Thoughts on John 6

Today’s reading: 2 Kings 7; John 6

The end of John 6 has been an incredibly important piece of Scripture to my Christian life.

There is a lot that happens in John 6, but it starts with the feeding of the 5000, and then, later in the chapter, the people come looking for Jesus, essentially looking for Him to perform the same miracle and feed them again. This leads to a whole interaction about Jesus Himself being the true bread from Heaven which will fully and permanently satisfy. But because so many people are there for the wrong reasons, looking for a free meal or a spectacle rather than looking for the true spiritual life Jesus offers, Jesus intentionally uses increasingly provocative language to polarize the crowd, and John tells us it was so effective that many of His disciples turned away and stopped following Him.

As everyone else is walking away from Jesus, John records a couple verses that I have come back to over and over again over the years:

“So Jesus said to the twelve, “Do you want to go away as well?” Simon Peter answered him, “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 6:67-69

These verses are simple, and maybe I’m reading into them a little too much, but given the context, and given what Peter says, I don’t think I am.

When Jesus asks the twelve if they want to go as well, Peter doesn’t say, “No, Lord, we understand what you mean about eating your flesh and drinking your blood. It makes complete sense and we aren’t disturbed by it at all.” I think Peter’s response indicates that they were just as confused and disturbed by what Jesus said as everyone else that was leaving, but there was a key difference between those that left and those that stayed. Peter says, “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.” Peter didn’t need to understand everything Jesus said and did if he knew who Jesus was. From everything else they had seen and heard, the twelve understood that Jesus was the Holy One of God, and their confusion or lack of understanding could not change who Jesus was. So if they left, where else could they possibly go? If they chose not to follow Jesus, they were turning away from God, and who else could they turn to?

I have felt this way so many times. There were times early on after I became a Christian that I really didn’t want Christianity to be true because I wanted to be free to run after my own sin and live the life I wanted to live free of consequences. I didn’t want my life to be about Christ, and I didn’t want to have to reorder my priorities around His values and purposes, but what choice did I have? After studying the evidence for it, I was so fully convinced of the truth of the Bible and of the person and reality of Jesus, that I couldn’t deny it was truth. So where did that leave me? To continue to live the way I wanted to live was to actively rebel against God Himself, and then who could I turn to? Who could I appeal to for eternal life if I rejected the life God was offering? So to some extent I felt trapped, but it was because I could not deny what I knew to be true, even when I didn’t like the implications of that truth. Times I wanted to turn away from God, the Holy Spirit would bring Peter’s words to my mind, “Where else could I go?”

As I have grown in the Lord past those initial years of following Him half-heartedly, really wishing I could go on living for the world rather than for Him, these have still been important verses for me. How often do my desires conflict with what God calls us to? How often do I want to keep in my life something that the Lord calls sin? And yet, I have come to know and believe that these are the words of truth, and they tell me that my thoughts and desires are fallen, that my flesh is at enmity with God, and that my heart is deceitful beyond all else, but they also tell me that God is good, and as the author of life, He knows how life works best, so when He calls something sin, it is not because He wants to suck the fun out of life, it is because He designed and created us for something better. So I, like Peter, don’t need to understand everything and don’t need to have every answer before I can follow after the Lord. I don’t need to always understand why God calls something sin, or to “feel” like I agree with His design. I know enough to know who He is, to know that He is good, and to know that what He has for me is better than what I can get for myself, and so where else could I go?

Other times, the Christian life has just been harder than life would be not following the Lord, and it can be tempting to stop. Or things about the Christian life can just be confusing, like why God is allowing us to experience what we are experiencing or suffer what we are suffering. But in all of these things and at all of these times, Peter’s words ring in my ears, “Where else could I go?” Jesus is the way, the truth, and the life, and no one can get to the Father except through Him, and that is where I want to be for eternity, with my Father in Heaven. So no matter what, I know it’s worth it.

I don’t have all the answers, and I don’t understand everything the Lord allows or calls me to, but I know the One in whom I have believed, the Holy One of God who has the words of eternal life, and that is enough.