Journey with us as we uncover how new ideas can challenge established beliefs. Jesus introduced radical changes that were both unsettling and enlightening, symbolized through parables about old and new wineskins and the symbolic bread from heaven. Join us in understanding how these teachings were meant to provoke deeper contemplation and a re-evaluation of spiritual principles.
The CEM Network is pleased to present Ronald L. Dart and Born to Win.
SPEAKER 03 :
Every time there was a crowd around Jesus, there were at least three kinds of people who were gathered there that heard him speak. For one, there was a smallish group of people who just immediately responded to him. To them, he was like water on dry ground. He was something they’d waited for all their lives. They were thrilled with his words. They soaked up everything he had to say, and they could have stayed with him all night and into the next day and would have gone with him anywhere. There was another small group that bristled at Jesus’ every word. There was something about him that annoyed them and that angered them. And to tell you the truth, I think in many cases they could not have told you why. I think I could tell you why. Jesus was a threat. He was a threat to several people in terms of their power and their control. You know, they were leaders in the community. They were big swingers. When they spoke, people listened. People thought they were important. Now comes along someone who makes claims to being even more important, and that’s not so good. But I don’t think that that’s where the really big threat came from. You know, when you have a system of belief and you have a lot of yourself, your life, your heart, your being invested in that system of belief. You’ve made sacrifices for it. You’ve done without for it. And you’ve studied and done all these things all these years. And then along comes someone and suggests that your belief system is somehow wrong. Well, that’s threatening. And it creates fear. And fear is sometimes followed by anger. And I think there’s a lot of that in the reason why so many people bristled at what Jesus said. But there was a third group out there. It was by far the largest group of people that gathered around Jesus. They just didn’t get it. They were fascinated with Jesus. Who wouldn’t be? I mean, the man was healing sick people, and he was incredibly charismatic, I’m sure, to be around. He was a man of intense presence. But for these people, even though they were fascinated with him, his words seemed to go in one ear and out the other, and they just didn’t lodge. They didn’t stick. Now, it’s tempting to criticize these people, but it’s probably better to feel sorry for them. as every indication Jesus did. In fact, the gospel writers tell us that when Jesus saw a crowd of these people out there, he was moved with compassion for them. He felt sorry for them because they were scattered abroad like sheep without a shepherd. You know, they were all coming to him because they knew something was missing. They knew that there was something out there they needed, and yet they would listen and somehow wouldn’t get it. The problem they had was they had looked at things for so long in the same way, and they had so much invested in their own belief system. Jesus might as well have been from another planet. They simply were not able to process a lot of the things that Jesus had to say. Jesus himself said earlier, he said, you know, no man puts new wine in old wineskins. The problem is there’s still, with new wine, a certain amount of the fermentation process going on, and the wineskin had better have a certain amount of elasticity in it or it’s going to break. You put that new wine in an old wineskin that’s already brittle, and it’s going to break, and you’re going to ruin the wineskin and ruin the wine. Well, what Jesus is trying to tell people is that what he is bringing them is new. And once it gets inside their head, it’s going to cause ferment. And they’d better have some flexibility to be able to deal with it. And Jesus himself said, you know, nobody, when you bring along the new wine, says they really want it. Because they’ll always tell you that the old is better. And that was the problem with so many people who heard Jesus. The old was better, and they were so used to it. And this new wine that Jesus brought was a little frightening, a little tart, a little tangy, and they just didn’t know what to do with it. You know, it’s tempting to think when you encounter people like this third group, when they don’t understand and when they’re wanting to fight it and they don’t quite want to accept what they’re hearing, it’s tempting to think that maybe more arguments or better arguments will help. Maybe if I can get a better scripture, maybe if I can find a way of putting this that will somehow cut through and disprove some of the old things they believe, maybe that will do it. But the problem is not with the facts. It’s not with the Scriptures, it’s not with the doctrines, and it’s not with the arguments or the way you put it together. The problem is on the inside of the people who are listening. Some of them are going to get it, and some of them are not. So I say they had these three groups of people that gathered around Jesus. There’s an interesting dialogue between Jesus and a crowd that includes all three groups. It’s found in the sixth chapter of the Gospel according to John, and it begins around about verse 22. Jesus had gotten away from the people and had taken a boat and gone across the ocean, across the Sea of Galilee, as it were. And the people, when they realized he was gone, well, they took shipping and they came pursuing Jesus across to where he was. And when they found him on the other side of the sea, they said, “‘Rabbi, when did you come here?’ Sort of a, “‘Hello there. How did you get over here?’ Jesus doesn’t even address that. He just looks at them and says, Verily I say unto you, I’m going to tell you the truth. You came looking for me not because you saw the miracles, but because you ate the loaves and were filled. Remember that he had actually taken five loaves and two fish and had fed 5,000 people with it over there. So it was pretty remarkable. And Jesus just said, I don’t think you’re as impressed with the miracle that I’m doing as you are with the fact that I gave you something to eat. Now, I would not have thought this. I would have assumed that the miracles Jesus did would have caused these people to follow him anywhere. But he said it wasn’t so. He had fed them, and they had followed him as the source of a free meal. That’s not what I would call a ringing endorsement of their faith. He went on to say, having said, first of all, you came after me because of the food, he said, don’t labor for the food that perishes, but for the food that endures unto everlasting life, which the Son of Man shall give you, for him the Father has sealed. And they said unto him, well, what shall we do that we might work the works of God? Now, so far they haven’t really even gotten on the same wavelength because Jesus is telling them that I’m coming to bring food to you that will endure to everlasting life. And they’re still back on the question of the miracles and all that type of thing. And they say, well, what can we do that we might work the works of God? I don’t know. Did they mean they wanted the power to do miracles? What were they asking? Were they saying, well, what’s your secret, Jesus? And Jesus answered and said to them, This is the work of God, that you believe on him whom he has sent. Now, obviously, there are more Christian works than that. Jesus himself will enumerate a lot of Christian works later on and talk about how important they are, including visiting people in prison and giving clothes to people who don’t have enough and feeding the hungry. But this is where it starts. If a person cannot believe Jesus, they have nowhere to go. And this is precisely the struggle that most of the people listening to Jesus had. They didn’t know whether to believe him or not, because what he was telling them was so different from anything they had believed before. Now, mind you, most of the people out in front of Jesus were Jews. They were religious Jews. They had followed Judaism all their life. And yet what Jesus was telling them was so sharply different, they just did not know what to make of it. So they said to him, Well, what sign do you show us then so that we can see and believe you? What are you going to work? Our fathers ate man in the desert. As it is written, he gave them bread from heaven to eat. They’ve still got their minds on their bellies. They’re still thinking about food. They haven’t got their mind around it yet. And Jesus said, I’m going to tell you the truth. Moses didn’t give you that bread from heaven. My Father gives you the true bread from heaven. For the bread of God is he which came down from heaven and gives life unto the world. Now, with our 20-20 hindsight, we know, we’ve read the New Testament, we know that Jesus was talking about himself. He who came down from heaven was Jesus. He was the true bread from heaven. But the analogy was not familiar to this crowd, and they were still thinking about food. That’s what was on their minds. And they said, well, Lord, give us ever more of this bread. And then Jesus said something that they couldn’t process at all. He said, I am the bread of life. He that comes to me shall never hunger. He that believes on me shall never thirst. But I’m going to tell you this. You have seen me, and you don’t believe. All that the Father gives me shall come to me, and him that comes to me I will in no wise cast out. Now in front of Jesus as he said these words, there were people listening to Jesus whose eyes were shining. They knew what he was talking about. But even they had trouble with some of Jesus’ allegories and metaphors. But they got the drift. And every time they heard him, something more clicked into place. But there were others in front of him whose faces were creased with frowns of puzzlement. They just didn’t get what he was saying. But their frowns were going to get a little deeper with the things Jesus said next. But I’ll be back with those words after this message.
