And I pray that this service
would be no different. Lord, though in my heart and
in my study, Father, all that I have prepared to consider to
teach us, Lord, Your Word is true. My commentary is unnecessary. So I pray, Father, as we've come
today and this time of year, Lord, You know why we do what
we do. But it's always difficult. It's
always a war. It's always a battle in our flesh
to be with the saints and to worship and to study and to be
in Your Word, even throughout the week. And so, Lord, when
things that we do in society, like time changes, happen, Lord,
it just throws a wrench in everything. Father, when vacations come,
when sickness comes, when death knocks on the door, There's nothing
we can do but accept that which is before us. And stand firmly
in the finished work of Christ, knowing that the whole reason
we live in this world, the whole reason that we have our jobs,
the whole reason that we have our homes and our families, and
the things that you've called us to in this life, Lord, is
to give glory to You. And one of the greatest ways
that we give glory to You The greatest way that we give glory
to You is to believe in Your Son whom You have sent. Father,
for that is the work that You have accomplished, that Your
people believe. Oh, how glorious a gospel! What a good news it is! And Lord,
then we also glorify You, we also glorify You when we suffer
well, when we forgive, when we have joy in the midst of suffering,
when we patiently, without complaining and with joy, wait upon Your
hand, no matter the circumstances and no matter the consequences. I pray Your Word would teach
us exactly what is necessary for us to learn this morning.
In Jesus' name, Amen. Amen. Well church, John chapter
6, here we are again in the midst of this wonderful gospel. And it's very, like I told you
last week, it's a frustrating text. It's a frustrating text
because in the end of it all, some of us, if not all of us,
in some way are going to be challenged. At the end of it all, some of
us may be challenged in such a way that we are frustrated
by what we learn and not necessarily understanding what it is that
you've called us to grasp in this text or apply in this text. That's often the trouble with
Scripture. that conflicts with our worldview,
that conflicts with our theology, that conflicts with our Christian
faith. We sometimes forget that there
is an application there, and we so desperately want to find
an application. We want to find the fleshly attire
to put on in order to walk as you've taught us in your Word.
As I teach on Tuesdays to our homeschool association high school
students, we've been going through the Gospel for the book of Colossians. And in chapter three of Colossians,
after we've been repeatedly hearing the gospel of grace, the gospel
of grace, we see what then Paul says for us to do, is to put
off, therefore, what? The flesh, for it has been crucified
with Christ. We are dead, and we also have
been raised with Christ, so therefore we are also alive. So put off
these things. And I shared with the students
this past week, this is part of any New Testament passages
where we start feeling like, okay, now I get it, now I see.
Because it's easy to say, don't be hateful. It's easy to say,
be compassionate. It's easy to say, have no sexual
immorality among you. It's easy to say, put on kind
hearts. Because we feel like we can actually do those things
and really if in the best of days we find ourselves doing
those things, we're really not doing those things. We're just
mimicking the very essence of righteousness. We're mimicking
and we're showing a shadow like marionettes of holiness. We're
not holy and we're not obeying. We're not walking in a manner
worthy but yet in the same way through Christ we are. Because
it's in Christ. We are in Christ. All of us are
in Christ. Christ is in all and Christ is
all. That's what Paul says to the
church of Colossae. And that's what this gospel is
teaching us. Christ is all. Christ is all. Last week I spoke in a way for
us to see how people throughout this narrative, and it's not
just here, but some more details that we see in the synoptics,
Matthew, Mark, and Luke, where people come to Jesus on their
own terms. They come to Jesus with their
own ideas, with their own presuppositions, or their own assumptions, and
they come to see Him as how they want to see Him. And the essence
of the way Jesus was viewed in the first century by humanity
is that He would be, according to Israel, according to Jewish
people, He would be their political Messiah. That's what He was. And according to Rome, He would
be a traitor. According to the Gentiles, He
would be their judge. Because they were not God's people. But according to Moses, He would
save His people from their sins. It's very odd. Spiritual warfare
is so active and so alive, it is very, very much never gone. It is always here. It is always prevalent. It is always at work. Why? Because the devil is very real
and the devil is very alive. And the enemy of God hates the
people of God. But the good news is that the
enemy of God does nothing outside the purview of God's providence
and purpose. That even when Job was attacked
by Satan, he not only was given permission to go after Job, he
was told to consider Job. He was told to consider Job.
