60 When many of His disciples heard it, they said, “This is a hard saying; who can listen to it?” 61 But Jesus, knowing in Himself that His disciples were grumbling about this, said to them, “Do you take offence at this? 62 Then what if you were to see the Son of Man ascending to where He was before? 63 It is the Spirit who gives life; the flesh is no help at all. The words that I have spoken to you are spirit and life. 64 But there are some of you who do not believe.” (For Jesus knew from the beginning who those were who did not believe, and who it was who would betray Him.) 65 And He said, “This is why I told you that no one can come to me unless it is granted him by the Father.”
66 After this many of His disciples turned back and no longer walked with Him. 67 So Jesus said to the twelve, “Do you want to go away as well?” 68 Simon Peter answered him, “Lord, to whom shall we go? You have the words of eternal life, 69 and we have believed, and have come to know, that you are the Holy One of God.” 70 Jesus answered them, “Did I not choose you, the twelve? And yet one of you is a devil.” 71 He spoke of Judas the son of Simon Iscariot, for he, one of the twelve, was going to betray Him.
The closing 12 verses of chapter 6 records the reaction of Jesus’ disciples to His teaching on the Bread of Life. The first thing we need to note here is that the disciples John mentions in verse 60 are His followers in general, and not the twelve, as we normally might think. The end of John 6 is a tipping point in the popularity of Jesus, as it was here where the people who claimed to be His followers needed to make the choice as to whether they were serious in their commitment to Him, or not.
Sadly, the reaction of the vast majority was unbelief and rejection of Him, and John describes two distinct groups - those who believed, and those who did not.
Not all followers of Jesus are true disciples. As we saw last week, many who called themselves disciples objected to what they considered to be the teaching of cannibalism. Their problem was that they could not understand the spiritual message in Jesus’ teaching. Literal interpretation of His words about flesh and blood would not lead them to the truth, because it is the Holy Spirit who guides us into all truth, and who explains the spiritual meaning of Jesus’ words. And if many of those who followed Him grumbled at His teaching in verses 53–58, what would their response to the scandal of the crucifixion be like?
When they said in verse 60, “this is a hard saying,” they meant that His teaching was offensive. It was not so much that it was hard for them to understand, but they simply could not accept it. In John Calvin’s commentary on verse 60 he wrote, “This is a harsh saying. On the contrary, it was in their hearts, and not in the saying, that the harshness lay.”
In verse 41 we read that the Jews began to grumble, and now in verse 61, it is His disciples who were grumbling. John wrote in chapter 2, “When He was in Jerusalem at the Passover Feast, many believed in His name when they saw the signs that He was doing. But Jesus on His part did not entrust Himself to them, because He knew all people and needed no one to bear witness about man, for He Himself knew what was in man.” (John 2:23-25)
We see here that not all who claim to be believers are true believers. A key issue in Biblical Christianity is regeneration - a change of heart brought about by the Holy Spirit, and so Jesus answers His critics by referring to the reality that only those willing to allow God’s Spirit to enlighten their understanding of God’s Word will find in it the substance of life. He says in verses 62-64, “What if you were to see the Son of Man ascending to where He was before? It is the Spirit who gives life; the flesh is no help at all. The words that I have spoken to you are spirit and life. But there are some of you who do not believe.”
Our problem, just as with Jesus’ disciples all those years ago, is that we are earthly, and spiritual discernment does not come naturally to us, unless if God grants us that gift. We know how the story ends. We know what Jesus was talking about when He said that we need to eat His flesh and drink His blood, but still we struggle to fully understand His words. The Bible commentator Leon Morris wrote, “A woodenly literal, flesh-dominated manner of looking at Jesus’ words will not yield the correct interpretation. That is granted only to the spiritual man, the Spirit-dominated man. Such words cannot be comprehended by the fleshly, whose horizon is bounded by this earth and its outlook. Only as the life-giving Spirit informs him may a man understand these words.”
The end of chapter 6 is a crucial turning point in the gospel of John. Many disciples, together with the crowds, rejected Jesus in unbelief, while His remaining disciples deepened their faith in Him. They still had a long way to go and much to learn, (as do we) but this is a pivotal point for Jesus’ true followers.
