The Provision and Presence of King Jesus

Introduction

Have you ever had expectations that went unmet? Probably all of us. It’s a common error: We make up something in our mind and make that a concrete expectation. This happens commonly with celebrities. We know someone as a character they play on screen or by the songs they sing that we hear. And it can be easy to build up expectations on that small snippet of their lives. And then, we have the opportunity to meet that celebrity, and they don’t really live up to the expectations that we’ve created. It’s not their fault: it’s ours. We build a narrative based on what we want out of that encounter and who we want them to be.

Today, we will see Jesus encounter crowds of people and we’ll also see some of their expectations of the Messiah. The Messiah is the long-awaited promised Savior of God’s people. The entire Old Testament is concerned with telling the story of God’s people and their need for salvation. Salvation was promised to come through the coming Messiah. Over and over again throughout Scripture, promises of salvation are met. A king was coming to rescue his people and set up the kingdom.

With that in mind, let’s look at the passage today: John 6:1–21:

John 6:1–21 (CSB)

1 After this, Jesus crossed the Sea of Galilee (or Tiberias). 2 A huge crowd was following him because they saw the signs that he was performing by healing the sick. 3 Jesus went up a mountain and sat down there with his disciples.

4 Now the Passover, a Jewish festival, was near. 5 So when Jesus looked up and noticed a huge crowd coming toward him, he asked Philip, “Where will we buy bread so that these people can eat?” 6 He asked this to test him, for he himself knew what he was going to do.

7 Philip answered him, “Two hundred denarii worth of bread wouldn’t be enough for each of them to have a little.”

8 One of his disciples, Andrew, Simon Peter’s brother, said to him, 9 “There’s a boy here who has five barley loaves and two fish—but what are they for so many?”

10 Jesus said, “Have the people sit down.”

There was plenty of grass in that place; so they sat down. The men numbered about five thousand. 11 Then Jesus took the loaves, and after giving thanks he distributed them to those who were seated—so also with the fish, as much as they wanted.

12 When they were full, he told his disciples, “Collect the leftovers so that nothing is wasted.” 13 So they collected them and filled twelve baskets with the pieces from the five barley loaves that were left over by those who had eaten.

14 When the people saw the sign he had done, they said, “This truly is the Prophet who is to come into the world.” 15 Therefore, when Jesus realized that they were about to come and take him by force to make him king, he withdrew again to the mountain by himself.

16 When evening came, his disciples went down to the sea, 17 got into a boat, and started across the sea to Capernaum. Darkness had already set in, but Jesus had not yet come to them. 18 A high wind arose, and the sea began to churn. 19 After they had rowed about three or four miles, they saw Jesus walking on the sea. He was coming near the boat, and they were afraid. 20 But he said to them, “It is I. Don’t be afraid.” 21 Then they were willing to take him on board, and at once the boat was at the shore where they were heading.

Let’s pray:

Father, as we open your Word, help us to see it clearly. Help us, by the power of the Holy Spirit to grasp what this word has for us today. As we seek the king and the kingdom, may we be amazed by, taken up with, and committed to King Jesus as the Bible presents him, as he truly is. Take away our idols and any false Jesus’s we might create. Help us to truly worship and adore our king. Now, may the words of my mouth and the meditations of my heart be acceptable in your sight, O Lord, my Rock and my Redeemer. Amen.

These are two famous passages. In fact, the miracle of the loaves and fish is the only miracle of Christ that is found in all four gospel accounts. That means we need to pay attention to it! In order to understand why these passages are here and what they mean for us, we need to see them in the context of John’s whole gospel. As you can remember, we are working our way through the gospel of John, and the main point of this sermon series is that we are working to behold the Lamb of God, Jesus himself. And John’s main point of his gospel is to show us Christ for a reason: John has written these things so that we might believe that Christ is the Son of God, and that by believing these things have eternal life. John wrote so that we could find life in Christ. We talked a bit more about that last week.

So that brings us to our passage today: How do these miracles fit into John’s goal of presenting Jesus as one who is worth staking our lives on? How does these miracles push our belief in Christ as the Son of God? That is what we will be exploring this morning.