The conflict between Jesus and the Jews here in John 5 and now
in John 6 is going to radically ramp up. The conflict with, just
as I've asked you all to pray this week about how we often
suffer for the sake of the gospel, how many of us are suffering
for the gospel? Well, are we in Christ? And are
we suffering? For the sake of the name of Christ,
we suffer. For the sake of the name of Christ,
we endure. For the sake of the name of Christ,
we hold fast by His power, not our own. It is not possible that
we should see these crowds come to their senses. It is not possible
that we see these people who knew full well that Jesus was
Messiah, but they misunderstood the teaching of Scripture and
misapplied, misappropriated His position as Messiah. And last week I made that very
clear, that unless God comes and regenerates the heart of
the dead, they will never see Him for who He is. Beloved, we
suffer in this life as Christians, if not even for the direct reason
of the gospel, we suffer for the sake of the witness of the
gospel. We suffer for the sake of the witness. What does that
mean? That means that when my body gets ill, I can then suffer
for the witness of the gospel, for the sake of the witness of
Christ, that when the world will say, oh my, oh no, oh wow, how
in the world are you going to put up with this? I can say it
is Christ who lives. when we're wondering if our electricity
is going to be terminated at the end of the day, or if we're
going to have gas to put into our car, or if our children are
going to get a square meal. And people go, well, wow, what
are you going to do? We can say, well, we can know
that no matter what, God purposes for these things and we can rejoice. Maybe it's a job. Maybe it's
a family member. Maybe it's a marriage. Maybe
it's a child. Maybe it's a relationship issue.
Maybe it's a mind thing. Maybe you or I or some of us
or somebody just cannot be joyful, cannot find hope, cannot see
past the blue that they don't even know why it is painted upon
their soul. What is taking place? As Christians,
it is taking place by the providence of our Father so that we might
rejoice in Him. In chapter 6, I want to bring
to your attention this morning these things. Listen, verse 1. After this, Jesus went away to
the other side of the Sea of Galilee, which is the Sea of
Tiberias. And a large crowd was following
Him, because they saw the signs that He was doing on the sick. Jesus went up on the mountain
and there he sat down with his disciples. Verse 4 is where we'll
be most of today. Now the Passover of the Feast
of the Jews was at hand. And I have a whole bunch of neat
notes to share with you about the Passover. And technology
is my enemy this morning. I have nothing. Can't pull up
on the internet, can't pull up on the phone. The Spirit of God
has said, nothing, just go. Preach the word and be done.
So by the grace of God, the Passover. This is interesting for me because
there are three Passovers in the Gospel of John. There are
three Passovers in the ministry of Jesus Christ. The first Passover
that we see over in chapter 2 of John's Gospel shows us that that's
where he says to the Jews, this temple will be destroyed and
I will rebuild it in three days. I want you to see what's happening
here. The same thing that's going over and over and over again
in this Gospel. Most people would say, well, John wrote this so
that we would know what time it was. No, he wrote that the
grass was green so that we would know what time it was. That's
why he wrote that. The grass was green, so it was
in March or April, so we know it was during the Passover. So here, he brings it to light. Why? Everything John writes has
a theological importance. When we see that the Passover
was at hand, we've already seen the Passover the first year.
Now we see the Passover the second year. You see how fast this gospel
goes? Three years. Boom! And then the
last half of the book. One week. The Passover. What is the Passover?
Well, the Passover is that place in history, is that time in history
where God, for His purpose, enslaved His people. They were enslaved
for nearly five centuries in Egypt. Five hundred years. Now think about that for a moment.
I mean, we live, you know, we've been back in Evans County six
years. We've already assimilated very
well. I get aggravated with rush hour. When there used to be 75,000
cars around me, now there's like seven or five, and I'm like,
get out of my way. We assimilate very well. Imagine
500 years of assimilation. And you're promised, there's
a Messiah. He's coming. And you're like,
really? Your great, great, great aunt
or uncle or grandmother or grandfather. I remember when Moses... You
know, you can see it. You can barely hear them, you
can understand them, but they were... You ever speak... Listen,
learn to listen to people who have lived before you. They have
wisdom that they cannot teach. They have knowledge that they
cannot grasp, that none of us will get if we do not hear them.