Personal commitment to Him comes through individual choice, and in a sense, Peter’s confession in verses 68 and 69, recorded in all four gospel accounts, represents a high-water mark of spiritual insight, which was given to him by the Holy Spirit. Here we see this Biblical principle once more - believing is seeing. Verse 69: “We have believed, and have come to know, that you are the Holy One of God.”
Peter would not understand the full meaning of his own words until after the resurrection, but he asks an excellent rhetorical question in verse 68. “Lord, to whom shall we go?” To whom indeed.
Who do we turn to for truth and life? To the multiple bizarre cults all around us today? The false religions of the world? The deception of secular humanism? All of these choices and many more will only lead us to hell and eternal death. Now, more than ever, we need to stand firm with Peter’s confession, and resist the temptation to wander away from message of the cross, because Jesus is the only way to the Father and the only source of life.
The choices we are faced with today are the same as those that day in Capernaum some 2000 years ago, and no less important. When they said His teaching was hard, the people did not mean His words were difficult to understand. They were too hard to accept. The Bible teacher A W Pink wrote, “It was not that they found the language of Christ so obscure as to be unintelligible, but what they had heard was so irreconcilable with their own views that they would not receive it.”
One of the most important things in Christian discipleship is for us to be teachable. The Bible often offends us, and with good reason, because it confronts the errors of our thinking about God, ourselves, life, and salvation. God says through the prophet Isaiah, “My thoughts are not your thoughts, neither are your ways my ways.”
So instead of reinterpreting and twisting the Bible to suit our own sinful desires, our response to Biblical truth needs to be the same as David, as he wrote in Psalm 25:4-5. “Make me to know your ways, O Lord; teach me your paths. Lead me in your truth and teach me, for you are the God of my salvation.”
This, however, was not the reaction to Jesus’ teaching in His day, and not much has changed in our day. When He came into the world, His teaching was consistently rejected. At first, the people were attracted to Him because of the miracles He performed, but their interest soon waned because they were carnal in their thinking. The same thing happens today, because human nature has not changed. The apostle Paul warned Timothy that this would happen: “The time is coming when people will not endure sound teaching, but having itching ears they will accumulate for themselves teachers to suit their own passions, and will turn away from listening to the truth and wander off into myths.” (2 Timothy 4:3–4).
When the people started grumbling about Jesus, He asked them in verse 61, “Do you take offence at this?” The NIV translates His question, “Does this offend you?” This is more than just a question about how offensive the idea of eating His flesh and drinking His blood is. The whole Gospel message, and how we receive or reject it is being put to us here.
The Greek word for “take offence” is skandalizo, which is the root of our word scandalise. It is the Bible’s teaching about the Cross of Calvary that makes Christianity offensive and scandalous to the human mind and heart.
Think about it: The Ten Commandments might not be appreciated by everyone, but generally speaking they are not hated. Most non-Christians would agree that if more people followed God’s laws and tried to keep the Ten Commandments, the world would be a much better place. The story of Jesus’ birth is not offensive, and most people like the idea of a resurrection. Everyone likes the idea of a life after this one without all of the aches and pains and heartache we all experience.
But what about the substitutionary atonement of Jesus Christ? This is an entirely different matter.
The cross offends us for at least two reasons.
Firstly, it allows no place for us to save ourselves. The cross condemns every kind of works-based salvation, because it proclaims that man in sin is so lost that only the death of the Son of God in our place is acceptable in order for us to be saved. People are quite happy to believe in Jesus as a model to follow or as a wonderful teacher.
The comedian Billy Connolly once said, “I can’t believe in Christianity, but I think Jesus was a wonderful man.” He got that wrong. It’s not that he can’t believe. He won’t believe, because if he did, he and countless others who say the same would have to admit that they are sinners, and that God is right, and they are wrong.
The truth is that the cross proclaims us all as miserable failures when it comes to following Jesus’ example as a wonderful man or a good teacher. The Presbyterian minister and Bible scholar J. Gresham Machen, said, “He is our Saviour, not because He has inspired us to live the same kind of life that He lived, but because He took upon Himself the dreadful guilt of our sins and bore it instead of us on the cross. This is a scandalous offence to the natural man, whose pride always wants to do something to commend himself to God.”