Our main point this morning is this: Because Jesus is King, we can find provision, presence, and peace through him. And that shapes our three points as well. Jesus came as the King of his people. He was the final king, the one who sit on the throne and never leave it. And he wasn’t just a good king; he was the king who is goodness. He was the king who came to bring the kingdom of God to earth. And good kings provide for their people. They are also present with their people. Finally, good kings bring and ensure peace to their people. We will look at how Jesus does all three of these things as we examine our passage today.

The Provision of Jesus

First, Jesus brings provision to his people. Let’s look at where this happening. Our last passage took place in Jerusalem, but we have now moved forward in the story. Jesus is back to the area near the Sea of Galilee, north of Jerusalem. He was probably near Capernaum and Gennesaret, outside of the city limits. His fame had spread far and wide by this point, and so several thousand people had come from the surrounding villages and towns to hear him preach and maybe even get healed. As was his custom, Jesus retreated to a mountain and sat.

Now, let’s look at verse 4, since it unlocks some contextual clues for us. The Passover was near. The Passover was one of the most sacred days in the Jewish festival year, in which the Jews celebrated God’s rescue of their ancestors from Egypt. God had sent great and terrible plagues on the Egyptians, but the final one was that the Angel of Death was going to sweep through Egypt and kill the firstborn child of every family. The only way to escape the Angel’s wrath was to paint the doorpost of your home with the blood of a spotless lamb. The blood of the lamb would be the signal of obedience in that home, and the Angel of Death would passover in mercy. The yearly Passover feast was in remembrance of this great provision of mercy from God to his people. They would gather and feast together and remember God’s provision to their ancestors.

This was a time of fervor, and of expectation. Part of the tradition of Passover is an expectant hope for restoration. In fact, the central traditional meal of Passover (the Seder meal) has a liturgy with readings. And the last phrase of that meal is “Maybe next year in Jerusalem.” This phrase is meant to inspire hope for a restored and renewed kingdom under the Messiah, the Blessed Hope. Passover is a time of fervent hope, and the people in Jesus’s time would have been no different. Expectations are high, and as we said earlier, it is easy to let expectations get out of control.

As Jesus sits to presumably teach his disciples, he notices a crowd of five thousand men. This means that there were probably around 20,000 people actually present. That’s a big crowd. But we need to notice something quickly about Jesus: He wants to feed them. He brings up the question of caring for them: “Where will we buy bread?” The primary provisions for human survival is food and water. Jesus want to meet this crowd’s need for dinner! He wanted to help them by providing a meal for them.

His testing of Philip was to see if the Disciples had begun to understand what he was capable of. They had seen him turn water into wine. They had seen him heal several people. They had heard his own claims about himself. Who knows what else they had seen that was not written down. But Jesus is seeing if they truly know what he is capable of. Of course, they do not. Philip is still thinking about the natural, physical realm. He says, “It’ll take half of a year’s wages to buy enough food for all these people!” 20,000 people is a lot of people.

But then we come to the miracle. Andrew brings forward a boy who had very little for himself and his family. However, Jesus is thankful unto God for this humble meal. And he gave thanks to God, and multiplied this meal to feed those 20,000 people. So much that they all ate their fill and had leftovers. What an amazing miracle. The tendency with this miracle is to glaze past it because of familiarity, right? We’ve all heard this story a thousand times so it can be easy to just kind of turn our brains off and skim it. We can also find it hard to believe since we haven’t seen anything like that. We cannot skip this miracle! We cannot skim by it because of its familiarity or unfamiliarity. Christ took a small basket of food and multiplied to provide for a great multitude of people.

Wow. When was the last time a miracle of Christ amazed you? When was the last time you gave in to the power of Christ as revealed in his word and sat in awe of it? The miracles of Jesus are recorded for us! May we never become cold to their beauty and power. That tends to happen to me. In my sinful stodginess and even in my stoic skepticism, I can just read the gospels and not be in awe and wonder. But God wants us to be in awe of what he has done. Lord, open our eyes to see your wonders anew! We repent of times where we have coldly approached your words and your works. Help us to see these miracles for what we claim them to be: The true workings of King Jesus!

