John 6 - CSB Spurgeon Study Bible

6:29 “This is the work of God—that you believe in the one he has sent.” Faith is most pleasing to God because it is the comprehensive summary of all true work. There lies within a heart of faith every possible form of holiness. As a forest may lie asleep within an acorn, so within the bounds of faith, little though it is, every virtue lies hidden. It may be microscopic in form, but it is certainly there and only needs development.

If I had before me a list of all the graces of the Spirit of God and I were to take them up one by one and examine them for faith, I would find some measure of all these good works of the Spirit hidden away in the simple act of believing in Jesus Christ. I know what some of us have asked—“Is that all we have to do to be saved? Are we simply and only to believe in Christ, that is, entrust ourselves to him?” Yes, that is all, and it is so small an act that even the most uneducated heart can perform it. Yet within it there are inconceivable mysteries of goodness. What is more, all the graces come out of faith in due time, for faith sums up the whole of a Christian’s life.

6:37 “Everyone the Father gives me will come to me, and the one who comes to me I will never cast out.” Christ will not die in vain. His Father gave him a certain number to be the reward of his soul travail, and he will have every one of them. Almighty grace will sweetly constrain them all to come. My father recently gave me some letters that I wrote to him when I began to preach. They are almost boyish epistles, but, in reading through them again, I noticed in one of them this expression: “How I long to see thousands of men saved, but my great comfort is that some will be saved, must be saved, shall be saved, for it is written, ‘All that the Father gives me shall come to me.”

6:53, 55 “So Jesus said to them, ‘Truly I tell you, unless you eat the flesh of the Son of Man and drink his blood, you do not have life in yourselves. . . . because my flesh is true food and my blood is true drink.’” Jesus did not guard his words by saying, “I am like bread, and faith is like eating and drinking,” but he said, “I am the bread of life” (6:35) and “unless you eat the flesh of the Son of Man and drink his blood, you do not have life in yourselves.” To us who know the meaning of Christ’s words, it seems monstrous that anyone could have supposed that Jesus meant men to eat His real, literal flesh and to drink His actual blood. The best of literal food only feeds the body for a time, for that body ultimately decays. It is not in the power of food to repair the waste that is continually going on, that the physical system will forever abide firm and strong. This food is food, but it is not “true food.” There are also various kinds of drink that refresh and invigorate the body, and by means of these we are enabled to continue from day to day. But where is the water, where is the crystal fountain that can give immortality? Where is the juice expressed from any fruit that grows beneath the sky that can rid the body of all disease and pain and cause it to live on without end? Among all the many kinds of literal food and drink, there is no food that is worthy to be called “true food,” or any drink that is worthy to be called “true drink.” But the doctrine of the incarnation of Christ, which is expressed by his flesh, is food to our souls, and the great truth of the substitutionary sacrifice of Christ, which is expressed by his blood, is the most nourishing cordial to our hearts.

6:66 “From that moment many of his disciples turned back and no longer accompanied him.” We believe the truth of the final perseverance of the saints concerning the true people of God, but the question comes to our heart, are we such? Is there in us the incorruptible seed that lives and abides forever? And how are we to know that we are such but by this perseverance? While it is an effect of grace, it is also one of the most certain tokens of it, for there is not the true grace of God in the heart where there is no perseverance in grace even unto the end. “But the one who endures to the end will be saved” (Mt 10:22).