JOHN 6:1-15 - A Hungry People and a Bountiful Christ

Introduction

There are certain neighborhoods in New York City or Philadelphia—the old neighborhoods that date back to Colonial times—where you might find a sign or a placard on the side of a building saying “George Washington slept here”. After the end of the American War for Independence, after Washington became the first president, he was determined to present himself as often as possible to the public, and spent so many nights “on the road” working to establish our country that you can find signs all over Connecticut, New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Ohio, Georgia, Virginia and more—some 232 sites, by one count.

George Washington is a towering figure in American history; he is rightly called “The Father of His Country”. As one commentator writes:

A state is named after him, as well as the nation’s capital. Two hundred forty-one townships and twenty-six cities are named Washington. Four forts, five mountains, and three ports bear his name. Bridges and parks and at least a dozen colleges are named after him. Imagine if you combined George Washington with the Pope or with Billy Graham, so that Washington was not only the founder of the nation, but he was also the leader of your religion. Even if you did that, you still wouldn’t come close to matching how the Jews felt about Moses. Moses was their great hero. Not only was he responsible for bringing them out of Egypt and governing them as a nation for the first time, but he was also the greatest religious leader in their history. He’s the one who went up the mountain to meet with God and receive the Ten Commandments. (Carter, M., & Wredberg, J. (2017). Exalting Jesus in John (p. 143). Holman Reference.)

As we move into Chapter 6 of John’s Gospel, and the fourth of the seven signs he records, it’s important that we establish just how revered Moses was in the hearts of the Jews of Jesus’ day. The sign that we considered last week—Jesus healing the lame man at the pool of Bethesda—sparked a long and vigorous debate between Jesus and his Jewish opponents over His identity as “the Christ, the Son of the Living God”. He tells them in John 5:39

John 5:39 LSB

“You search the Scriptures because you think that in them you have eternal life; it is these that bear witness about Me;

And then He hits them where it hurts—He says that someday Moses himself will stand and accuse them of rejecting Jesus as Messiah:

John 5:45–47 LSB

“Do not think that I will accuse you to the Father; the one who accuses you is Moses, in whom you have set your hope. “For if you believed Moses, you would believe Me, for he wrote about Me. “But if you do not believe his writings, how will you believe My words?”

There is probably a time gap of as much as six months between the end of John 5 and the beginning of John 6—remember, John’s purpose in writing this Gospel was not a chronological record: He was after a Christological record! He put these two accounts right next to each other so that his readers would see Jesus accusing the unbelieving Jews’ rejection of Moses’ testimony in Chapter 5 immediately followed by a demonstration of Jesus’ superiority over Moses in Chapter 6. He puts their stubborn rejection of Jesus into perspective by showing Jesus in the most Mosaic light possible.

In fact, I think it is accurate to say that John gives us this account of Jesus feeding the 5,000 in order to bear out what Jesus said in John 5:39—the entire story of Moses’ life is reflected and reinterpreted through this sign that Jesus performs here, showing Himself to be the True and Better Moses. In this sign, John is seeking to create and sustain faith in his readers by showing us that

Christ offers LIFE that Moses’ LAW could never GIVE

There are at least four clear elements to this sign Jesus performs that demonstrates that He is better than Moses—first, see here that

I. He performs better SIGNS than Moses (John 6:1-2; cp. Ex. 12:29-31) ________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

Look again at Verses 1-2:

John 6:1–2 LSB

After these things Jesus went away to the other side of the Sea of Galilee (or Tiberias). Now a large crowd was following Him, because they were seeing the signs which He was doing on those who were sick.

Now remember—Jesus’ last sign that we have recorded took place in Bethesda in Judea, down in the southern end of Israel. Here He is at the Sea of Galilee, in the northern end of the country. Now, remember what city is found along the coast of the Sea of Galilee? (Capernaum). Where did we last encounter Capernaum? (John 4:46, the healing of the royal official’s son).

So put that together—why were the crowds flocking out to find Him? Because (among other miracles) He had healed the nobleman’s son. A large crowd of people follow Jesus into the wilderness because of the signs that He had performed that demonstrated His authority from God.

Now, think back to Moses—what was the sign that came right before he led a massive crowd of people out into the wilderness?

Exodus 12:29–31 LSB

Now it happened at midnight that Yahweh struck all the firstborn in the land of Egypt, from the firstborn of Pharaoh who sat on his throne to the firstborn of the captive who was in the dungeon, and all the firstborn of cattle. Then Pharaoh arose in the night, he and all his servants and all the Egyptians, and there was a great cry in Egypt, for there was no home where there was not someone dead. Then he called for Moses and Aaron at night and said, “Rise up, get out from among my people, both you and the sons of Israel; and go, serve Yahweh, as you have spoken.

