The Great Sifting: When the Words of Life Offend Text: John 6:66-71
Introduction: The Offense of Hard Truth
We live in an age that prizes affability above all else. The modern evangelical project is largely one of marketing, of making the gospel palatable, inoffensive, and attractive to the consumer. We are told to find the felt needs of the culture and then present Jesus as the ultimate solution to those needs. But when we come to a text like this one in John 6, we find a very different strategy. We find a Christ who is not tweaking His message based on focus groups. We find a Christ who, after preaching one of the most glorious and difficult sermons in all of Scripture, watches a significant portion of His followers turn around and walk away. And He lets them go.
The entire chapter is a crescendo of divine revelation. Jesus has fed the five thousand, a stupendous miracle. The crowds are ecstatic. They want to make Him king by force. They are ready to follow this bread king anywhere. But Jesus will not be the kind of king they want. He refuses their carnal enthusiasm and instead offers them the true bread from heaven, which is His flesh, given for the life of the world. He tells them that unless they eat His flesh and drink His blood, they have no life in them. This is scandalous language. It is cannibalistic language to the unregenerate ear. It is a deliberate offense, a spiritual filter designed to separate the wheat from the chaff, the true seekers from the thrill-seekers.
And the filter works exactly as intended. The offense is taken. The crowd thins. The fair-weather disciples, who were happy with the free lunches and the spectacle of power, find that the cost of true discipleship is too high. The words are too hard. The claims are too absolute. And so they leave. This passage is a crucial diagnostic for the church in any age. It forces us to ask what kind of Christ we follow. Is it a Christ we have domesticated, a Christ who conforms to our sensibilities? Or is it the Christ of Scripture, the Holy One of God, whose words are spirit and life, and who therefore reserves the right to offend our flesh?
This moment of crisis and clarification sets the stage for one of the most profound confessions of faith, and one of the most chilling revelations of treachery, in all the Gospels. Here, in the shadow of mass apostasy, the true church is defined.
The Text
As a result of this many of His disciples went away and were not walking with Him anymore.
So Jesus said to the twelve, "Do you also want to go?"
Simon Peter answered Him, "Lord, to whom shall we go? You have words of eternal life.
And we have believed and have come to know that You are the Holy One of God."
Jesus answered them, "Did I Myself not choose you, the twelve, and yet one of you is a devil?"
Now He was speaking of Judas the son of Simon Iscariot, for he, one of the twelve, was going to betray Him.
(John 6:66-71 LSB)
The Great Apostasy (v. 66)
We begin with the sad but necessary result of Christ's hard teaching.
"As a result of this many of His disciples went away and were not walking with Him anymore." (John 6:66)
The language here is stark. These were not distant observers; they are called "disciples." They had been following Him, walking with Him. They were part of the visible covenant community surrounding Jesus. But the Word of God acted as a divine sieve. Christ's teaching on His sovereignty in salvation, "no one can come to Me unless it has been granted him from the Father," and the necessity of partaking of His very life, was too much for them. Their discipleship was a mile wide and an inch deep.
This is a critical lesson in the doctrine of perseverance. These disciples did not "lose their salvation." Rather, their departure proved they never had it to begin with. As John would later write, "They went out from us, but they were not really of us; for if they had been of us, they would have remained with us; but they went out, so that it would be shown that they all are not of us" (1 John 2:19). Their apostasy was not a failure of God's grace, but a revelation of their unregenerate hearts. They were attached to the vine like a bit of tumbleweed caught in the branches, but they were never true, living branches drawing life from Him.
This should chasten any ministry that measures its success solely by numbers. Jesus just preached a sermon that resulted in a mass exodus. By the standards of the modern church growth movement, His strategy was an abysmal failure. But Jesus was not trying to build a big church; He was building His Church, and that is a different thing entirely. He was not interested in decisions that did not flow from a divinely wrought conversion. He spoke the hard truth, and that truth did its work of dividing the true from the false.
The Searching Question (v. 67)
Jesus then turns His attention from the departing mob to His core group.
"So Jesus said to the twelve, 'Do you also want to go?'" (John 6:67 LSB)
This is not the question of an insecure leader, worried that His inner circle is about to abandon Him. This is the question of the sovereign Lord, designed to test and strengthen the faith of His chosen men. He is forcing them to a point of decision. He is asking, "Are you with them, or are you with Me? Is your allegiance based on the signs and wonders, or is it based on who I am?"
It is a loving and pastoral question. He is inviting them to count the cost. He is making them look at the backs of the departing disciples and decide which direction their own feet will carry them. In every generation, the true disciples of Christ are faced with this same question. When the culture walks away, when the popular preachers soften the truth, when faithfulness becomes costly, the Lord turns to us and asks, "Do you also want to go?" Our entire Christian life is our answer to that question.
The Great Confession (v. 68-69)
Peter, as is often the case, speaks for the twelve, and his answer is a magnificent confession of saving faith.
