In my preparation for this study, something dawned on me that was quite new - at least to me - and it gives to this familiar story a whole new dimension of meaning. I believe John wants us to understand from it that Jesus is everything to us that the Israelites discovered God to be to them in their desert wandering ... their true sustainer and their guide.

To see this, we have to take the two signs together - the feeding of the 5,000 and the walking on water. What I share with you now will not exhaust their meaning, but I do think it sets the key signature, so to speak, in which their music should be played.

John often uses little details of the story - true-to-life touches - which somehow suggest something deeper - and, as we have seen, it is by pondering those little touches that you catch his meaning. This chapter carries allusions to the story of the Israelites told in Exodus. Let me spell them out to you one by one.

1. v. 1-2 Jesus went to the other side of the sea, followed by a great multitude who had been impressed by the signs He had wrought.
... as Moses crossed the Red Sea, followed by the hosts of Israel, who had been impressed by the signs Moses had wrought in Egypt.

2. v. 3 Jesus went up into the hills and there sat down with His disciples, who were soon to share this extraordinary meal with Him.
... just as Moses took the 70 elders with him into the mountain, where, as the narrative tells us in Exodus 24 and that astonishing verse 11, "they beheld God, and did eat and drink."

3. v. 4 "Now the Passover, the Feast of the Jews was at hand." Why should John bother to tell us that?
True it may have been, but where is the point in telling us? Is this desert meal intended to be seen as some sort of Passover? If so, it will be a very unofficial, and highly irregular one, though most commentators on John's Gospel draw this conclusion.

But ... it was the first Passover that started the Israelites on their desert experiences ... the chief of which was the provision of manna (the Bread from Heaven, as they described it,) which was the evidence of their invisible God's sustaining presence in their midst, all their journey through. It was at Passover time too that the Lord's provision of bread on the Galilean hillside supplied evidence that He was in their midst to sustain them with the Bread from Heaven all their journey through.

4. v. 5 Jesus' question to Philip is exactly the question that faced Moses and his people in the Sinai desert: "Whence shall we get bread to feed this multitude?"

5. v. 6 "This He said to test him," John tells us, just as in Exodus 16:4, we read, God promised them the manna "to prove them - to test them - whether they will walk in my law or not."

"Jesus Himself knew what He would do" - just as God in the desert knew what He would do when He provided quail and manna and water from the rock. Time and again, the Israelites faced what looked like the end of everything for want of resources, just as the crowd and the disciples did here: only to be shown again and again that with God, nothing is impossible. Had the disciples learned with Jesus yet what the Israelites were so slow to learn in the desert? - that every crisis we face is not a reason to despair, but a challenge to trust and hope, and watch for God to act, to manifest Himself.

Have we?

6. v. 11 When Jesus miraculously multiplied the bread, everyone ate "as much as he wanted." That too is reminiscent of the desert experience; "Gather the manna" they were instructed, "every man as much as he can eat."
And when they had done so, you read in Exodus 16:18 a most remarkable thing:
"They did so, they gathered, some more, some less. But when they measured it, he that gathered much had nothing over, and he that gathered little had no lack ... And Moses said to them, "Let no man leave any of it till the morning."

That was exactly how it was, too, on the Galilean hillside. When the fragments were gathered up ("Nothing must be lost," said Jesus, as Moses had said) they exactly matched the need of the distributing disciples. The basket not the size of an esky - just of a lunch bag. The supply of His Grace is always exactly matched by our need.

7. v. 14 By now, we must hardly find it surprising that the reaction of the Jewish crowd is to link Jesus in their minds with Moses; for the prophet they refer to when they said, "Surely this is that prophet," is the prophet whom Moses himself had promised, as recorded in Deuteronomy 18:15 - "The Lord your God will raise up for you a prophet like me from among you, from your brethren - him you shall heed - for I shall put my words in his mouth."

Their response - "This is indeed the prophet who is to come into the world" is exactly the response John means us, the readers, to make ourselves.

As if this were not enough, the desert wanderings of the Jewish people are specifically referred to in the discourse that occupies the rest of ch. 6 of John, including the provision of manna. And Jesus goes on to say (v. 32) "It was not Moses who gave you the bread from heaven; my Father gives you the true bread from heaven" ... and then He says plainly, "I am that bread of God which comes down from heaven, and gives life to the world."

Finally we should notice the superb twist which John gives to this recapitulation of the old desert story.

The whole meaning of that Exodus story is that God was in the midst of His people as their sustainer, and as their guide through all the perils of the way.

And there were many perils - attacks from the Amalekites, plagues of various kinds, and of course the ever-present danger of losing their way and perishing because they could not find a supply of water in the desert places. They needed God to guide them ... though they so persistently fell into unbelief with every fresh crisis, that in the end they wandered about for 40 years covering a distance that should only have taken them a few months at the most.

Now John includes the element of guidance with his story of Jesus coming to the disciples through the storm - not in the desert - but on the lake in this case. And the nice twist he is able to give the story is to say that when you take Jesus on board to be your guide, there is no need for you to grope about for 40 years looking for the promised land, but rather ... "immediately the boat was at the land to which they were going."

Now, if I am right about all this, then the truth which this sign - this twin sign - that John gives us in ch. 6 is a single one, which the Scriptures drive home over and over again: because God has fixed His love upon us, and because He is God, the Creator and Redeemer, we can trust him for everything; for bread - real honest-to-goodness daily bread - as well as for the deeper spiritual sustenance of which bread is the symbol.

Both.

