3.1 The Words I Speak
© 2017 Christ Revealed Bible InstituteIt is the Spirit who gives life; the flesh profits nothing. The words that I speak to you are spirit, and they are life (John 6:63). Jesus is every word God speaks – is He not? But how can a Person be words or how can words be a Person?
God is Spirit, and those who worship Him must worship in spirit and truth (John 4:24). What is Spirit? We know two things about Spirit; first, we hardly know what it is, and second, we know God has given us vague metaphors like air and water to help us know what He means by Spirit.
Knowing by Spirit. But God has revealed (His purpose) to us through His Spirit. For the Spirit searches all things, yes, the deep things of God. …Even so no one knows the things of God except the Spirit of God. Now we have received… the Spirit who is from God, that we might know the things that have been freely given to us by God (1 Corinthians 2:10-12).
Knowing comes from Spirit; it does not come from human intellect. The human mind, not immersed in the Spirit of God, cannot know the things of God. But the natural man does not receive the things of the Spirit of God, for they are foolishness to him; nor can he know them, because they are spiritually discerned (1 Corinthians 2:14).
Sounds Foolish. To say that Jesus is every word God speaks sounds foolish. Jesus’ claim, “The words that I speak to you are Spirit and they are life,” sounds foolish. To many Christians, this phrase has no meaning unless it can be translated into mental ideas. The disciples had no idea what on earth Jesus could mean when He spoke those words to them. In fact, the disciples were incapable of knowing Spirit until the Day of Pentecost.
We will look at “words are Spirit” in the next lesson, however. Here we want to understand the traumatic and devastating setting in which Jesus spoke John 6:63 to his disciples.
Playing Games with God. On the evening of the day Jesus feeds five thousand men, not counting women and children, with five loaves of bread and two fishes, Jesus escapes from the crowds and crosses the sea of Galilee with His disciples. They were trying to make Him king; they did not know Him. The next day, that great crowd comes back across the sea to find Jesus. Jesus is looking at a multitude of people including most of His disciples, who were all playing games with God, seeing what they could get out of God for themselves. After a preceding conversation, Jesus says to those crowds of people the most horrific thing He ever utters.
Cannibalism. Then Jesus said to them, “Most assuredly, I say to you, unless you eat the flesh of the Son of Man and drink His blood, you have no life in you. Whoever eats My flesh and drinks My blood has eternal life, and I will raise him up at the last day. For My flesh is food indeed, and My blood is drink indeed. He who eats My flesh and drinks My blood abides in Me, and I in him (John 6:53-56).
Because any interpretation of the Bible separate from John 6:63 cannot impart life, we must understand these words. It would have been impossible for Jesus to have dreamed up a statement more EVIL to the ears of the Jews who heard Him speak this day than these words.
Blasphemy. Israel in that day survived, barely, in a sea of Greek culture. It was the Pharisees who kept Israel connected with Moses and the Scriptures in the face of the onslaught of all things Greek, especially Greek paganism. Yet part of the results of the vigilance of the Pharisees was a thinking that had elevated God as “untouchable” and way beyond the commonality of man. Thus the idea of blasphemy was a huge deal in the minds of all Jews of that day. Inside of the Greek culture pressing against the Jews, there was a religious cult called the cult of Dionysus. In this cult, a child representing the god, Dionysus, was torn to pieces by the worshippers.
The Words of Dionysus. After tearing the child to pieces they ate his flesh and drank his blood. They did this because Dionysus had said, “Except you eat my flesh and drink my blood, you have no life in you.”
The Jews who heard Jesus speak were fully aware of the gross paganism and filthy ritual that swirled around them. They were a captive people, living in a land claimed and possessed by others. They knew of the cult of Dionysus and the gallant role of the Pharisees in keeping such evil away from their lives. Moses, on the other hand, had commanded the people of Israel not to eat the blood with the flesh of an animal, because the blood was the life of the flesh.
Awfulness. Not eating the blood was a big deal to all Jews. Because we have heard these words of Jesus all of our lives, they seem weird to us, but no more. We have no ability to comprehend the awfulness of these words to the minds of those who first heard them. For Jesus to quote this most horrible of pagan deities in the most excessive pagan ritual was beyond all human reason. And to the Jewish ear it was BLASPHEMY in every possible way. It was not possible for Jesus to have said any more “wicked” or “evil” thing to their minds. And Jesus was speaking to the Jews who had followed Him, who had eaten the bread and hung on His every word.
Stumbling and Offense. Jesus is a stone of stumbling and a rock of offense. He couches the greatest truth of the gospel inside the second greatest “blasphemy” uttered in Scripture. “Except you eat My flesh and drink My blood, you have no life in you.” Even to our ears, these words are awful; to the Jews they were unmitigated horror and inconceivable evil. Jesus lost everyone who had followed Him until that point, everyone except the twelve.
Now, good, Christian, Bible interpreters will explain to you what Jesus “meant” by these words. That explanation will vary from one sect to another, but every explanation will allow you to say, “Oh, that’s a nice idea.”
A Choice. And every gospel interpretation of these words will cause you to miss entirely Jesus’ purpose in speaking them. Jesus intended to shatter something inside His disciples, something that was blocking them from hearing Him at all. That something was their religious intellects; of those twelve, only one ever recovered from that devastating blow that day.
The disciples had a choice. Blaspheme God and stay with Jesus, whom everyone else now rejected, or refuse to blaspheme God, go with all the other Jews, and never hear Jesus speak to them again. Jesus turned to the twelve and said, “Does this offend you? Do you also want to go away?
Choosing “Blasphemy.” But Simon Peter answered Him, “Lord, to whom shall we go? You have the words of eternal life” (John 6:68). Thousands heard Jesus speak that day, but only eleven preferred blasphemy over losing Jesus speaking into them. And it is into the numbed, confused, and devastated minds of His disciples that Jesus said, “It is the Spirit who gives life; the flesh profits nothing. The words that I speak to you are Spirit, and they are life.”
Most Christians insist on knowing the Bible with their intellects only. If you choose to study the Bible in that way, you will have much company and many learned teachers of the Bible.
Choosing Life. But if you want to come to Jesus that you might win eternal life, that is, that you might KNOW the Father, then there is only one place I know where you will discover what Jesus means by “My words are Spirit and they are life.” You will not find what Jesus means in any book; no teacher is capable of explaining those words to you. The only place you will know is on your face on the floor before a Holy and a Mighty God with your heart wide open and your mouth tight shut.
God is a Person. And if you want to know Him, if you want Him to show you what He means by what He says, you have to deal directly with Him. And He will show you by His Spirit.