagery all the way to the wall by saying, “Don’t you understand? You live because I die. You take your sustenance from me or you’re dead. If you want this eternal life, you must understand it’s because I die,” and you receive your life from this dead Jesus who rises again to life, as we’ll see tomorrow night.

John’s gospel is full of images like that, images we don’t have time to explore in this series. For example, in chapter 10, Jesus describes himself as the Good Shepherd. He says, “Ordinary shepherds, of course, are supposed to shoo away the wild animals (a lion here or a bear there), but on the other hand, if it really looks too dangerous, they’ll run first, and if the lion gets some of those lambs, well, that’s the way it is. It’s a tough world. Eat or be eaten.”

He says, “But the Good Shepherd gives his life for the sheep.” Now that’s stunning! Again, it’s a metaphor that is pushed all the way to the wall. A good shepherd doesn’t volunteer to give his life for the sheep. A good shepherd risks his life for the sheep, but he doesn’t give his life for the sheep. Jesus says that he, as the Good Shepherd, actually gives his life for the sheep, because pushing the metaphor that far is a way of saying, “The sheep don’t survive until this particular Shepherd dies.”

That’s the sort of thing you find in all four of the first four books of the New Testament (Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John). All four of them talk about Jesus, his words, his actions, his miracles, his teachings, but they all rush toward the cross where he gives his life. According to the Bible, if we are to have eternal life ourselves, if we are to receive this life in ourselves that connects us with God now and issues, finally, in consummated resurrection life at the end in a new heaven and the new earth.… If we are to have that, it’s because Jesus died.

He dies, in effect, taking our death. He bears our guilt, our sin, our shame, and even that sort of imagery is drawn from Old Testament passages. Between 700 and 800 years before Christ, the prophet Isaiah wrote about one in these terms: “He was wounded for our transgressions, he was bruised for our iniquities; the chastisement of our peace was on him. With the blows that fell on him, we are healed.”

The way you taste this eternal life, the way you come to enjoy it is by eating him. Oh, not cannibalistically. The text has already explained what it means to eat him, to have this bread of life, to come to him and trust him, to abandon your self to him, to rely on him, and to ask his forgiveness and believe him.

When this truly happens, it’s more than just a choice. “Okay. I’ll give this a try.” It’s much deeper than that. It’s God himself drawing you to him by this quiet revelation in your own life and heart that you find as irresistible as the determined love of a wooer until you bow the knee and you say, “Give me this bread of life. Lord, I believe.” Let us pray.

We cannot know each other in this room very well, but you, heavenly Father, know us through and through. You know our loves and our fears, the things we’re ashamed of, the things we’re thankful for, and you alone, Lord God, are able to draw these men and women to yourself, and we pray you will do so now.

We pray that some who feel this drawing power of the living God will even now where they sit say, “I am so sorry for my sin. I am quite clearly spiritually dead without you. I thank you for Jesus and his death, which alone can give me life. Lord, I believe.” In Jesus’ name, amen.

Male: Why don’t we start with our first question? Why was eternal life so important to the Israelites then? Why might it be so important to us today?

Don Carson: There are, of course, in every culture and in every society, even in the first century, some people who actually take comfort in thinking that when they die they die like a dog and there’s no consciousness beyond that. In the first century, that was pretty close to the view of a chap named Lucretius, for example.

On the other hand, what the Bible insists is that it is appointed once to human beings to die and after that one faces judgment. One does come before God and there is the potential for eternal life in glory and triumph and joy and forgiveness and resurrection existence, or there is the potential instead for an ongoing world of rebellion and judgment and sorrow.

Quite apart from the fact that there is a restlessness in a lot of us that expects to live beyond this life, the Bible certainly insists that it is so. I remember when I was an undergraduate studying chemistry. My grandmother died. The guy in the next room to me had become a really good friend. He was an atheist, and I was just a young Christian. I went to tell him, “I have to go away for a few days. My grandmother has just died. I have to go to her funeral and so on. We were quite close. It’s going to be a hard time.”

He said to me very sympathetically, “I’m sorry.” Long pause.” But it is a bit different for you, isn’t it?” He said, “My grandmother died last year, and I can scarcely bring myself to believe that she’s really, really gone.” I think his intuitions were good. I think there is a restlessness in the heart of human beings generally that looks around the world and looks not least at death and says, “This is not the way it’s supposed to be.”