And Martyn Lloyd-Jones, in one of his sermons said, “What the Gospel says to every one of us is most galling to the natural man; it seems to him to be completely insulting and humiliating because it does not come and tell us that we have only to live a good life and that we have only to look at the Lord Jesus Christ and see His perfect example and then go out and follow Him, practicing the imitation of Christ. No, says the Gospel, the message is not to look at Jesus as the great moral exemplar, the great teacher. It is to look at a man with a crown of thorns upon His brow and an agonised expression on His face, crying out, ‘My God, my God, why hast Thou forsaken me?’ That is what you are called to look at - Jesus Christ and Him crucified!”
As Paul wrote in Galatians 3:13, “Christ redeemed us from the curse of the law by becoming a curse for us.” What this means is that it is only through faith in what Jesus did for us on the cross - a scandal to Jews and foolishness to the Gentiles - that sinners can be forgiven and accepted by God.
The second way in which the cross offends is by its demand for an exclusive faith in Jesus Christ alone. This is perhaps the greatest scandal of Christianity, especially in our day where we have a smorgasbord of religions to choose from, and the world insists they are all of equal value.
As long as we say, “Jesus is a way to salvation,” people are not offended. But when we proclaim that Jesus teaches we must look to Him alone for salvation or else die in our sins, everyone is up in arms. Including many Christians.
It’s the scandal of the cross once more. What is so offensive and scandalous to so many is that when the Gospel message is presented and taught Biblically and accurately, it teaches the exclusivity of salvation through Christ alone.
Salvation is not merely through Christ, but only through Christ. In that little word “only” is all the offence. Without that word the true Christian Church and the message we proclaim would not be persecuted and hated. But then it wouldn’t be Christianity. Without its exclusiveness, the Christian message would be perfectly acceptable, because it would be just one of the menu items on the smorgasbord of world religions. Pick what you like, and if it doesn’t suit your taste, just send it back and order something else.
The problem is that when the Gospel is message is watered down to make it less offensive, the power and the glory of the cross is destroyed.
The cross of Jesus Christ is the very centre of the Christian faith, which means that the Biblical doctrine of the atonement - Jesus’ substitutionary death to pay the penalty of our sin - is what drives the Church and the message we proclaim.
Unfortunately there is a liberal movement in certain Churches today which denies the doctrine of substitutionary atonement. An example is the American Anglican bishop John Spong, who died just a few months ago. He said, “A human father who would nail his son to a cross for any purpose would be arrested for child abuse. I would choose to loathe rather than to worship a deity who required the sacrifice of His Son.” I wonder how he feels about that statement now?
There is a liberal Baptist minister in England by the name of Steve Chalke who, in one of his books called the crucifixion of Jesus “a form of cosmic child abuse.” These men (and there are many like them in the so-called progressive Church) are dangerous false teachers. Any Church that denies the core doctrine of substitutionary atonement has to all intents and purposes ceased to be a Church.
We need to ask what these wolves in sheep’s clothing make of the most famous verses in the entire Bible. “For God so loved the world, that He gave His only Son, that whoever believes in Him should not perish but have eternal life. For God did not send His Son into the world to condemn the world, but in order that the world might be saved through Him.” (John 3:16-17) How do they explain that? And what about the very next verse which outright condemns them and their twisted theology: “Whoever believes in Him is not condemned, but whoever does not believe is condemned already, because he has not believed in the name of the only Son of God.” A Christian who denies the power of the cross and the exclusivity of the Gospel is a contradiction in terms, because to be offended by the cross is to deny the Gospel.
Paul wrote in 1 Corinthians 15:2-3, “For I delivered to you as of first importance what I also received: that Christ died for our sins in accordance with the Scriptures, that He was buried, that He was raised on the third day in accordance with the Scriptures.”
Jesus’ question in John 6:61 should pierce our hearts. “Do you take offence at this?” If the cross does offend us, it can only be because we refuse to humble ourselves before the cross, or that we refuse to accept Jesus alone as the exclusive Saviour of the world, or because we have been taught to think like the world.
This is why Christianity relies not on human strength or wisdom, but only on the Spirit of God working through His Word. This is what Jesus meant when He said in verse 63, “It is the Spirit who gives life; the flesh is no help at all. The words that I have spoken to you are spirit and life.”
