What is Living Bread?

“I am the living bread which came down from heaven” (John 6:51 NKJV).

It was a peculiar thing for Jesus to say.

And it left the Jews of the time quarreling and confounded. It was one thing to compare Himself with a consumable, but why did He feel the need to add the word “living” to the description?

Bread sustains our lives. It helps us grow, build us up, strengthens us. It certainly gives life, but by what stretch of the imagination could it be living? It’s made from seeds which have been ripped from their stems, crushed and baked. By the time it becomes bread, everything it is made of is thoroughly and most certainly dead.

Living Water

It might be helpful to see what the people of Jesus’s time understood about living water and see how that might apply to bread.

The NET Bible First Edition Notes says that living water is “the fresh, flowing spring water that is clear, life-giving, and not the collected pools of stagnant or dirty water.”^[1]

Constantly in motion, continually renewed from upstream or bubbling up from a spring, running water flows past us without apparent beginning or end (at least from our perspective on the bank). It doesn’t sit still long enough to allow noxious algae to build up the way it does in dead, stagnant pools or cisterns. Living water is pure, refreshing, life giving.

Every time I dip my cup in living water it’s instantly replaced with more from upstream. Nonmoving sources, on the other hand, offer water in a limited supply. Take out a bucketful and the water level goes down.

Living Bread

But bread doesn’t flow like water, so how can it be living?

In the same sentence in John 6 where Jesus gave Himself this name, He also declared His origins. “I am the living bread which came down from heaven” (emphasis mine).

Jews of the day knew about manna coming from heaven, but Jesus demonstrated a different way provision could come from above.

In Mathew 15 and Mark 8, He blessed a few loaves and fishes, and fed over four thousand picnickers. In Mathew 14, Mark 6, Luke 9 and John 6, five thousand more people watched Him dip into God’s stream of supply and draw out bread and fish until everyone was satisfied. The “water level” of bread, as though flowing from upstream, didn’t drop until everyone had their fill. While the manna in the wilderness had provided just enough for each day, the bread Jesus gave left them with baskets of overflow.

The Old Testament name Jehovah Jireh designated the Lord as one who provides. As living bread, Jesus reveals Himself as our inexhaustible supply. This idea of cascading bounty spills over into every aspect of who Jesus is. He wells up as Healer, pours forth as Wisdom, flows over us as Prince of Peace, wells up as our Righteousness, and rushes over us as Savior. In everything He proves Himself to be more than enough.

As He said in John 10:10, He came that we might not just have life, but that we might have it more abundantly.

How are some ways Jesus has proved Himself as Living Bread, spilling over as more than enough in your life?

“Now to Him who is able to do exceedingly abundantly above all that we ask or think, according to the power that works in us, to Him be glory in the church by Christ Jesus to all generations, forever and ever. Amen.”

(Ephesians 3:20–21 NKJV)

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^[1] Biblical Studies Press. (2006). The NET Bible First Edition Notes (Nu 19:17). Biblical Studies Press.