For the Bible says we are made in the image of God and we are made to have a connection with him. Unless we suppress this a great deal, there is something in us that is longing for, looking for a rectifying, vindicating, God-honoring, restituted world where there is life and freedom and joy and righteousness and integrity and love and so on.

This increasingly pertains in the old covenant Scriptures. It becomes clear yet in the teaching of Jesus and the new covenant Scriptures. It is pretty deeply engrained in the whole Bible. In other words, it’s not just for this life that we’re Christians; it’s for eternity.

Male: If Jesus is all-satisfying and God loves the world, why does starvation still persist in many parts of the world?

Don: That’s a good question, and it is part of a much bigger one. Why is there evil and suffering in the world? It’s not just starvation. Why is there war? Why is there violence? Why is there poverty? This is part of it, but it’s a much bigger issue than that. Behind that sort of question, the assumption seems to be something like, “If God is good and all-powerful, then surely he ought to arrange things so that there is no suffering under any circumstances, and everybody should live a happy life.”

The Bible actually places this sovereign God within a whole narrative context. It’s not just an abstract account, the Bible, and that narrative context shows we human beings have rebelled against him. Supposing God gave everything out richly to enjoy, would that by itself mean there would be no more war? How much of the suffering actually turns not on natural catastrophes but malice, race hatred, lust for power, sin? An awful lot of suffering is along those lines.

The Bible depicts the natural disaster’s part of it as a temporary thing that is tragic, not always easily explained, but a foretaste of judgment that is still more severe unless we actually do repent before him. For example, in Luke, chapter 13 (I mentioned Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John; this is the third one), Jesus raises some questions about a recent disaster that had taken place in his own lifetime in his own country.

A tower had fallen and killed a bunch of people. He says, “What do you think? The people who died, were they worse than others? Were they more sinful than others? Did they deserve it?” So the people who are dying now in Pakistan, are they more sinful than Australians? Hmm? Long pause. He says, “No, but unless you repent, you will all likewise perish.”

In other words, almost surprisingly, the God of the Bible presents these things as markers of judgment to warn us of still more severe judgment to come unless we actually do really come to him. The Bible says a lot of other things about suffering. It has a whole book just dealing with the question of innocent suffering. It’s in the Old Testament. It’s called the book of Job.

In fact, as it happened, last Sunday afternoon I gave a two-hour seminar just on this question of suffering and how to understand it from the Bible’s perspective, and I’m sure if this is a question you’d really like more information on, if you contact Ridley College and say you’d like the tape of Don Carson on suffering and evil and how to understand that in light of what the Bible says, then I’m sure they could get it for you and send it to you on a CD or an mp3 or something. Is that possible? Okay. There. It’s done. Probably for free. It’s amazing what foreigners can do!

Male: Thank you, Don. That was a good question. How can God hold people responsible for not coming to him if it is only by him drawing them to himself that they can come?

Don: That’s a good question. It’s a very good question. The Bible presents God as presenting all of the revelation, all of the information, all of the appeal, all of the pleading that welcomes, in principle, everybody. The same God of whom these things are said in John 6 says elsewhere, “Turn. Turn. Why will you die? The Lord has no pleasure in the death of the wicked.”

The same God we saw two nights ago. “God so loved the world that he gave his Son.” When you deal with these passages that talk about God in his sovereignty drawing people to himself, when you read those passages you’re not allowed to take those passages that talk about those things, absolutize them, and then forget about all the other kinds of things the Bible also says. The picture of God in the Bible is multi-layered, and it’s rich.

On the one hand, it says God pleads with people to come, he gives them revelation, he warns them they need to come, and he even begs them to come. He declares his love for them, he invites them all to come, and most don’t, so the Bible treats it as a bit of wonderful surprise that God actually goes even further and draws some to himself.

So if people don’t come it’s not that they’re innocent and God comes down to a whole lot of innocent people as if they are neutral people and says, “Uh-huh. You’re damned. Uh-huh. You’re saved. Uh-huh. You’re damned. Uh-huh. You’re saved.” He comes to a lost world, and the surprising thing is that out of his sheer grace he calls to himself men and women from every tongue and tribe and people and nation, a vast number that no man can number, even while he calls the whole world.