SPEAKER 02 :
Why wasn’t it enough for Jesus to die? Why the shame, the humiliation, the flogging? To understand this, you need to understand about sin. Write or call for a free program titled, Why Christ Had to Suffer. Write to Born to Win, Post Office Box 560, White House, Texas 75791. Or call toll free 1-888-BIBLE-44.
SPEAKER 03 :
For I came down from heaven, Jesus said, not to do my own will, but the will of him that sent me. Now, I’ll tell you right off, that didn’t compute with the crowd standing in front of Jesus. Because they weren’t thinking in terms of the Messiah coming down from heaven. They were thinking of the Messiah being born of a woman and, you know, growing up as a man. And he being just a man who became king over Israel, anointed by God to throw off the Roman domination and all that stuff. And Jesus now says, I came down from heaven. So you can see why the frowns might get deeper. not to do my own will, but the will of him that sent me. And this is the Father’s will which he has sent me, that of all which he has given me, I should lose nothing, but should raise it up again at the last day. And this is the will of him that sent me, that everyone who sees the Son and believes on him may have everlasting life, and I will raise him up at the last day. I understand what he’s saying, don’t you? He is saying he came down from the Father in heaven. He is saying that of all the people the Father gives him, he’ll lose none of them, but he will have raised them up at the last day. He’s talking about the resurrection from the dead. And the starting point is believing on Jesus, not just believing him, not just saying, well, I heard what he said and I believe it, but believing on him, which means everything he stands for. Now, that was going a little bit beyond what most of the people standing there would be able to deal with. And sure enough, they couldn’t. John tells us the Jews then murmured at him because he said, I am the bread that came down from heaven. They didn’t like that. And they said, now wait a minute. This is Jesus, the son of Joseph, whose father and mother we know. How can he say, I came down from heaven? And this is fundamental, folks. This gets down to basic Christianity. Jesus was in the flesh, but he was the word become flesh. You know, I don’t know how deeply we would have understood this if we had only had the first three Gospels. But John’s Gospel was written rather later. And by this time, the truth of who Jesus was and all the implications of many of the things that he said had really begun to make sense to the church, to John, and to the others. And these people were having trouble with what Jesus said. Now, mind you, they are not bad people. They just don’t understand. They had a frame of reference. They had a set of expectations, and Jesus had another. Jesus was asking them to think in entirely new ways, and most of them just couldn’t do it. They kept trying to make Jesus’ words fit their preconceptions, their preconceptions of God, their preconceptions of the Messiah, of the mission of the Messiah, of what he was supposed to do. And they couldn’t accept the Son of God who was standing in front of them, who had healed the sick, had raised the dead, had demonstrated in every way the power to forgive sins. He was the man who was there to rescue them, and they just couldn’t see it. And Jesus answered and said, Look, don’t murmur among yourselves. No man can come to me except the Father which has sent me draw him, and I’ll raise him up at the last day. In a way, Jesus is acknowledging that it’s not entirely their fault that they couldn’t understand. In a way. But there’s another side to this. He goes on to say this in verse 45. It is written in the prophets, quote, and they shall all be taught of God, end quote. Every man, therefore, Jesus said, that has heard and has learned of the Father comes to me. So this isn’t just… God turning some screws down inside someone’s head and changing the way they look at this. What he is saying is that people who prior to this time have heard of the Father and have learned of the Father have no trouble understanding what I’m saying. They come