Moses’ signs brought death and destruction to bring the people out of Egypt; Jesus’ signs that brought the crowds to follow Him in the wilderness were signs of life and healing. Jesus is so much better than Moses! He offers life that Moses and the Law could never offer.

In Verse 3 John makes another allusion to Christ’s superior role:

II. He brings a better WORD than Moses (John 6:3; cp. Ex. 19:20-2119:20-21) ________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

John 6:3 LSB

Then Jesus went up on the mountain, and there He was sitting down with His disciples.

When Moses went up to the mountain of Sinai, he went up to hear the words of the Law that brought the threat of death and punishment:

Exodus 19:20–21 LSB

And Yahweh came down on Mount Sinai, to the top of the mountain; and Yahweh called Moses to the top of the mountain, and Moses went up. Then Yahweh spoke to Moses, “Go down, warn the people, lest they break through to Yahweh to see, and many of them perish.

But when Jesus went up onto a mountain, He sat down (a common rabbinical posture for teaching) with His disciples and the people flocked to Him! Moses went trembling up a mountain to be given the Law of the penalties for sin and dire warnings that if the people touched the mountain they would die. But Jesus went up a mountain and sat down with His disciples to teach as the crowd gathered in eagerness to listen to the Good News of the life He came to bring them!

In Verse 5 Jesus sees the people flocking to Him:

John 6:5 LSB

Therefore Jesus, lifting up His eyes and seeing that a large crowd was coming to Him, said to Philip, “Where should we buy bread, so that these people may eat?”

Moses warned the people to stay away from the mountain; Jesus is ready to invite them to eat with Him—here is the major way that John demonstrates that Jesus is superior to Moses:

III. He provides better BREAD than Moses (John 6:5-11) ________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

Look at verses 5-9:

John 6:5–9 LSB

Therefore Jesus, lifting up His eyes and seeing that a large crowd was coming to Him, said to Philip, “Where should we buy bread, so that these people may eat?” And this He was saying to test him, for He Himself knew what He was going to do. Philip answered Him, “Two hundred denarii worth of bread is not sufficient for them, for everyone to receive a little.” One of His disciples, Andrew, Simon Peter’s brother, said to Him, “There is a boy here who has five barley loaves and two fish, but what are these for so many people?”

You almost always hear these verses preached in a particular way: “Oh, see how little we trust Jesus! He is so much more abundant in His provision than we give Him credit for! Poor Philip and Andrew, they just don’t have enough faith!” And while it is profitable for us to consider that takeaway here, John is doing something much much more profound. In Philip’s and Andrew’s expressions of doubt, John wants us to hear Moses’ doubts about feeding his crowd in the wilderness—consider Numbers 11:13-15

Numbers 11:13–15 LSB

“Where am I to get meat to give to all this people? For they weep before me, saying, ‘Give us meat that we may eat!’ I alone am not able to carry all this people because it is too heavy for me. So if You are going to deal thus with me, please kill me at once, if I have found favor in Your sight, and do not let me see my wretchedness.”

Or further down in Numbers 11:22

Numbers 11:22 LSB

“Should flocks and herds be slaughtered for them, to be sufficient for them? Or should all the fish of the sea be gathered together for them, to be sufficient for them?”

You just can’t miss this comparison—where Moses fussed and fretted over where all that food was going to come from, Jesus already knew where the food was coming from!

John 6:10–11 LSB

Jesus said, “Have the people sit down.” Now there was much grass in the place. So the men sat down, in number about five thousand. Jesus then took the loaves, and having given thanks, He distributed them to those who were seated; likewise also of the fish, as much as they wanted.

Once again, with nothing

This is one of the most in-your-face, bullhorn-and-strobe-light, giant flashing LED billboard by the freeway moments in all of John’s Gospel—JESUS IS YHWH! John includes this sign so that you might believe that Jesus is the Messiah, the Son of God, and that believing you might have life in His Name!

As great as Moses was—the Deliverer, the Lawgiver, the Prophet—the one who took millions of refugees from Egypt and forged them into a nation, who established a code of law that not only governed Israel but is in fact the very basis of all Western jurisprudence that governs every civilized nation on the face of the earth today, who gave us the first five books of the Holy Scriptures from which our entire way of understanding and living in the world around us springs—as great as this man was, Jesus Christ is infinitely superior in every way!

John cannot make it more plain—in fact, one of the reasons that this is the only miracle of Jesus to appear in all four Gospels is because it is so plain—that Jesus Christ is the Messiah, YHWH in human flesh, and He came to do what Moses could never do:

John 1:17 LSB

For the Law was given through Moses; grace and truth came through Jesus Christ.

Jesus performs better signs than Moses, He brings a better word than Moses, He provides better bread than Moses, and

IV. He accomplishes a better DELIVERANCE than Moses (John 6:4) ________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

There is one more connection with Moses that John aims to make with this sign—he wants us to know what time of year this sign took place:

John 6:4 LSB

Now the Passover, the feast of the Jews, was near.