If people do not come, it is because they have willfully, self-consciously rejected whatever revelation they have had from God. That has to be said. You cannot take one snippet from the Bible, absolutize that, and say, “I reject the God of the Bible.” It’s a total package that shows him in his love, in his sovereignty, in his treaty, in his power, in his humility, and ultimately, in the love that sends his own dear Son to the cross on our behalf.

Male: If a Christian pastor tells lies every week but at the end of the week asks for forgiveness, will he be forgiven? You’re getting easy ones tonight. This is great.

Don: What I’d like to know is why this questioner picked on a Christian pastor? I mean, why can’t we generalize that? How about, “If I told lies every week …” Moreover, one has to admit from the Bible’s point of view, there are all kinds of people who take on the name of Christian, pastors included, who are nowhere near what the Bible says Christian pastors ought to be.

That’s why in the New Testament where that sort of thing does go on, there are steps to be taken for disciplining pastors who get in a situation where they’re telling lies or where they’re morally deformed or where they’re leading people astray. There are layers behind this question that need to be unpacked, but let’s just generalize it and say, supposing someone who claims to be a Christian lies and lies and lies and then says, “I want forgiveness, I want forgiveness, I want forgiveness,” will it just continuously be given?

My answer is a very, very clear yes and no. I need to unpack that one just a wee bit. You see, the life that Jesus gives, the salvation life he gives, it does forgive us our sins. Yes, it does, but as we saw two nights ago, it also gives us a new beginning, a new birth. The work of the Spirit? It begins to change us so that our lives get shunted around.

The example I gave a couple of nights ago I’m going to repeat. I mentioned John Newton who was a slave trader responsible for ferrying 20,000 Africans as part of the slave trade across the Atlantic to North America. In due course, he was spectacularly converted and abandoned all of this life. He used to say in his nightmares he could still hear the 20,000 souls screaming.

His life was changed. He wasn’t heading in the same direction anymore, and in due course, he got some theological training, became a pastor in the little town of Olney, and he wrote Amazing Grace which we’ve been singing every night. “… how sweet the sound that saved a wretch like me.”

That doesn’t mean John Newton was perfect. He wasn’t. He wasn’t doing slave trading anymore. He was just terribly sorry for all the things he had done, and he tried to help people, to minister the gospel to them, to help people in their illness, helped his friend William Cowper with his insanity, and so on. He was a different sort of man, but he could then write, which is what I quoted two nights ago, “I am not what I want to be. I am not what I ought to be. I am not what one day I will be, but I am not what I was, and by the grace of God, I am what I am.”

If, by this question, you mean a Christian does continue to sin and needs forgiveness, you go back to the cross again and again and claim the same forgiveness on the same ground as when you first became a Christian. “Christ died for my sins.” If, to use it in very physical terms, I die, and Saint Peter asks me, “Why should I let you in here?” my answer will be, “I have no other argument. I need no other plea. It is enough that Jesus died, and that he died for me. And the final transformation where I will be sinning no more will come at that point.

But if by the question instead you mean that somebody says, “Okay. I’m forgiven,” and then lives indistinguishably from any person who hates God or wants to be independent of God or do his own thing or becomes a sociopath and at the end of each week says, “Okay. I want forgiveness,” then the Bible has lots and lots of texts that say that’s just the rawest form of hypocrisy, and there’s no forgiveness for that because where the gospel really does come and where people really are drawn to Christ, where they really do genuinely believe, their lives are turned around.

It doesn’t make them perfectly sinless. In fact, when people first become Christians, they often first begin to see just how many shady spots in their lives there are, and they actually begin to feel a little guiltier for a bit until they learn to take this to Christ and their lives turn around. They’re heading in another direction.

Instead, to claim the forgiveness of Christ where there is no power at all in transformation, that’s not Christianity. That’s just plain flat-out hypocrisy, and the Bible has lots to warn against that sort of thing, too. It’s a good question because it probes to show how the answer is going to come out somewhat differently. It’s what I meant by, “Yes and no,” depending on how people, in fact, are responding to the whole message of Christ and his good news.