Today, I am reading and commenting on  John 6-7.

Today’s passage contains some things said by Jesus which seem to support the Roman Catholic Church’s stance that the bread and wine in the Lord’s Supper literally becomes flesh and blood.  When you combine what Jesus said when He broke bread and shared the cup with His disciples at the Last Supper with what He says here, one could easily draw that conclusion.  Here He says, “ For my flesh is real food and my blood is real drink.”  However, I think we can better understand what He means here about His flesh and blood being food by looking what He said to His disciples when they returned and brought Him food after He spoke with the woman at the well.  In John 4:34, He said, “My food is to do the will of him who sent me and to finish his work.”  So, my understanding of what Jesus said here is that we eat His flesh and blood as real food, food and drink which will satisfy our spiritual hunger and thirst, when we do the will of Him who called, and then sent, us.  I mentioned that when we do the will of Him who called us we eat Christ’s flesh and drink His blood and that it will satisfy our spiritual hunger.  Yet it is worth noting that when Jesus spoke to the woman at the well, doing the will of His Father satisfied His physical hunger.  

I use the daily Bible reading schedule from “The Bible.net” for my daily Bible reading.

Today, I am reading and commenting on  John 4-5.

The account of the lame man at the pool whom Jesus healed contains a couple of interesting points.  The first one being the question which Jesus asked the man, “Do you want to get well?”  The man’s response to the question is interesting and instructive.  He said that he couldn’t get well because he had no one to help him.  Together these tell us something about helping people in need.  We cannot help those who do not wish to be helped, and sometimes all people need is someone to walk along side offering some assistance.  Which brings us to what Jesus did to heal the man.  He told him to get up, pick up his mat, and walk.  He gave the man something to do.  Then later, Jesus found the man and told him, “See, you are well again. Stop sinning or something worse may happen to you.”  That is a message for all of us.  When we accepted Jesus as our Lord and Savior, He forgave our sins and made us well with God.  We need to stop sinning or something worse may happen to us.  Fortunately, God will help us with that, just like He made us well.

I use the daily Bible reading schedule from “The Bible.net” for my daily Bible reading.

Today, I am reading and commenting on  John 1-3.

John does an interesting thing in his Gospel that I have noticed before, but never really thought about before.  He switches from quoting someone to making commentary without leaving a clear indicator of where the quote ends and the commentary begins.  Primarily he does that when he quotes Jesus, but he also does it a few times in today’s passage when he quotes John the Baptist.  Until today, I always thought it was just something which John did without thinking about it (side note: while there is some debate about whether this Gospel was written by John, or by someone else, and, if it was written by John, whether that was the Apostle John or another John, I generally write my blogs assuming that it was written from the perspective of the Apostle John).  As I read it today, it struck me that John did it on purpose; partly to communicate that his “quotes” were only paraphrases of what was said, and partly to communicate a deeper understanding of what the speaker said than conveyed directly by what they said.

I use the daily Bible reading schedule from “The Bible.net” for my daily Bible reading.