"Simon Peter answered Him, 'Lord, to whom shall we go? You have words of eternal life. And we have believed and have come to know that You are the Holy One of God.'" (John 6:68-69 LSB)
Peter's response is built on a profound, rhetorical question: "Lord, to whom shall we go?" This is the bedrock of Christian conviction. It is a confession of utter exclusivity. There are no other options. The world offers a thousand paths, a thousand gurus, a thousand philosophies. But for the one whose eyes have been opened by grace, there is only Christ. Where else is there to go? To go anywhere else is to go to nothing, to death. This is not arrogance; it is the logical conclusion of meeting the living God.
Peter gives two reasons for this unwavering loyalty. First, "You have words of eternal life." Notice he does not say, "You speak about eternal life." He says Jesus has the words. The words themselves are life-giving because they are the words of the one who is the Life (John 14:6). The departing disciples found His words to be "a hard saying." Peter found them to be words of life. The difference was not in the words, but in the ears that heard them, one set opened by the Spirit, the other deafened by the flesh.
Second, Peter makes a doctrinal confession: "we have believed and have come to know that You are the Holy One of God." This is not a guess or a pious hope. It is a settled conviction. "We have believed and have come to know." Faith precedes and gives rise to true knowledge. And what do they know? That He is "the Holy One of God." This is a title steeped in the Old Testament, a title for Yahweh Himself (Isaiah 43:15). It is a declaration of Christ's unique, divine nature. They are not following a mere prophet or a miracle worker. They are following God in the flesh.
The Sobering Clarification (v. 70-71)
The scene should end here on this high note of confession. But Jesus introduces a chilling and necessary corrective.
"Jesus answered them, 'Did I Myself not choose you, the twelve, and yet one of you is a devil?' Now He was speaking of Judas the son of Simon Iscariot, for he, one of the twelve, was going to betray Him." (John 6:70-71 LSB)
Just as Peter finishes his glorious "we," Jesus qualifies it. Peter spoke for the twelve, but Jesus knows the heart of each one. His response is a staggering assertion of divine sovereignty and a warning against false assurance. "Did I Myself not choose you, the twelve...?" Here is the doctrine of election. They did not ascend to their position; they were chosen for it. Their presence in that inner circle was due to His sovereign choice alone.
But this choice operates on two levels. All twelve were chosen for the apostolic office. They were all given authority to preach and cast out demons. But only eleven were chosen for salvation. And one, Judas, was chosen for his grim task, and is here identified as "a devil." This is not to say he was an incarnation of Satan, but that he was Satan's man, an adversary, a slanderer, operating in perfect alignment with the purposes of the enemy. He was a son of perdition from the beginning (John 17:12).
This is one of the hardest truths in Scripture. Judas's presence was not an oversight. It was not a mistake in the divine hiring process. Jesus knew from the beginning who would betray Him. Judas's treachery was woven into the eternal decree of God. This demolishes our sentimental notions of God's plan. God's sovereignty is so absolute that He ordains and uses the most wicked acts of men to accomplish His most glorious purposes, namely, the crucifixion of His Son. Judas was fully responsible for his sin, yet his sin served the predetermined plan of God (Acts 2:23).
Jesus exposes this reality here to remind the disciples, and us, that proximity to Christ is not the same as possession of Christ. Judas heard the words of eternal life. He saw the miracles. He sat at the feet of the Holy One of God. And yet, his heart was a nest of treachery. This is a permanent warning to the visible church. There will always be Judases in the pews, and sometimes even in the pulpits. Our assurance must never rest on our external position, but only on a true, Spirit-wrought faith like Peter's.
Conclusion: Where Will You Go?
This passage leaves us standing in the dust with the twelve, watching the crowd disappear over the horizon. The Lord's searching question hangs in the air: "Do you also want to go?"
The gospel of Jesus Christ is not a take-it-or-leave-it buffet of spiritual suggestions. It is an absolute, exclusive, and often offensive claim on your entire life. It demands that you eat His flesh and drink His blood, that you find your entire sustenance and life in Him alone. It demands that you confess Him as the Holy One of God, the only Lord and Savior. For many, this is a hard saying, and they will walk away to find a more accommodating god, a more convenient gospel.
But for those to whom the Father has granted it, there is no other place to go. Where would we go? To the empty promises of secularism? To the dead-end street of self-worship? To the shifting sands of postmodern relativism? All other ground is sinking sand. Only Christ has the words of eternal life.
The question for each of us today is this: which group are you in? Are you among the crowd, intrigued by Jesus but ultimately offended by His claims? Or are you with Peter, driven to your knees by the glorious realization that there is no one else? And we must also hear the sobering warning about Judas. Let us examine ourselves, not to see if we are good enough, but to see if our faith is in Christ alone. For in that small circle of twelve, we see the destinies of all mankind: eternal life for those who believe and know Him, and a devil's end for those who sit near Him but never truly love Him.
There is nowhere else to go. Let that be our confession, our anchor, and our joy, now and forever.