Hunger for Righteousness - John 6:35
If you have a copy of God’s Word, please join me in turning to the gospel of John chapter 6. The passage is also typed in the worship guide on page 6. We are going to be looking at a portion of Scripture that comes from one of Jesus’ many teaching discourses that are recorded in the Bible. Specifically, in verse 35 of Chapter 6, Jesus declares the first of seven “I am” statements about himself. It holds significant truth for all of us, whether believer or non-believer. In those “I am” statements, Jesus is making very profound declarations about himself. And we will be looking at the first of those statements today.
So, follow along with me as I read. The gospel of John chapter 6 verse 35. John writes, “Jesus said to them, ‘I am the bread of life; whoever comes to me shall not hunger, and whoever believes in me shall never thirst.” This is the Word of the Lord.
Let us pray together and ask God to illuminate His Word this morning. God, we acknowledge that we are completely dependent upon you this morning to open our hearts and minds so that we may see the wonderful truths of your holy Word. May you give us fresh eyes and hearts as we look at this passage in the gospel of John. Father, you command us to worship you in spirit and truth, and your Word is truth. So would you illuminate your Word for all here to see and understand that the satisfaction for our hearts’ eternal longings can only be found in Christ. In His name we pray, amen.
It should come as no surprise, given the reference to bread in our passage, that I would begin the sermon this morning by talking about bread. Mmmm...Bread. Given the fact that it is around 11:00 on a Sunday morning, many of you, just from hearing me mention it, are beginning to experience a growling in your stomachs. You’re thinking, “Man I am hungry, and a warm piece of homemade bread would be sooooo good.” And don’t pretend like, even though you are on a keto diet or a Paleo diet or some other no carb thing, that you don’t have those same cravings. You’re fooling yourself.
Bread is such a basic staple of so many people’s diets around the world. A quick search on the web for bread reveals some interesting, but probably not surprising, facts. Did you know that each American consumes, on average, 53 pounds of bread per year? I’m pretty sure I exceed my quota every year. I love bread. I especially love when Gretchen makes homemade bread. I honestly think I could eat an entire loaf myself. It is truly delicious. But I digress. My brief research also revealed another notable phenomenon, that at home bread making soared during the outbreak of COVID. As we know, bread was one of the first perishable items that was cleared from the shelves at the beginning of the COVID outbreak. Due partly to that and due partly to lockdown and quarantine, people decided to start making their own bread. However, it became apparent that making your own bread was not only convenient, but it was also a great way to relieve stress. It is no surprise that bread baking became so popular: Bread is one of the few foods, if not the only food, that is eaten by every race, culture, and religion around the world. And it is fairly simple to make with a few ingredients. In fact, grain of some sort was likely one of the first crops cultivated outside of the garden of Eden and bread was likely one of man’s first self-produced foods.
With all this in mind it is interesting, but probably not surprising, bread has had major significance in Scripture. As we will see in today’s passage, Jesus uses bread to teach about his ability to satisfy not only our temporal hunger, but infinitely more importantly, that He is the only one who can satisfy the eternal hunger that exists in our souls - that hunger that exists in our souls for righteousness and peace with God. It was the 17th century theologian, philosopher, and mathematician, Blaise Pascal, who said, “There is a God-shaped vacuum in the heart of each man which cannot be satisfied by any created thing but only by God the Creator, made known through Jesus Christ.”
You see we were created to be worshipers. We saw that at the beginning of our Genesis study. God created mankind to live in communion with him and to worship him. The Westminster Shorter Catechism question and answer #1 states, “What is the chief end of man? Man’s chief end is to glorify God and to enjoy him forever.” And yet, as we have seen through our study of the first part of Genesis, mankind lost their communion with God. Man’s only source of true joy, and peace, and satisfaction was separated from him. And so, what happened?
We just saw in Genesis 6 last week that there was increasing corruption on Earth. Man became increasingly wicked. And what was that the root of that? Essentially, going back to the Fall, mankind questioned the goodness of God and whether God could truly satisfy their hearts’ longings. So, they looked not to the promises of God and the goodness he had shown them, but to the created order to fulfill the longing and desires of their heart.
You see because of our fallen nature we seek satisfaction for our soul’s hunger from temporary and created things rather than He who offers complete and eternal satisfaction. We perceive our greatest needs are physical and/or emotional, those felt needs so to speak, and that those needs can be satisfied by temporary things. Even when we realize that we have a deeper longing in our souls, we think we can fill that longing with material and temporary solutions. Yet God reveals to us that our greatest need is a redemptive need, it is one of reconciliation. That is, our greatest need is to be redeemed by the Savior, Jesus Christ, so that our soul’s hunger and thirst will be eternally satisfied.