in this imagined generations of generations of people saying,
well, we were supposed to be redeemed. We were supposed to
be saved. We were supposed to be called out. God has promised. Now, what happens after the first
hundred years? Their children begin to think
this is nothing but old wives' tales. Old myths and legends. Oh, yeah,
one day, yeah, I heard you, Grandpa. I heard you telling me about,
and then when that kid's a grandpa, he's telling about how his grandpa's
grandpa used to say that there was a Messiah, and after a while,
people just sort of forget. God put His people into slavery
for the same reason He took Abram out of the slavery of idolatry
and paganism, so that He could call them His people and do with
them as He wishes. Now I want you to grasp this
for just a moment, because Jesus is about to tell the same thing
in a couple of weeks. We're going to see Jesus say
that only those who come to Me, only those who are given by the
Father can come. Can come! And all that the Father
gives will come. And all that come will be secure. I will raise them up on the last
day. They will have eternal life. This is something that you cannot
overcome. God does what He wishes with His people as He chooses,
when He chooses, without any respect to what they need in
their own flesh, or desire in their own flesh. People say,
well, that's a maniacal God. No, it's a sovereign God. Well,
how's that fair? God is not subject to fairness.
God is righteous. If you want to see what that
looks like, go read Romans 9. Well, read Romans 6-9. Well,
just read Romans. And here Jesus is doing not His
will, but the will of the One who sent Him. And He is not doing
anything for His own glory. He is doing it for the glory
of the Father. He is not trying to accomplish
anything in a worldly sense. He is doing everything in a spiritual
sense. So Jesus now, theologically, is exercising
these things and teaching these things at the Passover. Exodus,
we're back there. What is Exodus? Exodus is where
God fulfilled His promise to Israel to get them out of slavery. And what did He do? How did He
do it? I find it very interesting that even the pagans of antiquity
believed in the oracles of God. What do you mean? Well, the Egyptians,
they served many gods, particularly the sun god, the god of Ra, or
Re, depending on where you come from in the world. And when we see these Egyptians,
they did not believe in the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob.
They did not believe in the God of the Hebrew people. The Hebrew
people were their slaves. They built those pyramids. They
tended to their families. But the oracles of God outlived
generations of doubt and unbelief. The Word of God never dies. Not one jot, not one tittle will
ever cease to be, you see. So that even though Israel may
have forgotten it, God had not. And when the Pharaoh heard that
there would be a firstborn son to be Messiah for the Hebrew
people to take them out of slavery. In His fear, He murdered them
all. Throughout the entirety of the
kingdom of Egypt, Pharaoh ordered every firstborn of every Hebrew
household killed. And they were all killed but
one. and his name was Moses. And his mother put him in the
marsh and floated him down for the water supply to the palace,
and the palace queen found this baby and then went and said,
we're going to keep this baby, but we have slaves to rave our
children. We'll give it back to the Hebrew
family up the way. So his own mother raised him.
but he was spared. Why? Because that's what God
wanted. That's what God wanted. She's not to be praised for her
compassion. I'm glad she had it, but she had it because God
put it in her heart to have compassion so that God could raise Moses
up the same way God told Pharaoh He raised him up that his power
might be seen. Why did Pharaoh exist? To enslave
the Hebrew people so that the power of God might be seen. You
see, we think too much of our nations. We think too much of
our governments. We think too much of our politics.
We think too much of the longevity. Friends, America has never, ever
been the power that Rome was, nor shall she ever be. There
will never, ever be another Rome, and God took it down in a breath.
And God will take all of Babylon down. Every nation, every kingdom,
every king, every ruler, every congressman, every president
will be crushed under the feet of Christ. For there is no such
thing as a nation of God or a nation of Christians, just like there's
not such a thing as a nation of God's chosen people. We are
a royal priesthood, not a government. And Jesus is our King, and the
government stands on His shoulders. Perspective, folks. The Exodus. This is what God has done in
His sovereignty. And He put them in captivity
and He brought them out of captivity with signs and wonders. He sent
Moses back to his mother. He was raised sort of in a Hebrew
household and in an Egyptian household. So that later in life,
he would have zeal for his people, and in an attempt to help save
a slave, he would murder an Egyptian guard. And because of that, he
fled to Midian, to the wilderness. And it was there, it was there
that God spoke to Moses. And how did God speak to Moses?