to me. These are the people who were sitting in front of him with their eyes shining, understanding what he was saying, hanging on his every word. It’s now becoming a little clearer. No man can come to Jesus except the Father draw him. But how does the Father draw a man? Well, Jesus said every man that has heard and learned of the Father would come to him. This is all past tense. They had heard the Father in the reading of the Holy Scriptures every Sabbath in the synagogue. And the people who had heard and had learned of God, who had responded to the Father, who had obeyed the Father, these people, well, these people were able to understand Christ quickly. These people hearing the Father in a synagogue was not enough. They had to learn. And to learn, you have to confess that you don’t know. And in that process, you grow. The Father had called all these people through their own history and the Old Testament. But too many of them had either never heard or had heard only what they wanted to hear. And isn’t that the way of it? You sit in synagogue week after week, month after month, and the scriptures are read. And you hear what you expect to hear. And you do what everybody around you is doing. But there would be some who would listen, who would hear, and who would respond. And these are the people whom God, through the Scriptures, drew to Jesus. So the ones who recognized Jesus knew him because it was the same voice they had heard in the Scriptures. Now, I know there’s a spiritual element in this. In other words, that God’s Spirit touches a man and calls him. But it has a lot to do with the receptiveness of the individual to the voice of God. And Jesus said plainly that the key element in those people who were standing in front of him, who understood him, and who believed him, were people who had heard and learned of the Father before they had ever encountered Jesus. I’m convinced that one reason—only one reason, but an important reason— That so many Christians are confused about Jesus is because they have not been grounded in the Old Testament Scriptures. You know it’s true. An awful lot of people who call themselves Christian never read the Old Testament. Some of them, the Bible they carry around with them is actually a New Testament plus the Psalms. Even the Psalms would help them. But the truth is there is so much in the Old Testament about Christ that if you don’t read it, you won’t know it. And if you don’t know what the Old Testament says about Christ, well, you know, when you think about that, Jesus said that in the end time there would be false Christs. Would one be vulnerable to a false Christ because they did not know what the real one was supposed to be like, what he was supposed to say, and what he was supposed to do? Jesus went on to say, not that any man has seen the Father, save he which is of God, he has seen the Father. Verily, verily, I say unto you, he that believes on me has everlasting life. I am that bread of life. Your fathers ate manna in the wilderness and they died, right? They brought up the manna. They talked about, well, now God gave our fathers manna from heaven, bread from heaven. And Jesus said, yep, he did. And your fathers ate it and they died. The bread I’m talking about that comes down from heaven, if a man eats of that bread, he will not die. I am the living bread which came down from heaven. If any man eat of this bread, he shall live forever. And the bread that I will give is my flesh, which I will give for the life of the world. Now you talk about something that doesn’t compute. The Jews therefore strove among themselves saying, how can this man give us his flesh to eat? Jesus is about to head into deep waters, and not everyone is going to follow him there.
SPEAKER 02 :
We’ll go into those deep waters when I come back. For a free copy of this radio program that you can share with friends and others, write or call this week only and request the program titled The Words of Jesus, number 21. Write to Born to Win, Post Office Box 560, White House, Texas 75791. Or call toll free 1-888-BIBLE44. And tell us the call letters of this radio station. I’m going to tell you the truth.