We see evidence of this eternal satisfaction offer from God clearly throughout scripture. Isaiah 55:1-2 reads, “Come, everyone who thirsts, come to the waters; and he who has no money, come, buy and eat! Why do you spend your money for that which is not bread, and your labor for that which does not satisfy? Listen diligently to me, and eat what is good, and delight yourselves in rich food.” God is speaking metaphorically here through the pen of Isaiah. He is not referring to literal water, or literal bread, or literal money but to faith, hope, and love. The hunger and thirst are for a salvation that money cannot buy. 1 Corinthians 10:3-4 says, “and all ate the same spiritual food, and all drank the same spiritual drink. For they drank from the spiritual Rock that followed them, and the Rock was Christ.”
So, though we abandoned God through our disobedience and by questioning his provision, God did not abandon mankind. He indeed intended to redeem worshipers for himself from all the people on the earth. And you see throughout the course of redemptive history, God revealing his plan to redeem a people for himself through types and shadows that pointed to the One who would provide that Redemption, the One who would fully satisfy mankind’s hunger.
You may remember that Exodus 16 describes the Israelites’ experience in the wilderness as they traveled toward Mt. Sinai with Moses. You may recall that they were hungry and grumbled against Aaron and Moses, and ultimately against God. They displayed a focus on the immediate and the temporal. Now, it was not wrong or sinful to be hungry but the fact that they grumbled, displayed their lack of trust in God to provide. And remember, they had already seen God’s display of power in their escape from the Egyptians. And doesn’t this sound all too familiar to us? Though God has shown us his kindness and provision over and over in our lives, we grumble against Him. But God continually shows His people His ability to satisfy their eternal hunger and thirst by satisfying their natural and immediate hunger and thirst. So, in chapter 16 of Exodus, a section subtitled “Bread from Heaven” in the ESV, God sends manna from heaven. God provided for his people in a supernatural way displaying his sovereignty and therefore his ability to provide, not just material and temporal things, but spiritual and eternal things as well. By providing for His people’s hunger, he was pointing them to the only one who could provide eternal satisfaction. God sent Christ as the true bread of life that could satisfy mankind’s eternal hunger and thirst.
Fast forward to John 6, and there was a crowd, which was comprised of mostly Galileans, that was following Jesus and wanted their hunger satisfied. The Reformation Study Bible notes this about the crowd, "They expected that the coming of the Messiah would be marked by a miracle as great as or greater than the giving of the manna in the desert, so they dismiss the multiplication of loaves and fish that filled their stomachs the day before.” They simply wanted this man, special because he had performed miracles in their presence, to satisfy their temporal and physical needs. In essence, to give them a happy and pleasurable life. Yet, Jesus knew that their greatest need was to be delivered from sin and to walk in righteousness.
And that brings us to today’s passage. How do we experience Jesus as the true bread of life? How is our eternal hunger and thirst quenched? If you look at the outline there on page six, you will see the two points I think we see in our passage and that we need to understand if we are to truly discover the cure for our heart’s longing. We must understand that we, mankind, hunger and thirst for righteousness and we must understand that Christ alone satisfies our hunger and thirst for righteousness.
Look at the beginning of verse 35. Jesus says, “I am the bread of life”. This is the first “I am” saying of Jesus recorded in the fourth gospel. Dr. R.C. Sproul comments on this phrase, “There is a significance to the Greek construction that is translated “I am.” This construction is used in the New Testament to place emphasis on the subject which is the “I” of the above saying. The meaning is seen more clearly if we translate it as “I, I myself, am.” This construction appears in the gospel of John each time Jesus says “I am.” It is the same construction found in the Greek version of Exodus 3:14, where God declares of Himself: “I am who I am.” No first-century Jew would have missed such a clear self-reference from Jesus to His own deity.” So not only was Jesus saying he was the Messiah, he was also saying he was God, the great “I am”.
Jesus says, “I am the bread of life”. Why did Jesus use bread for this metaphor? It goes back to what we were saying earlier. So many can relate to the hunger for bread. If we look back at the beginning of Chapter 6, we see Jesus performing the miracle of the feeding of the 5000. Not surprisingly, this miracle in which Jesus provided for the physical needs of the crowd involved bread. God had been using bread in one form or another to satisfy the physical and immediate hunger of his people throughout Scripture. But bread was simply provisional. It satisfied a temporary need. The actual bread was always representative of something greater. Jesus was trying to teach them about something much more important and much more satisfying.
If we look forward from the feeding of the 5000 to verse 26 of Chp.6, we see Jesus saying to his followers, “Truly, truly, I say to you, you are seeking me, not because you saw signs, but because you ate your fill of the loaves. Do not work for the food that perishes, but for the food that endures to eternal life, which the Son of Man will give to you.” The people had just seen Christ perform a miracle to meet their physical need of hunger. Yet they cannot see beyond the immediate provision to the more significant meaning. But as we see over and over in Scripture, the miracles were intended by God to set his seal of approval on Christ’s ministry and identify him as the Son of Man, the promised Messiah. The signs were in a sense, a means to an end.
