What is a bit of bread, anyway?

 Meanwhile the disciples were urging Him, saying, “Rabbi, eat.” But He said to them, “I have food to eat that you do not know about.” So the disciples were saying to one another, “Has anyone brought Him anything to eat?” Jesus said to them, “My food is to do the will of Him who sent Me and to finish His work. Do you not say, ‘There are yet four months, and then comes the harvest’? Behold, I say to you, lift up your eyes and look on the fields, that they are white for harvest. Even now he who reaps is receiving wages and is gathering fruit for life eternal; so that he who sows and he who reaps may rejoice together. For in this case the saying is true, ‘One sows and another reaps.’ I sent you to reap that for which you have not labored; others have labored and you have entered into their labor.”

John 4:31-38

Introduction

If you are anything like me, you might have thought to yourself, “Why did Jesus have a 3 year ministry? Why did He wait until He was 30 to begin it? Why didn’t He just do everything faster?” This gets stressed even more in passages like John 3:4 when Jesus explicitly states His time had not yet come (when His mother asked Him to perform a miracle at Cana). This line of questioning can easily grow out of control and extend into asking why God waited at all to send the Christ. Why not send Him immediately after the fall? What was the point of all this?

I will not pretend to know the precise answers to those questions except to say that God, in His wisdom, set the times and occasions perfectly for His purposes. And as a masterful signature God put on all of creation, the work of redemption for His people was built on years of sowing, culminating in the fruitfulness of the Church.

Like a dwarf perched on the shoulders of a giant

Likening human history to the very seasons, Jesus gives us a beautiful image of the progressive work God did through His people in redemptive history. No one enters the world in a void, and no work is done without consequence. In fact, some of the most consequential work is that which has no immediate impact.

Hebrews 11 contains a section many affectionately call “The Hall of Faith,” naming many who lived by faith who are set as examples for us. After detailing the life of Abraham, Sarah, Isaac, and Jacob, the writer states this, “ All these died in faith, without receiving the promises, but having seen them and having welcomed them from a distance, and having confessed that they were strangers and exiles on the earth.” They lived faithfully, believing God’s promises even though those promises were never made manifest to them.

Where Abraham had only the direct revelation God gave to him, we have the fullness of what God has chosen to show the world through His Son. Again, we can look at Hebrews which opens with the statement, “God, having spoken long ago to the fathers in the prophets in many portions and in many ways, in these last days spoke to us in His Son, whom He appointed heir of all things.” No longer do we need to rely on the word of a prophet to tell us the will of God since we have seen it in the culmination of history on the Cross. As William of Conches once said of historians in the 12th century, “we are like a dwarf perched on the shoulders of a giant.”

The fullness of revelation that was made perfect in the coming of Christ was built on the progressive display of God’s power and goodness throughout history.

The food you do not know about

All this revelation lets us know about God. We can read His word and know His will. That is more than most in history could say. Technology today is such that the word is never far from you. Long gone are the days when a single physical copy of the scriptures existed in a township, opened weekly for a congregation of worshipers. Even these words you are reading now are very likely being read off the screen of a device designed to fit inside your pocket.

Now more than ever we are without excuse to partake in the food which the disciples did not know about: to do the will of the Father. Jesus came to finish the work that was started in the prophets. And we are sent to finish the work He started in the disciples, sending them out into the world to make disciples of all the nations. As another kind of communion we might have with the Lord, we are invited to partake in His good work. What a blessing it is that we might share the gospel with the lost.

May the Lord bless you and conform you into the image of His Son.