All of this took place during the time when people were remembering Moses’ greatest work of his life—delivering the children of Israel (nearly two million people!) from their slavery in Egypt and bringing them out with mighty signs and wonders from YHWH. So it was a time of year when people were naturally thinking back to the moment they gained their freedom from bondage. And here they see Jesus feeding them with bread and meat in the wilderness—just like Moses did—and they made the connection:

John 6:14 LSB

Therefore when the people saw the sign which He had done, they were saying, “This is truly the Prophet who is to come into the world.”

Notice they didn’t say Jesus was a prophet—they said He was THE prophet, “the one who is to come into the world”. This declaration on the part of the crowd shows that they hadn’t missed all of these connections with Moses: Here was a Man Who performed miracles like Moses, Who provides bread in the wilderness like Moses, Who reveals God’s Words from the mountaintop like Moses—and they remembered the words of Moses recorded in Deuteronomy18:

Deuteronomy 18:15–18 LSB

“Yahweh your God will raise up for you a prophet like me from among you, from your brothers; you shall listen to him. “This is according to all that you asked of Yahweh your God in Horeb on the day of the assembly, saying, ‘Let me not hear again the voice of Yahweh my God; let me not see this great fire anymore, or I will die.’ “And Yahweh said to me, ‘They have spoken well. ‘I will raise up a prophet from among their brothers like you, and I will put My words in his mouth, and he shall speak to them all that I command him.

Seeing Jesus perform this sign, they said, “This is the One Moses told us to look for! He has revealed Himself!” And that’s exactly what Jesus did with this sign—revealed Himself to be the Messiah, the Son of the living God.

But the tragedy of this account is that the people, having seen and believed that Jesus was the New and Better Moses come into the world, came to exactly the wrong conclusion over what His appearance meant. In Verse 15 we read

John 6:15 LSB

So Jesus, knowing that they were going to come and take Him by force to make Him king, withdrew again to the mountain by Himself alone.

Consider again the time in the Jewish year this sign takes place—Passover. As one commentator writes:

Remember that at this time in Jewish history, when the people of Israel were under Roman occupation, the Passover was not just an exciting and important religious festival, it was the supreme celebration of national pride. Americans’ celebration of the Fourth of July is not worthy to be compared to the Jews’ experience of Passover, when they reaffirmed their hope that God would deliver them from the tyranny of Rome (Sproul, R. C. (2009). John (p. 105). Reformation Trust Publishing.)

And so, when the people saw Jesus’ superiority to Moses—the Deliverer—and His ability to perform miracles of healing and provision, he became the perfect political candidate! They were in the neighborhood of Capernaum and Herod’s summer palace, after all—just knock off Herod as governor, and before you know it they could get out from under Roman occupation altogether!

In seeing this sign, the people took exactly the wrong message—they saw Jesus as a means to their end of gaining political power and personal safety. Jesus made it plain to them further along in this chapter, in Verse 26:

John 6:26 LSB

Jesus answered them and said, “Truly, truly, I say to you, you seek Me, not because you saw signs, but because you ate of the loaves and were filled.

They wanted full bellies; they wanted healing from their diseases; they wanted influence and power and authority over the Empire of Rome—in other words, they wanted all the things that could be taken from them! They wanted Jesus to be their king so that they could have a guaranteed supply of perishable treasures! But Jesus tells them plainly in Verse 27:

John 6:27 LSB

“Do not work for the food which perishes, but for the food which endures to eternal life, which the Son of Man will give to you, for on Him the Father, God, set His seal.”

We live in remarkably tumultuous times; we are witnessing the decay and death of the Golden Age of the American Empire. The “shining city on a hill” that Ronald Reagan so memorably portrayed is crumbling; the American Dream is beginning its inevitable collapse.

And there are a lot of people—a lot of Christians, in fact—who still cling to the thought that it could all be made right if we just get the right man in the White House! If we just could have a man with the stature of George Washington come back to the city that was named after him, he could just “fix” everything wrong with our country. So we wrangle over elections, we look for that perfect mix of statesman, administrator and evangelicalism to rescue our country—maybe it’s Ron DeSantis, maybe it’s JD Vance, maybe it’s Nick Freitas—but there has to be someone out there who can fill our bellies, overthrow our oppressors and restore our former glory.

Do not make the mistake that the people made when they saw this sign: Jesus Christ is not here to fix your government. He has not come to undo all the terrible things the liberals have done. He did not reveal Himself in order to start a new superPAC or grassroots lobbying. He did not come to overthrow the tyrannical moral rot infesting our halls of government—he came to overthrow the tyrannical moral rot in you.