The end being Christ himself and his death as the Father’s provision of eternally life-giving bread from heaven. The Reformation Study Bible states it this way, “although they saw the miracle of the loaves and fishes, they did not recognize it as a sign identifying Jesus as the kind of Messiah that the Father had sent him to be. It was merely an opportunity for a meal to them. However, it was intended to point to the One who would call himself the “Bread of life” and who would satisfy mankind’s hunger and thirst for righteousness.
Indeed, mankind hungers and thirsts for righteousness. We not only know that this is true because it is written in the pages of Scripture, but our own personal experiences attest to the fact that our souls have a deep longing. A longing that, no matter how hard we try to satisfy it with the things of this world, we never seem fulfilled. Think about in your own personal experience. What are the things you have used to satisfy the longing in your heart or the emptiness of your soul? Is it a relationship with another person? Is it money? Is it a job? Is it children? Is it physical beauty? Is it food? Is it shopping? There are so many ways we try to fill the “God-shaped vacuum” in our soul. I have heard interviews over the years with some of the wealthiest and most powerful people in the world. And it always amazes me how often they say something to the effect of: I have reached the mountaintop of success. I have experienced or attained everything that money and power can be used to attain. And yet, I wondered, is this all there is? There must be something more. They tend to express that it is during those times they felt the most alone and the least fulfilled, when they essentially had everything from a material standpoint. They still feel as if they are searching.
In verse 35, Jesus is pointing out the answer – the key, to that searching. It is Him. Christ alone satisfies mankind’s hunger and thirst for righteousness. Christ tells the crowd that he is the “Bead of Life”. He doesn’t say that he gives the bread of life but that he is the bread of life. Jesus is claiming that he is the One who both imparts and sustains life. He is not offering something outside of himself, he is offering himself. In his commentary, William Hendriksen writes this of Christ, “It is through faith, through intimate union with him, assimilating him spiritually, as physical bread is assimilated physically, that man attains everlasting life.
Jesus continues in verse 35, “whoever comes to me will not hunger, and whoever believes in me will never thirst”. Much like God was speaking metaphorically in Isaiah 55:1-2, Jesus is speaking metaphorically of spiritual hunger and spiritual thirst. He had been speaking in the immediate context of John 6 about bread and hunger. He had mentioned the manna in the wilderness, and He had just performed the miracle of feeding the 5ooo with bread and fish. He adds thirst here in verse 35 because it is as fundamental a human need as hunger, in fact, it is more essential because humans can survive longer without food than they can without water. Jesus’ point remains the same – he is the answer to the need, the hunger, of the human heart.
Jesus reiterates and doubles down on his claim later in chapter 6 in verses 50 and 51 which state, “this is the bread that comes down from heaven, so that one may eat of it and not die. I am the living bread that came down from heaven. If anyone eats of this bread, he will live forever. And the bread that I will give for the life of the world is my flesh.” Author and theologian Bruce Milne rights, “the bread of life implies the fundamental, elemental roll Jesus claims to fulfill in relation to the yearning of the human spirit. For Jesus’ audience bread was “the staff of life”, the primary source of nourishment.” The contrast that Jesus wants to draw in verse 35 is all food, including bread, leaves a sense of dissatisfaction. We will hunger again. We all can relate to this, can’t we? If you have ever tried fasting or not had assess to food for long periods of time, you know this is true. If you are like me, you can hardly skip a meal without becoming hangry. The point is food and water may quench hunger and thirst temporarily, but we will always hunger and thirst again. By contrast Jesus, once tasted, eliminates the need for further satisfaction. Just as Jesus said to the woman at the well in John 4:14, “whoever drinks the water I give him will never thirst”, so now he says to the Galileans, he who believes in me will never be thirsty. The sense of the two phrases “not hunger” and “not thirst” in the original Greek is very interesting. Biblical Greek, unlike English, employs the use of double negatives. The use of the double negative adds more force to the negation. So, a slightly more literal reading would be “will never go hungry” and “will never be thirsty”. Jesus’ intention is that those who believe in Him will never have to worry about their hunger and thirst for righteousness because He is their eternal “bread” and their eternal “water”. In a society which has experimented to the point of apparent yet incomplete satisfaction with every form of material, physical, and spiritual thing to fill the inner emptiness of its heart, Jesus’ invitation in verse 35 comes with wonderful relevance – He who comes to me will never go hungry and will never be thirsty.
The first time we feed on Christ by faith, putting our trust in Him alone for salvation, we are brought out of the kingdom of darkness and into the light. We are sustained in the faith that saves us as we continue to feed on the Savior, learning from Him as we read God’s Word and hear it preached, and as we experience His presence among His people through the sacraments. If we regularly taste and savor Jesus, we can be assured of our salvation. Because Christ is the true bread, those who come to Him and believe in Him will never hunger for righteousness again. Have you tasted and seen that the Lord is good? Has the longing of your soul been satisfied? Jesus is the bread of life that satisfies all hunger. Have you trusted in Him?
Let us pray.