SPEAKER 03 :
Except you eat the flesh of the Son of Man and drink his blood, you have no life in you. Well, I told you he was headed for deep waters, didn’t I? Now, there’s probably something you need to know about this. In ancient times among Semitic people, they had a custom of entering into covenants with one another. They’re called blood covenants. And it’s rather gruesome, but the way in which it was done originally was that two men who were going to enter into a blood covenant with one another would cut themselves. And unlike the American Indian idea of blood brotherhood, where you would cut yourself and let your blood run together, the idea was each man would drink a little bit of the other man’s blood. And I’ve got your blood in me, and you’ve got my blood in you. And now we take on all the obligations of kinship. You know, if you were born my brother, I would have certain obligations to you, right? Well, if I’ve made you my blood covenant brother, then I have the same obligations to you. So this was the way it was done. You drank the other person’s blood. Now, this was kind of unpleasant, I suppose. And in time to come, they substituted an animal’s blood for human blood. In other words, they’d kill an animal sacrificially, and each man would drink some of the blood of the animal, and that would be the sign of the covenant that they shared with one another. And then in times to come, it went away from the blood exactly into the sacrificial meal. In fact, in the law of Moses, God told Israel not to eat any blood at all. And he was specifically prohibiting this kind of activity of entering into a blood covenant, not only with human blood, but with animal blood as well. So what got substituted for it was the sacrificial meal where you would sacrifice the animal and you would sit down and you would share this animal together in food and in a meal, which was a form of the confirming of a covenant between two individuals. So when Jesus speaks of eating his flesh and drinking his blood, he is talking about the entering into of a blood covenant. That’s what it means. And, of course, the idea of eating his own flesh and his own blood, that would be prohibited by the law of Moses in any case, and naturally gave the people listening to him whiplash. Jesus didn’t quit there. He said, whoever eats my flesh and drinks my blood has eternal life, and I will raise him up at the last day. For my flesh is food indeed, and my blood is drink indeed. He that eats my flesh and drinks my blood dwells in me and I in him. In other words, we have entered into a blood covenant. We are inside, as it were, of one another with all the obligations that go along with that. And toward the end of John’s gospel, Jesus describes in some detail what those obligations are. As the living Father has sent me, he said, and I live by the Father, so he that eats me, even he shall live by me. This is the bread that came down from heaven. It’s not going to be like your fathers ate manna and died. He that eats this bread will live forever. Now, with 20-20 hindsight, again, those of us who have read the rest of the New Testament know that all these allusions here are to what we have come to call the Lord’s Supper. where Jesus took the wine and said, this is my blood, drink this. The wine symbolized the blood of Christ at the Last Supper. Take this, this is my blood of the New Testament or New Covenant. And he gave them a little piece of unleavened bread and said, here, take this, eat this. This is my flesh which is broken for you. And so, therefore, they had the sacrificial or covenant meal, and the Lord’s Supper or the Christian Passover is a renewal of that covenant that Christians make with Christ every year. Now, he said these things in the synagogue as he taught in Capernaum. And many of his disciples, when they heard this, said, this is a hard saying. Who can hear it? Now, mind you, it’s as many of his disciples, not just the crowds out there. But a disciple is simply one who has made you his rabbi. He’s learning from you. So these were his disciples or his learners. And they just really had a problem. And Jesus knew in himself his disciples were murmuring at it. And he said, does this offend you? What are you going to do if you see the Son of Man ascend up where he was before? It’s the spirit that quickens. The flesh doesn’t profit anything. The words that I speak to you, they are spirit and they are life. And then Jesus looked around at the people who were still there. And he said, but there are some of you that do not believe. Now that… That had to be a worrisome thing spoken in this particular group of people. Because Jesus knew right from the beginning who they were who didn’t believe. And he knew who would betray him. Oh yeah, right here in this group of people was a man named Judas. And he said, therefore I said to you, no man can come unto me except it were given to him of my father. And from that time, many of his disciples went back and walked no more with him. That’s a painful thing to consider, isn’t it? Here was the Son of God, a man who came down from heaven, a man who was the Savior of all mankind. And because his sayings are hard, some people just couldn’t handle it and turned back. And Jesus said to the twelve, Would you also go away? It almost sounds like they were all that was left. And Simon Peter said, Lord, to whom shall we go? You have the words of eternal life, and we believe and are sure that you are that Christ, the Son of the living God. And Jesus answered and said, Haven’t I chosen you twelve, and one of you is a devil? I don’t know how that went down with the twelve, but Judas Iscariot, that great loser, was there. Until next time, this is Ronald Dart. You weren’t born to lose.
SPEAKER 02 :
You were born to win. The Born to Win radio program with Ronald L. Dart is sponsored by Christian Educational Ministries and made possible by donations from listeners like you. If you can help, please send your donation to Born to Win, Post Office Box 560 White House, Texas 75791. You may call us at 1- 888-BIBLE-44 and visit us online at borntowin.net.
SPEAKER 01 :
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