February 12, 2026 | Be Connected
People Disagree that Jesus is from Heaven
Scripture: John 6:41-59(NIV)
41 At this the Jews there began to grumble about him because he said, “I am the bread that came down from heaven.” 42 They said, “Is this not Jesus, the son of Joseph, whose father and mother we know? How can he now say, ‘I came down from heaven’?”
43 “Stop grumbling among yourselves,” Jesus answered. 44 “No one can come to me unless the Father who sent me draws them, and I will raise them up at the last day. 45 It is written in the Prophets: ‘They will all be taught by God.’ Everyone who has heard the Father and learned from him comes to me. 46 No one has seen the Father except the one who is from God; only he has seen the Father. 47 Very truly I tell you, the one who believes has eternal life. 48 I am the bread of life. 49 Your ancestors ate the manna in the wilderness, yet they died. 50 But here is the bread that comes down from heaven, which anyone may eat and not die. 51 I am the living bread that came down from heaven. Whoever eats this bread will live forever. This bread is my flesh, which I will give for the life of the world.”
52 Then the Jews began to argue sharply among themselves, “How can this man give us his flesh to eat?”
53 Jesus said to them, “Very truly I tell you, unless you eat the flesh of the Son of Man and drink his blood, you have no life in you. 54 Whoever eats my flesh and drinks my blood has eternal life, and I will raise them up at the last day. 55 For my flesh is real food and my blood is real drink. 56 Whoever eats my flesh and drinks my blood remains in me, and I in them. 57 Just as the living Father sent me and I live because of the Father, so the one who feeds on me will live because of me. 58 This is the bread that came down from heaven. Your ancestors ate manna and died, but whoever feeds on this bread will live forever.” 59 He said this while teaching in the synagogue in Capernaum.
Devotional
In Exodus 13-14, God led His people through the Red Sea on dry ground. In Exodus 20, God have them the Ten Commandments. What did the people do between these two manifestations of God’s power and presence? They grumbled.
In Exodus 16:3 they complained, “If only we had died by the Lord’s hand in Egypt! There we sat around pots of meat and ate all the food we wanted, but you have brought us out into this desert to starve this entire assembly to death.”
So, God rained down bread from heaven called manna (meaning “What is it?”). The Bible says manna “was white like coriander seed and tasted like wafers made with honey” (Exodus 16:31). This food sustained them for the next forty years, until they entered the Promised Land. It was an iconic part of Israel’s history of receiving God’s provision.
In today’s passage, Jesus makes a sharp statement. He says that everyone who ate manna died. It was only temporary sustenance. Then Jesus said that His own flesh and blood were a different kind of bread from heaven, a sustenance that would result in eternal life.
When my dad was nearing the end of his life, his Alzheimer’s disease progressively took away his memories. At first, he couldn’t remember what he had said a few minutes before. Later, he couldn’t remember that he had been a truck driver, or that we had tended a huge garden. Near the end, he often didn’t know me or mom. Finally, he forgot how to swallow. Unable to eat, his life ebbed away.
But this I know. When my dad fell asleep for the last time on earth, he woke up in the blessings of heaven. The bread of earth could no longer sustain him. But the Bread of Life, Jesus, welcomed him with open arms. As Jesus promised, “No one can come to me unless the Father who sent me draws them, and I will raise them up at the last day” (v. 44).
