John 6:34-56

34 Eating to supply the demands of physical hunger and thirst is but a symbol of the spiritual satisfaction apart from which life is debased to mere existence. Desires and aspirations for spiritual sustenance can never be finally filled apart from the One Who came down from heaven. It is only as we have every heart hunger satisfied in Him that we cease to feel the pangs of famine. It is only as we find all our spiritual aspirations realized in God's Son that our thirst is assuaged. How slow we are to learn that man shall not live by bread alone, but by every word that proceeds out of God's mouth! It is because Christ is set forth as the Word in this evangel that so much is made of eating and drinking.

37 How marvelously serene and sure are God's operations! The Jews may murmur and misunderstand Him, but how could they do otherwise? There was nothing in Him to attract them to Him. He is not moved by their murmurs, but tells them plainly that God alone, in His sovereign pleasure, picks out those who come to Him. They are a gift from the Father to the Son. Such not only desire to come to Him, but cannot fail to reach Him, and when they find Him, He counts them as precious presents from His Father, prized much for themselves but most for the Giver. Nothing can possibly arise to estrange Him from them. They are not only His for life, but He will rob death itself to restore them to Him in the resurrection.

40 That the life here bestowed on the believer is not everlasting is clear from the context, for it is not continuous, but waits until the resurrection. Those who received this life died. Their life lasted only a few years. But they will be raised to live for the eons. The life is eonian, not everlasting.

41 The great truth which begins and pervades John's account, that the Lord was the Logos, the spiritual reality of which the manna was only a type. The manna in the wilderness could only satisfy their temporal, bodily hunger, whereas His words would bring them spiritual satisfaction at all times and all places.

45 See Isa_54:13; Jer_31:34.

47 This passage should be studied carefully in order to correct the erroneous impression that believers have "eternal" or "everlasting" life. Eternal may be applied only to that which had no beginning and will have no end. No one but God has eternal life. Everlasting should be used only of that which continues without intermission endlessly. Not a single one of the Lord's personal followers is alive today. None of them received "everlasting" life. They are dead. If everlasting life permits of interruption by death now, why not in the resurrection also? All of these expressions denote definite periods of time, measured by eons, or ages. Eonian life begins in the next eon. Now it is evident that the Lord had no thought of a life lasting for ever. In that case how could He be raising him in the last day? The life here spoken of was to be bestowed in resurrection. There could be no resurrection apart from a previous death. In short, our Lord spoke in such away that we are sure that "everlasting" life, so-called, does not commence until He calls His own from the grave. As this life has a definite beginning, it also has an end. But as the end does not come until death is abolished, it changes from "eonian" life into actual never-ending life. This will be the portion of all. It is not the special privilege of the believer. The peculiar kind of life promised to faith begins at Christ's presence, when those who are His will be vivified, and continues through the last two eons, embracing the millennium and the succeeding eon in the new earth, until the eons end, and the last enemy, death, is abolished. Hence the life received in vivification is actually "everlasting," though never so called in the Word of God.

5. The term "masticate" is not the usual word for "eat", and presents some difficulty in translation, for English usage prefers the broader term "eat" in such passages as this. It means to chew, gnaw, hence suggests the only process in digestion which is voluntary. It represents the actual appropriation of the life of Christ as our own.