He consumed, or he ignited, but not consumed a bush. And God
spoke to Moses and commanded him to go and command the Pharaoh,
the ruler of the world, to let the Hebrews go. And so Moses
went, and Aaron was sent, and God gave Moses a stick. You need
some help? Take this stick. What was the
pressure of that stick? Nothing. Stick had no power. God had the power. But it's just
like a security blanket. Kids can't go to bed with it,
without it. Can't find the little binky or whatever it is they
need. Just go buy another one. Throw it outside in the yard.
They think it's the old one. Nothing special about the stick.
It's God who is power. And God showed signs and wonders
to the Egyptian people, and their magicians came and showed illusions
that would match. And then God showed His power
in ways that no one could match. God showed judgment when Pharaoh
refused to obey God. Newsflash, unbelievers are bound
to obey the Word of God also. They must obey, they will obey,
and they will be judged by the Word of God. All human beings
are judged by their obedience to the Word of God. And in Romans
3, all human beings are guilty of falling from the glory of
God and disobeying. We are all subject to the judgment
of God. God, in the same way, showed
His judgment against Egypt. He sent Pestilence after pestilence
turned their waters to blood. Rained fire from heaven. Frogs
filled their homes. Lice took over their crops. Their storage. Locusts ate their
harvest. All of their livestock died. The sun became black. And every time this happened,
what would Pharaoh do when God's judgment was upon him? The same
thing a child does when the belt, or the paddle, or the switch,
or the spoon, or the stern look, or the time-out chair, or the
dunce cap, or whatever it is you might do at home, comes out. Some redneck families just kick
the kid down the stairs and hope for the best, you know? That's
a joke. I'm joking. I don't want any dirty letters. But what do they do? They relent.
Relent, not repent. Relent. There's a difference.
Repentance is a change of mind. I don't want to be this way anymore.
I see the way that I should go. I see what I should trust in.
I know that none of my works matter anymore. I trust in Christ. That's repentance. It's only
possible through regeneration. But Pharaoh relented when God
would push his thumb upon him. And then God would do what God
does. best. He would be merciful. Pharaoh
would relent and God would give grace. Oh, you said, God's not
stupid. He knew Pharaoh would not repent. But God showed his mercy and
he took away the plague. And just as soon as they would
clean up that damage, Pharaoh would harden his heart. Why?
Because God hardened the heart of Pharaoh with His grace. The same way Jesus is hardening
the heart of the Pharisees with His grace. And finally, God goes and speaks
through Aaron, Moses, and says, if you do not let us
go, God will judge you. And God told Moses to tell the
Hebrew people to kill a lamb and eat it, and to take the blood
of that lamb, a perfect lamb, as good as they could have, and
put it on the doorposts of their homes. And that if they did not
do this, when the angel of the Lord passed over Egypt, every
firstborn son in every household would die. And so the Hebrew people spent
much time preparing for this Passover. The Bible says that
God said, if I see the blood on the doors, I will pass over
your home. I will pass over. And that night, I could imagine
the agony and the wailing and the gnashing of teeth as son
after son, as infant and toddler and teenager and young man and
middle-aged man and old man alike, the firstborn of every home,
died. And the next day, the Hebrew
people who had put their blood of that Lamb on them had been
passed over from this judgment. That is when repentance happened
temporarily in the heart of Pharaoh and he let them go and then he
pursued them to destroy them. That's what the Passover is.
So we see these Passover festivals. What was happening is that the
Jews would remember that. Remember what the Lord has done
for you. Remember the works of my hands. Do these things in
remembrance of Me." The Lord's table. The Jews had their Passover festival
and every household was required to kill a lamb and to eat of
it in remembrance. You see what
this is looking like? You see what we've already learned
in John's Gospel? The Passover did not have anything to do with
the temporal promises of God to Israel. It had everything
to do with pointing and showing what salvation would look like.
Everything. It had everything to do with
what salvation would look like. And when we think about these
things, we often forget. And sometimes we even fall into
the trap that the Israelites did, is that we just begin to
think it's some kind of a custom that had some other meaning. The Passover of the Feast of
the Jews was at hand. Friends, Jesus is the Lamb of
God that takes away the sins of the world. It is by the blood
of Christ alone through which we are passed over from judgment. It's unlike anything I've ever
seen in my life. And in chapter 1, we see that
His own did not receive Him. No one can choose, no one can
will, no one can be born. But God must birth them anew.
