Eat My Flesh, Drink My Blood John 6:22-71

About this Episode

Eat My Flesh, Drink My Blood John 6:22-71 is the topic that will be discussed today on RIOT Podcast, a Christian Discipleship Podcast.

In today’s show, we will be covering John Chapter 6 verses:22-71. We will be picking up where we left off in the discussion that came from Jesus’ miracle of the feeding of the 5k.

In grace, Jesus fed the hungry people, but in Truth, meaning He gave them the Word of God. They wanted physical food, but they did not want the Truth. In the end, as we will see today, most of those disciples abandoned Jesus and refused to walk with him. We will see that Jesus lost His crowd with just one sermon.

We will call this sermon “the bread of life”. It is actually a dialogue between Christ and the people, especially the religious leaders. The sermon starts outside but eventually ends up in the synagogue, as we will see in vs 59. In verses 22-40 we see the people seeking the Truth, in verses 41-51 the people begin to complain, in verses 52-59 they start to fight and quarrel, and lastly in verses 60-71 they began to walk away from Jesus.

Read John 6 verses 22-40

In our last show of John, we ended the show with Jesus walking on the sea in a storm, and in today’s reading; it starts out the very next day, after the storm. The disciples must have been impressed that so many people stayed through the storm in order to seek after Jesus further. But Jesus was not impressed, He knows the human heart. He knew that the people originally followed Him because of His miracles, but now their motive was to get fed.

Read verses 41-51 and unpack this further.

Jesus, of course, was the legal son of Joseph, but not his natural son, for He was born of a virgin. The leaders identified Jesus with Nazareth, in Galilee, and not from Bethlehem in Judea, and they thought that Joseph was His natural father.

Read verses 52-59 and unpack what He means.

Jesus comes out and says that you must eat of His flesh to be saved. He knew that the Jews were against eating human flesh or any kind of blood. What we see here, is another example in Johns gospel, of the people misunderstanding a spiritual truth by treating it literally. All Jesus was saying is that, just as you take food and drink within your body and it becomes a part of you, so you must receive Me within your innermost being so that I can give you life.

Read verses 60-71 and unpack their rejection of this teaching.

The Jewish leaders both misunderstood Jesus’ words and rejected them. They were offended by what He taught. This was too much for them and the result is that many of Jesus’s own disciples turned their back on Him and went back to their old life.

A true follower of God will never abandon Jesus. When He asked His twelve if they planned on leaving Him as well, Peter responded and said “Where else could we go? You have the words of eternal life.” Peter got the message. He knew that Jesus was speaking about the word and not about literal flesh and blood.