The one thing that Moses’ Law is good at is demonstrating how miserably we fall short of God’s standards—

Romans 7:7–8 LSB

What shall we say then? Is the Law sin? May it never be! Rather, I would not have come to know sin except through the Law. For I would not have known about coveting if the Law had not said, “You shall not covet.” But sin, taking opportunity through the commandment, worked out in me coveting of every kind. For apart from the Law sin is dead.

All Moses can do—as magnificent and noble and exalted as he is in history—is condemn you to death for your failure to reach perfection.

But Christ offers what Moses never could—Christ offers life:

Romans 8:2–4 LSB

For the law of the Spirit of life in Christ Jesus has set you free from the law of sin and of death. For what the Law could not do, weak as it was through the flesh, God did: sending His own Son in the likeness of sinful flesh and as an offering for sin, He condemned sin in the flesh, so that the righteous requirement of the Law might be fulfilled in us, who do not walk according to the flesh but according to the Spirit.

John records this sign in order to create and sustain faith in his readers—what does this sign reveal in your life? Are you looking to Christ only for whatever political or economic or moral gain might come from following Him? Are you looking for a new George Washington to appear on the political scene with Christian convictions and that will save the country? More specifically—are you focusing so much on what material or temporal gains you can have from Christ that the eternal promises He makes only of passing interest to you?

Here’s a way to evaluate yourself in this regard: Take some time this week and keep track of the content of your prayer life. We are certainly commanded (by Christ Himself) to ask for our “daily bread” in prayer; but compare the amount of time you are asking for physical comforts, physical gains, temporal benefits (more money, a better job, more economic security, etc.) versus the amount of time you spend in thanksgiving for the salvation you have in Christ. Of course we all cling to Christ in prayer for our physical needs; but if that is all you are looking to Jesus for—or if it is the vast majority of your prayer life—consider then what Jesus means in this passage when He says

John 6:27 LSB

“Do not work for the food which perishes, but for the food which endures to eternal life, which the Son of Man will give to you, for on Him the Father, God, set His seal.”

And if you are here this morning still convinced that you can meet the standards of righteousness that God demands, won’t you see here that relying on Moses to save you is a hopeless pursuit? When Moses went up on that mountain, he came down with tablets inscribed with a ten-point summary of the entire Law. To break even one of those commands—even once—is enough to condemn you for all eternity:

James 2:10 LSB

For whoever keeps the whole law and yet stumbles in one point, he has become guilty of all.

Have you ever told a lie? Even once? Have you ever taken something that didn’t belong to you? Even once? Have you ever used the name of Jesus Christ as a curse word? Even once? Have you ever looked at another woman and imagined what it would be like to take her to your bed? Even once? Have you ever lost your temper and entertained fantasies of murdering the object of your rage? Even once? Have you ever stared longingly at that Instagram post of the perfect family with their perfect kids sitting in their perfect living room in their perfect neighborhood with their perfect garden and perfect marriage and said “I deserve for that to be my life, not theirs”—even once? Have you ever treated Sunday like any other day and ignored the worship of God because you had better things to do? Even once? Then all Moses can do is tell you that you are already lost.

There is only one escape from the condemnation that Moses’ Law places on you for stumbling even once—and that is for Another to take that death penalty for you. Moses put together an entire sacrificial system that illustrated that the payment of sin had to come from the death of an innocent lamb; that sin could only be paid for in blood.

And John’s entire point of his Gospel is to reveal to us that Jesus Christ is the Lamb of God Who takes away the sin of the world! He came to fulfil the impossible demands that Moses’ Law placed on us; He came to perfectly complete the Law, to die in our place for all our Law-breaking, and to rise again the third day with the power to grant that same New Birth to us.

These things are written that you might believe that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of God, and that believing you might have life in His Name. Come to Him today with all of your law-breaking; with all of your failures, with all of your guilt and shame and regret and prideful stubbornness. Come to Him and confess that you are utterly empty of any goodness or righteousness that would be found acceptable in His sight—because He has promised to fill you. Not with bread that will just leave you hungry again in a few hours, but with the bread of life in Him—food that will never perish, a life that will never die. You can have all of that today—forgiveness, restoration, freedom from your past and the promise of a life with Him here and now and forever in eternity:

John 1:12–13 LSB

But as many as received Him, to them He gave the right to become children of God, even to those who believe in His name, who were born, not of blood nor of the will of the flesh nor of the will of man, but of God.

The sign has been presented; His offer still stands—come, and welcome! to Jesus Christ!

BENEDICTION

Jude 24–25 LSB

Now to Him who is able to keep you from stumbling, and to make you stand in the presence of His glory blameless with great joy, to the only God our Savior, through Jesus Christ our Lord, be glory, majesty, might, and authority, before all time and now and forever. Amen.

ADDITIONAL NOTES: ________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________