Nicodemus said, we know you are from God. The Jews said, how
are you going to rebuild this temple? There's no way. It's
been 48 years to build it where it is now. How are you going
to rebuild it in three days? You're crazy. Jesus is the temple.
The woman of Sychar, she wanted that magic water, and she was
looking for Jesus to have some kind of a pail in order to pull
it up from the well. Give me this water always, that
I may cover and have my sins passed over. And Jesus says,
I'm that water. And then when she goes back to
town, the disciples come back and say, Hey, Jesus, eat. And
he's like, I'm full. You ever had somebody bring food
and say, hey, what did you eat? And you're like, oh, I just ate.
I've already eaten. Now some of us are just big enough
to go, no, I'll eat again, especially if it's cake. But you know, you
meet with somebody, oh, have you had lunch? Yeah, I've already
had lunch. You may sit with them, but Jesus is there and He said,
have you eaten? Eat something. Teacher, eat.
And He says, I have food that you know not of. And my food
is to do the will of the one who sent me. I am full because
I am fulfilling the will of the Father in this conversation right
now with this woman who the world hates and the Jews abhor. And I'm going to bring her to
eternal salvation by the will of God the Father. They could
not see it. In John 5, they could not understand
that Jesus was speaking for God and working for God, that He
was God, and they chose in their hearts that He needed to die,
that we'd love to kill Him. And then when they tried in their
best to stand there silent, Jesus knew their hearts and He spoke
to what they were thinking. And He reminded them that they
rejoiced in the light of John the Baptist in His preaching.
But as soon as John pointed to Jesus and said, Behold, the Lamb
of God that takes away the sins of the world, they're like, there's
no way. Not doing this. There's no way
that that man is going to be. Who does he think he is talking
about taking away? Listen to this. Taking away our
sins. He doesn't know who we are. We
don't need our sins taken away. Is that our hearts? We don't
need to hear the gospel because we're already, quote, saved?
We don't need to be in Bible study because we already have
been in Sunday school for 38 years? We've been learning We don't
need the gospel. We don't need grace. We need
to get our lives together and start doing what Christians do.
Oh, beloved, that's why Jesus was
on this mountain. To teach us and His disciples
and 25,000 other people that if He did not do a work in them,
they would perish in their sins and not even know it. The feast of the Jews was at
hand. In verse 5, Jesus lifts up His eyes and then
seeing a large crowd was coming toward Him, Jesus said to Philip,
where are we to buy bread so that these people may eat? Now
I've heard this preach before. Y'all listen to this. I've heard
this preach before back when I was in my 20s. And I heard
a man use this as a proof text to show that we should be concerned
with people having food. Interestingly enough, Jesus does
this so that he can tell them the very next day, get away from
me, all you want is food. So that's a silly thing to say. Secondly, people like to try
to make it as a proof text for the church's business. When Jesus
isn't the church, He's the head of the church and He rejected
feeding them again. Why? He fed them to show them
their famine. But He looked and He saw the
synoptics, especially Mark's gospel, talks about what Jesus
did. That they saw Him up on the hill and that they began
to run. to the north side of the hill so they could get around
an earshot of where He was. That they ran to Him, that they
hurried themselves there, they were following after Him, they
could not wait to see what He was going to say next, or more
importantly, what the text teaches us, what magic that He would
perform. What cool trick will this man
do for us this day? What is it that we're going to
see Jesus illustrate in His power? Let's go see. But here, theologically, John
wants us to remember who Christ is, and He is the Passover. He
is the Passover. He is the Lamb. And as we'll see in a couple
of weeks, the bread and the wine of Passover becomes the body
and the blood of Jesus. No longer has any bearing. Judaism
is over. It's false gospel. It's a false
worship. It is idolatry. It is paganism. It is Satanism. Oh, that's harsh
words. You're anti-Semitic. No, the
Gospel of John is anti-Semitic. It's not really. It's anti-Judaism.