You are to cast yourself on God for everything - for the big things of life, as well as for every little thing, and life with Christ for His disciples, like life with God for the Israelites of old, has for its whole meaning the learning of one thing - to trust God: so to trust Him that in the end no circumstance of life, however disastrous, is able to weaken or whither our faith ... to be able at last to say, "Who or what shall separate us from the love of Christ?
• shall tribulation, or distress?
... experienced any distress lately? And are you letting it weaken your trust in His love?
• or persecution
... experienced any persecution lately? - and are you letting it weaken your trust in His love?
• or famine - or nakedness - or peril
... been in any peril lately?
• or sword?
In all these things we are to become more than conquerors.

How? By watching God wave a magic wand over them all that makes them go away? No, but by trusting Him through them all, by leaning on Him through them all. We do not become conquerors until we learn faith in all these things.

That was the one lesson God was aiming to teach the desert Israelites all through their experiences. "The message they heard" we are told in Hebrews 4:2, "did not benefit them, because it did not meet with faith in their hearts."

Does it meet with faith in ours? Or do we fall into the same errors and disobediences into which they fell?

i. They fell into grumbling.
They got the miseries. They fell victims to depression. As soon as they faced another setback they said, "Why can't we die, and be done with it all?"

ii. Or they fell into the temptation to idolatry.
As they did when they fashioned a molten calf like the gods they had worshipped in Egypt.

Sometimes we do that. God, we believe, has let us down. He has not given us what He promised (which normally means - He has not given me what I want His promise to mean!!) So we turn to substitutes. We allow old cravings to take hold of us as the Israelites did - for wealth, or success, or achievement, or sex or something like that, and turn from God to work, or another job, or to gambling, or a woman, or a man, and we say - "I'll get the satisfaction I want - out of this, or this, or that."

Or we withdraw - as the Israelites did when they refused to go into Canaan at Kadesh-Barnea. We "go bush," inwardly - we detach. No more church, no more books, no more prayer, no more ... no more. I stick. Thank you, I'm retiring. Stop the world. I want to get off.

We all have our defences, against the challenge of faith, to stick it out with Christ.
And when we turn to them, we sin.

Paul has a marvellously suggestive phrase to describe the meaning of those desert experiences, a phrase we can apply with equal force to the wilderness experience in Galilee, and to our own. In II Corinthians 10:3-4 he speaks of the manna as "spiritual food," and the water from the rock as "spiritual drink," and the rock from which it flowed as a "spiritual" rock. He does not mean that the manna and the water and the rock were not real food and water and rock, but were somehow "magic" substances - spirit-like, and not substantial. Not at all. The manna was in fact an honest-to-goodness secretion from certain desert shrubs, as it is still today (though in much more meagre quantities; Arabs in the Sinai will sell it to you); and the water was honest-to-goodness water that had been dammed up behind the rock till Moses struck it.

What Paul means when he describes it as "spiritual" food and "spiritual" drink, is that it was so given as to carry a spiritual significance. It was so given as to mean "This is evidence of God's care for you. This is proof that He is present among you in a real and vital way. This is meant to reassure you - to strengthen in you a living faith that He will never fail you nor forsake you, as He has promised. He does not deliver you out of six troubles, only to desert you in the seventh."

That is what the provision of the bread on the Galilean hills was meant to say too - and not just to the disciples, but to us. The manna and the water from the rock not only satisfied a physical need - their hunger and their thirst: it satisfied at the same time a spiritual need - their need of assurance, the assurance that God was indeed among them and could be trusted ... for everything.

And - if you remember the passage in II Corinthians 10 - Paul went on to apply the lesson to the elements of bread and wine in the Lord's Supper: these, too - these gifts of bread and wine - are spiritual gifts; not in the sense that they are in any way supernatural or magical - they are just plain bread and honest-to-goodness grape juice; but, ordained as they were by our blessed Lord to speak with silent eloquence of His Body broken for us and His Blood shed for us, they are so given to us, here, on the table, as to carry spiritual significance. They are so given as to say to us, "The Lord Who gave Himself for us to the uttermost on the Cross is the same Lord Who is among us now, giving Himself to the uttermost to us still. He has not forsworn His Name or His nature. All that He ever was, He is still, and for you. Trust Him - trust Him now; let these simple gifts nourish the life of faith in you, just as they nourish the life of the flesh in you."

That is how you eat the flesh of the Son of Man. As St. Augustine said once: "Believe ... and thou hast eaten."

O it can still happen, when it needs to, that God can do miracles to provide for us ... as, for example he did for Eddie Rickenbacker when he was 50 days adrift in a life-boat in the Pacific. In the book, "I Heard The Angels Sing" he recalls how they prayed desperately for water when they were almost dying of thirst. With his own eyes, he tells us, he saw a rain cloud detach itself from others that were blowing away from their raft, and against the wind, it sailed over them and dumped its water in their boat and all around them.

But as Jesus was so at pains to say after this very episode - it is not in miracles that our faith should rest, but in the God of miracles - whether He does them or not! If you are trusting in God as you should, you will see His giving hand in the toast and marmalade on your daily breakfast table; you will not need a loaf of bread to fall out of the sky into your bicycle basket to know that God is the source of your daily bread.

God has a care for you. Believe it. Really believe it - with resolute persistence. Believe it, and see if life does not yield you all the evidence you could ever have asked for for the truth of it.

God - and God alone - can satisfy your every need.

Hear Jesus say it ... to you, "Do not labour for the food which perishes, but for the food which endures to eternal life, which the Son of Man will give you; for on Him has God the Father set His seal. (vs. 47-48) I am the bread of life. He who believes in me shall never hunger."