Home • Bible Studies • The Feeding of the Five Thousand & the Sufficiency of Christ: A Study of John 6
The Bridge to The Bread of Life
By Jake Hanson
VI. The Bridge to the Bread of Life Discourse (vv 16-24)
Why Not Stop?
It would be easy for us to just stop at the miracle of the feeding of the Five Thousand, and see the miracle for the event itself. But to do so would miss the point John is trying to make. He is saying something more than the other Gospel writers were saying. It seems that their point was that Jesus was the Messiah, implicitly shown by the miraculous feeding. John does not dispute this, but he connects the miracle with Jesus’ teaching (as John often does). And the teaching has much to say to us.
The Bridge
So we find that in verses 16-25, Jesus leaves the satisfied crowd, and we see that He walks across the sea. We won’t dwell on this miraculous event, since we need to get on to the rest of the discourse, except to note one highly interesting thing about the parallels between this chapter, and the account of the Exodus. In the account of the Exodus, (1) the Hebrews participated in the first Passover, and then (2) they miraculously crossed the Red Sea, and then (3) they dwelt in the wilderness where the Lord provided Manna from heaven to provide for His people for forty years.
As we have noted before, John begins this story, making mention that it is (1) the Passover, (2) Jesus Crosses the sea (Sea of Galilee), and (3) Jesus discusses the Manna in the wilderness. John is picking up on the fact that Jesus seems to be living out the life of Israel. But Jesus is going to take the story in a different direction than what His listeners expect, and what the Hebrews experienced. He is going to offer something infinitely better than the Manna in the wilderness. But the people will have a hard time believing Him. And so do we.
So Jesus crosses the sea, and then finds a crowd waiting for Him.