Why? Jesus said, I tell you these
things that you may have life. I tell you these things, Pharisees,
so that you may live. I tell you these things, Nicodemus,
that you may be born again. Lifting up his eyes, he saw that
the large crowd was there and he taught them. John, theologically,
shares this with us so that we can understand The purpose in
the rest of this book, starting in verse 22, in the rest of this
chapter specifically, we can understand why Jesus did this
miracle and to what end it proved Him, God, and Messiah, and everything
else that He claimed to be. So he goes and he wants to feed
them because he's been teaching them. Now was it Jesus' interest? Look what happens here. No, it
wasn't Jesus' interest that they might have food. If we were all
together and we were doing an outside Bible hour or something
and a thousand people showed up, would any of you feel inclined
to find food for all of them? No, you'd be like, it's time
for us to eat. See ya. It wasn't like they were all
in the wilderness together. No, Jesus had no moral, ethical,
spiritual responsibility to feed these people. He had a theological
responsibility to feed these people because it was the will
of the Father that he feed them. Why? Look, he goes to Philip. Why did he ask Philip? Well,
because Philip is a practical guy. He says, where are we to
buy bread so that these people may eat? I don't know about you,
but we've had members gatherings at the buffet down there. I mean,
it's a week's wage. It's expensive. If we were to
buy chicken and feed a hundred people, That's not like going
and getting a 99-cent milkshake. It can get costly. How many of
you have ever been to a wedding feast? $45 a head, so they can make
it look pretty. You know how I say that? Pretty. It's pretty. Pretty. Where are we going to
buy bread? Jesus asks an absurd question. For one, it's impossible. And
Judas is freaking out. I mean, can you imagine? He's
just going, oh my gosh, they're going to take every dime I've
got. And they're going to know that I've spent some. Oh no. That's just a joke. Where are
we to buy bread so that these people may eat, he says to Philip.
And verse 6 says he did that to test him, for he himself knew
what he would do. John wrote that in there theologically so
that the reader wouldn't go, wow, Jesus is an omniscient.
No, Jesus purposely says everything that He says so that God, the
Father, will be glorified. The messages that Jesus teaches
and the Scriptures that record His words are important. Every measure is important. Every sentence is important.
And it doesn't have a deep meaning. What in the world is Jesus doing
here asking Philip where to buy bread? He's asking for an absurd
thing. So Philip, just like everybody
else in the Gospel of John, thinks what? In a fleshly way. He's
thinking, well, in the market I know there's a place we could
buy some bread. Holy cow! And what does the other Gospels
say? It would take eight months worth of a household income and
still not all of them would get anything to eat. Can you imagine
taking eight months of your annual income just to feed a few people?
And then two-thirds of them go hungry? Jesus was asking them
to come up with the answer of something that was impossible.
You see the theological portion of that, pun intended. The theology
behind that is that Jesus is asking His disciples, His closest
confidants, His closest students, His most trusted people, how
they can do something that cannot be done. So that in their mind
they would go, oh wow, Philip's like, I don't know, and then
Andrew comes up with his wisecrack. Andrew's trying to show Jesus
just a simple absurdity of this request. Philip's like, we can't
afford, we couldn't afford to feed a hundred of these guys.
If we had eight months' salary, we couldn't feed a hundred of
these people. How are we going to feed 25,000? Where do you get
25,000? Listen, 5,000 men. They're women and children. Why does he emphasize the men?
Because they were counted. Because there's an important
issue in verse 15 of this text that tells you just what kind
of power the people had. And here Andrew comes and says,
there's a boy over there that's got a little tiny sack lunch.
He's got some pickled fish. He's got five little barley loaves,
like a Ritz cracker. He's got a little lunch. That's
all we've got, teacher. You see? See what he's saying
there? Philip's saying, this is absurd. We can't afford this.
And Andrew's going, see, this is it. I mean, come on, Master,
this is absurd. They weren't thinking, okay,
Jesus can do something with this. They were thinking, this is an
impossible task. And that's the point of the teaching. It's an
impossible thing. It is impossible for 20,000 people
to be hungry. and nobody has any money, and
nobody has any food, it's impossible to feed them. It's impossible. And the hunger that these people
had, in reality, was not physical, it was spiritual. Jesus then, after Andrew says
these things, just said, okay, just have them all sit down. I mean, just in this room, if
I pulled out one cracker, I'm like, man, we're starving. We're
locked in here. There's tanks outside. We're in a hostile environment.
And I'm like, how are we going to eat? How are we going to eat?
The children need to eat. And little Ethan's got a cracker. And I
get the cracker from Ethan. I say, here's a cracker. Everybody
just sit down and get a little close. Y'all are thinking he has lost his
mind. He's hangry, and he's taking it out on us. He's going to eat
that cracker in front of us, isn't he? What's happening? They're
thinking, this guy, they're not going to disobey him. Just like
they didn't rebuke him when he was talking with the woman at
Sychar. They're asking amongst themselves, who gave him food?