When He says that the flesh is no help at all, He is referring to man in his worldly, sinful state. This is why so many rejected Him then, and why so many reject Him now - because they respond to the Gospel in the flesh. Verse 64 says, “Jesus knew from the beginning who those were who did not believe, and who it was who would betray Him.” Jesus not only knew who would not believe, but why they would not believe: They were fleshly and not spiritual. Their hearts were hard and their spirits were dead. This is why Jesus repeats what He taught earlier. “This is why I told you that no one can come to me unless it is granted him by the Father.” (John 6:65)
Salvation is by grace alone. It is an unmerited gift from God. Salvation comes only by grace because sinful man is unable to come to Jesus. Notice that Jesus says not only that His hearers were not willing to come, but that unless the Father grants it, no one can come to Him. This means that while salvation is received through faith alone, faith is itself another gracious gift from God.
Look at Ephesians 2:8-9. “For by grace you have been saved through faith. And this is not your own doing; it is the gift of God, not a result of works, so that no one may boast.” The gift Paul is talking about here is the faith to believe we are saved. Faith is not something we have to do or contribute to God. Rather, it is something that He contributes to us by the ministry of the Holy Spirit, so that through faith in Christ His will for our salvation can be achieved.
We should not be surprised at the world’s opposition to Jesus and the Gospel. They want the Church to be inoffensive and worldly, rather than holy. The cross and its true message remain foolish and scandalous to the non-believing world, but this does not give us the right to rethink how to present the Gospel in ways which the world will find more acceptable.
Tim Keller, who has become increasingly liberal in his theology in recent years said just a couple of weeks ago that in order for the Church to be effective, we should be presenting the Gospel “in a form the culture can handle.” I don’t know where he gets that idea from. It’s certainly not from the Bible, and it is not how the apostles proclaimed Christ and Him crucified in the book of Acts.
Peter had it right. “Lord, to whom shall we go? You have the words of eternal life, and we have believed, and have come to know, that you are the Holy One of God.” (John 6:68-69)
Jesus said that it is the Holy Spirit who gives life to those who are dead in sin. We preach the Gospel in all its scandal because we know that God the Father has chosen sinners for salvation. We preach the Gospel in all its foolishness because we know that Jesus Christ died to redeem His people. And we preach the Gospel boldly because we know that the Spirit is at work bringing life through the Word of God.
As we come to the end of John 6, we need to answer the question Jesus asked the twelve in verse 67. “Do you want to go away as well?”
Do you want to go back to your old life, empty of meaning and purpose because it was a life without Christ? It might have brought temporary happiness, but at the end of the day, it was nothing but emptiness.
There are other alternatives. You could leave Jesus for some other religion, or look for the god inside you that the new age cults teach about. You could also take a more liberal approach to the Bible like many confessing Christians, and in so doing you can avoid the hard teaching of the cross.
But if you turn away from Jesus - if your answer to “do you want to go away as well” is yes, where will you find forgiveness for your sins?
As Peter said, it is only Christ who has the words of eternal life. This means we need to take seriously our call to be faithful disciples of Jesus Christ, knowing that many have fallen away, and many more will. Let that not be true of us. He has given us His Spirit, and it is He who empowers and equips us to take up our cross, as we die to sin, to self, and to the world, as we follow Christ.
Remember His promise to us in verse 40. “This is the will of my Father, that everyone who looks on the Son and believes in Him should have eternal life, and I will raise him up on the last day.”
Homegroup Study Notes
Read John 6:60-71
In verse 60, the people are referring to what Jesus had taught them earlier in chapter 6.
What was hard – the teaching itself, or the call to accept and believe it? (Jesus’ question in the following verse might help!)
Read 1 Corinthians 1:18-25
What is your understanding of the doctrine of substitutionary atonement?
Why do you think the world is so offended by the Cross of Calvary?
In the last 20 years or so, there has been a move in certain Churches to make the Gospel message less offensive to non-Christians. (We see this in so-called “Seeker Sensitive Churches.”)
What is the problem with this movement?
Read verses 66-69 again.
Discuss how the question Jesus asked His disciples applies to us today.
How can we apply Peter’s wonderful response in verses 68 and 69 to our own life of faith?