Because he is king. The people recognized him as such. Look at verses 14-15. Remember, they were celebrating Passover. They were full of fervor for the Messiah. They were wanting to see the Kingdom restored. Their expectation was that a king would ride in and take over and force out those pesky Romans once and for all. And this became a frenzy: They see this miracle and start putting two and two together. They realized (rightly) that Jesus was the true Prophet who came after Moses. They, however, became undone by their false expectations. No where in the Old Testament does it say that the Messiah would be a powerful human king or military leader. No where in the Prophets do we read about the king coming into the world to take over the world.

The people are overtaken with their fervor and want to take him straight to Jerusalem to take over and make him king. If they only knew. If they only knew that no man can make God a king, for he is already sovereign over all. If they only knew that they did not hold the keys to the kingdom or the throne. Jesus withdrew, not out of fear, but because he didn’t need them to make him king. Augustine, a great church father and theologian of the 4th century says this:

Yet he who shrank from being made a king, was a king [already]; not made king by people but one who would bestow a kingdom on people.… For he ever reigns with the Father, in that he is the Son of God, the Word of God, the Word by which all things were made. The prophets had foretold his kingdom. Christ, by being made man, made the believers in him Christians. There will consequently be a kingdom of Christians that at present is being gathered together, being prepared and purchased by the blood of Christ

- Augustine

They were right: Jesus is King. But they didn’t understand his kingdom. Jesus had acted as a good king acts: He provided for them. But his kingdom was going to be a supernatural kingdom of peace; not a national kingdom. We will talk more about that later.

Let’s look at the provision of King Jesus, though. In fact, Jesus provides for us in two ways. In this miracle, Jesus provides physically. Jesus gives the people something that they needed. He gives them bread. When Jesus teaches his disciples to pray, he teaches them to acknowledge God as the giver of their daily bread. God gives us sustenance to make it through each day. How? Because, as Psalm 24 says: the earth is the Lord’s and fulness thereof. Everything that we need to survive is provided by God. God has provided us with food to eat and water to drink.

But, as usual, the Bible guides us into thinking on a spiritual level as well as on a physical level. Jesus doesn’t merely provide physical sustenance, but he provides us with spiritual life. Later on in this chapter, Jesus calls himself the bread of life. In chapter 4, he referred to himself as living water. He reveals himself to be the way, the truth, and the life. All of these are metaphors to show what Jesus provides for his people spiritually. Jesus met their physical need but that points us to how Jesus meets spiritual needs.

You and I were born with a great need. In fact, everyone who has ever lived has been born in spiritual death. Our greatest need is Jesus himself. And as a good king, he has come to earth to provide us with himself. He has given us living bread by coming to earth. He has provided us with salvation. What a king!

You may think today that your greatest need is physical. You may think that your greatest need is food. Physically, you’d be right. But your greatest need is salvation that can only come from Christ alone. And in his great love for sinners like you and me, he has come to earth to save a people for himself. For his glory. And he has provided us with spiritual salvation. He has met our needs. A good king meets his people’s needs: Jesus has done that and infinitely more. He has given us himself. Give yourself back to him today. If you have questions about how to do that, please talk with me after the service.

Jesus provides. He provided for the people that day. He provides for us everyday. And he has provided for us in giving us salvation by his death on the cross, and eternal life by his resurrection from the dead.

The Presence of Jesus

King Jesus gives us provision. But he also gives us his presence. That brings us to the second part of this text, where the disciples see Jesus walk on water.

Again, this is a passage that can be too familiar and also very unfamiliar. We have heard about Jesus walking on the water so much. But we have also never seen anything like it. So we can lose the wonder and awe that this would have stricken in the hearts of all those who watched Jesus walk to the boat. But let’s try to not do that this morning. Let’s try to maintain the awe and wonder of what Jesus did here.

The disciples went down to the sea, and started off without Jesus. It was night, so that increased the danger of the moment. The sea was churning. These were not great conditions for seafaring, however, they needed to get where they were going. Then John gives us some great information: They were three to four miles out to sea. Three to four miles. This wasn’t like when we run out into the water at the beach a few feet. Jesus walked three to four miles on the water.

We can understand their fear: It’s the middle of the night, a storm had taken their ability to see and navigate safely, and now a man is walking on the water toward them. They didn’t have flood lights or loudspeakers or any of the safety features of modern boats. This was a first century fishing boat three or four miles off the coast. And to see a man walking on water would have alarmed any of us! He walked on water. Don’t lose your awe and wonder at the miracles of Jesus.