Now they're asking amongst themselves, he's going to make a fool of
himself. He's going to stand here and give an object lesson.
And these 20,000 people, these 5,000 men are going to get really
angry at us because they're thinking they're going to be fed and Jesus
is going to give them an object lesson. He's going to disappear
and we're going to be standing here going, oh! That's what they're thinking. Jesus
says these things because it's an impossibility. They cannot
be fed. So He has them sit down. He orders the disciples to have
them sit down. In the Synoptics, it teaches
that He sat them down in groups of 50 and 100 so they could be
ministered to in a better way. And it says there was much grass
in the place, so the men sat down about 5,000 in number. The
grass there is indicative of the time of year. And if you've
ever been to the West Coast, you see in the summer the grass
is completely brown. Everything's brown. Because once the sun really
starts scorching, it just burns everything and everything's brown.
The grass was green. It was during the Passover. Then
it says in verse 11, Jesus then took the small lunch. He took
the loaves, and when He had given things, He just distributed them. He just distributed them. He
distributed the lunch. And I'm willing to bet you that
it was something like this. He just had this little basket
of food from this boy, and he would reach in and he would hand
the bread and fish to the disciples, one at a time, and they would
begin to hand, and he would continue to hand them food, and they would
begin to hand food out, and he just kept on going, and it never
stopped. It didn't like all of a sudden,
you know. It's a mountain of food, you
know. You've seen those cereal commercials
back in the 80s. He just kept giving out an endless
supply of food that would fill and fill and fill and feed and
feed and feed straight from the hands of Christ. Straight from
the hands of Messiah. Straight from the Lord, from
the God of creation. He takes that which He made.
He made the wheat and the soil and the sun. He made everything
that caused that wheat to become what it needed to become so that
it could become bread. He created the fish and the sea
and everything in it, and He had power over it, whether it
lived on the earth and grew or whether it was dead in a basket
and pickled. And He just kept feeding. He
just kept feeding and He just kept feeding until people were
sitting there with their tunics untied. That's what it says. He doesn't say it like that. He distributed the loaves and
the fish and they ate as much as they wanted. And when they
had eaten their fill, He told the disciples, gather up the
leftover fragments that nothing may be lost. I so hard want to
preach into that verse what's not there. Just like I want to
preach into the verse in chapter 11 of John's Gospel, where Jesus,
after He commands Lazarus to come out of the tomb, where He
says, unbind him and let him go. But I see it. I see what Jesus did here is
He gave people physical food in a way that they've never been
given physical food as a symbol of what He will do eternally
for their spiritual food. They thought to themselves, we
have not eaten this much in so long. Consider that it would have cost
a million dollars to feed these people. And Jesus just fed them
out of His hands. with no money and with no food. What would it cost for Jesus
to feed your soul and to pass you over for your sin? It cost
His very body and His very blood. And the filling and the fullness
of the bread of life and the living water and the blood of
the covenant flows fully and continually from the hands of
Christ and His mercy as we see to the writing of the Hebrews
that He intercedes at the right hand of the Father for the work
is finished. The work is finished. And so much so that He gathered
up the twelve baskets with the fragments, verse 13, from the
five barley loaves left by those who had eaten. And when the people
saw the sign that He had done, they said, This is indeed the
prophet who is to come into the world. You know why? Because they were not born again,
they were just full. They were not born again, they
were just full. They were just full of food that Jesus had miraculously
given them. And they were willing to believe
in this man. As He fed them physically, they were thinking, wow, if He
can do this with our stomachs, what can He do with Rome? This is Messiah. Rome can't touch
us. They can't starve us out. because
He just keeps pulling out of that basket. They can't destroy
us. There's many of us. Look, if
we got behind this guy, what could we do? Oh, how I want to say something. I believe that same mentality
is in the world we have today. And people want to come to Jesus
to be filled. And I'm not talking about crazy
theology. I'm talking about simple, Jesus
will take the world we live in back. Jesus gave it to the enemy. But Jesus is the Lord of it all.
The world is God's. He doesn't need to take it back.