Let’s look at what Jesus said to the the disciples here, because it is very important. Our Bibles say “It is I.” In the Greek, Jesus uses the phrase “ego eimi.” Translated literally, this phrase means “I am.” Now, it is possible that Jesus was simply identifying himself. However, he uses the exact same phrase to identify himself with God. “Ego eimi” is the same phrase used in the Old Testament to translate to ‘Yahweh’ or the divine name. ‘I am who I am.” Jesus uses this phrase in John 8:58 to clearly identify himself as divine: “before Abraham was, I am!” Now, Jesus didn’t need to use words to identify himself as divine: He had walked on water at night to get to them. But I think his use of ‘ego eimi’ here is on purpose: Not only had he walked out to them miraculously, but he wanted to remind them with his words that they were dealing with the God of the universe. He had spoken the sea of Galilee into existence. He was sovereign over the moon that hung above them. He knew every wave that was churning. And they had no reason to fear, for they were now in the presence of ‘I am.’

Look at what happens in the presence of Jesus. He tells them, “Don’t be afraid.” Without the presence of Jesus, they were alarmed. They had every reason to be. Cyril of Alexandria says this:

They encounter darkness and a storm that take away any navigational ability. But despite the darkness and the billowing waves, the real danger is that Jesus is not with them—a hazard for anyone caught in the storms of life.

- Cyril of Alexandria

Without Jesus’s presence, we are in real danger. We’re not just in a boat in a stormy night; we’re sunk and dead at the bottom of the sea. But King Jesus has come to us, and offered us his presence.

King Jesus gives the bread of life, and he gets into the boat. What does this mean for us? Jesus is a king that gives us his presence. He is no absent and aloof monarch. He is no dictator from above that is never around his people. He is a shepherd-king that smells like his sheep. He gives to us his presence. His gift to us is himself. Believer, he has given himself to you. Your king has gotten into the boat with you. What are you afraid of?

Are you afraid of others? Jesus is with you. Are you afraid of God’s judgment? There is no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus. He is with you. Are you afraid of the future? He has promised to return victoriously. Jesus is with you. Are you afraid of the present? He holds all things together in his sovereignty. He is with you. Jesus is in the boat with you. Move forward in the strength of his might. With Christ, we have no reason to fear. He has brought us the peace of the kingdom.

The Peace of the Kingdom

This is our final point: We have no reason to fear for we now reside in the kingdom of peace. In Old Testament prophecies about Jesus, he is called the ‘Prince of Peace.’ Jesus’s coming ushered in a kingdom. This is a spiritual kingdom that is made up of all of those who have acknowledged Christ as Lord. And this is a kingdom of peace.

First, it’s a kingdom of peace with God. Jesus has come into our lives and taken our sin from us. This brings us peace with God. Without this work of Christ, we are at war with God. He cannot be in the presence of our sin, and in fact must punish us for it. But Jesus stands between us in his perfect righteousness and brings us peace with God. Reconciliation with God.

We also have peace with one another. As Christians, we actually have unity with one another through the gospel. The gospel brings peace to people who otherwise don’t have any reason to be peaceful. As Christians, we are a family. And our family tie is not our flesh and blood, but the broken body of Jesus on our behalf and his shed blood for us. We are family by the blood of Christ. That’s the strongest unifying bond there can be. This is an even closer bond than our blood relations. We have a reason for peace with one another: We are in the family of God together.

The peace of God dwells in us, and passes all understanding.

Conclusion

King Jesus has come. Praise God that he has sent his only Son to us, to save us from our sins and reign as our King. And as our King, he has done great things: He performed miracle after miracle. If your heart has grown cold and calloused to beauty of the work of Christ displayed in Scripture, ask God to break through the ice and give you child-like wonder at what he has done. Spend time today reflecting on these miraculous events, and be led to marvel at Jesus. Because just as he provided those people with what they needed that day, he gives you your daily bread…and more. He gives you your spiritual sustenance. King Jesus provides. He also gets in your boat and fills you with his presence. And in his presence there is fulness of joy. Even in the storms of life, us Christians get to live in the real presence of God. Don’t fear today: God is with you. In fact, that’s what we celebrated at Christmas: Immanuel means God with us. That’s our every day reality. We have real peace and joy because we have Immanuel: God with us.

Let’s pray.