Just like God's people were given to their enemies by God in the
captivity In the same way, this world is set up to show judgment. This feeding was to show these
people the insufficiency of the world in which they live. The
insufficiency of their desires. The insufficiency, the ineffectuality,
the inefficacy of His food, if it is not His body and His blood. They believed that Jesus was
the prophet, was the Messiah that had come into the world,
but their intentions were not so that they would worship Him
because He would give them the grace to be saved from their
sins. Their intentions were, this is
a man who can do this, what can he do for us otherwise? So in verse 15, Jesus, John tells us, perceiving
then that they were about to come and take him by force to
make him king, Jesus withdrew again to the mountain by himself.
Now, Jesus knows the heart of man. We see that in John 1. We see that in the end of John
2. We see that in John 3. We see that in John 4. He knew
the woman. He knew her sin. He knew her hunger, her thirst,
what she longed for. He knew the Pharisees' heart
in John 5, and He knows the people and the multitudes' heart in
John 6. He knows who we are, and He knows what we need. Five thousand men could do whatever
they wanted to with any single man. I know you've all seen the
Trojan War movies and you've seen the 300 movies and all those
things and you've seen in the history books where these small
number of people like kicked 100,000 people's army off the
map. Legend. But we do know 5,000 people could
do a lot. They could, have they been permitted
by Jesus, made Him king. With Jesus on their shoulders,
marching into the Roman procouncil and the Roman courts, they would
have taken Roman people out of their city. But that is not why Jesus came.
Jesus also did not come to restore America to any kind of godliness.
Jesus did not come so that China would be known as a God-fearing
country or nation or people. Jesus did not come so that Israel
would be re-established and the temple worship would begin. Jesus
came to save people from their sins. and everything else that is permitted
in this life either establishes more the reason for the judgment
of God and for the insufficiency of what we can do as humans.
They couldn't even come up with the answer of how to feed anybody.
How are we going to come up with the answer of how to save ourselves
from judgment? How are we going to come up with
the answer on how we're going to escape the wrath of God to
come? We can't. But Jesus did and He
has and He is doing. He has accomplished the work
of redemption. He has taken the wrath of God and He has satisfied
it. And the gospel of grace is just
that. that Jesus has satisfied the
wrath of God, the justice of God, the holiness of God, the
requirements and the commandments of God, and the law of God for
the people of God. And faith in Jesus Christ is
hoping and trusting in who He says He is and what He's done.
It's not just that He died and raised from the dead. It's not
just that He was Messiah. It's that He actually accomplished
the work that God the Father sent Him to do. He has accomplished
this work. And without Christ, what you'll
see the very next day is that the multitude stayed up all night
trying to find out where Jesus had gone. And they got into boats
and went to Capernaum, and lo and behold, Jesus says, why is
it that you seek Me? You seek Me not because of My
signs and wonders, not because of My power, not because of My
authority, not because of who I am and what I have done and
can do, but you seek Me because you've got your stomachs full
of the bread. Then He commands them, do not
labor for the bread that perishes. Do not labor for the food that
perishes. And we will stop there. Let's
pray. Oh Lord, if there was ever a
time, when is there not a time we don't need You, but Father,
I need You to work into that preaching, into our hearts, the
preaching of Your Word. Lord, I pray that as we leave
today, as we depart our building, that Your church would still
be intact. Lord, that everyone who assembles
here each week, that everyone who prays for one another each
day, as we are able to interact and to invest both physically
and spiritually in each other's lives. Father, I pray that we
would lose none. Though people move and things
change and life goes on, Lord, from a spiritual sense, Father,
I pray that all who are Grace Truth are born again. Just as Mike was praying and
teaching this morning, Lord, just as sharing the Scripture
in the beginning, that our children would be Your children. That
our households would be Your households. That Your church
would truly be a unified people who have been saved by the grace
that You've given us through Christ, Lord, and who are established
and presented before You for the sake of Your glory on the
day of Christ. Until that day, Lord, let us
learn more and more of Your great love toward us, that we might
see You and love You, that we might hear You and acknowledge
and believe, Lord, that every moment of our lives would be
spent considering how we are glorifying You. and that we would
not trust in the temporality of this world, that we would
not put our hope in the fact that you or any other person could satisfy our physical needs.
But Lord, most importantly, that only You, only You could give
us eternal life. The Gospel is about what You
have done and how You have worked and how You have finished the
work. So I pray, Lord, I pray, Lord, that we would be satisfied
in this, that we would hope in Christ, that we would take all
joy, even when we're hungry, to be full in the gospel of grace. In Jesus' name, amen.