Regarding the Roman Catholic doctrine of the Eucharist in relation to John 6

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Charles Church

Jn 6:60-64
60 Many therefore of his disciples, when they had heard this, said, This is an hard saying; who can hear it? 61 When Jesus knew in himself that his disciples murmured at it, he said unto them, Doth this offend you? 62 What and if ye shall see the Son of man ascend up where he was before? 63 It is the spirit that quickeneth; the flesh profiteth nothing:the words that I speak unto you, they are spirit, and they are life. 64 But there are some of you that believe not. For Jesus knew from the beginning who they were that believed not, and who should betray him.

(KJV)

Roman Catholics teach that when they take the Eucharist, (The Lord’s Supper), that they are in truth EATING GOD, “body, soul, and divinity”, and appeal to John 6 as the biblical text to warrant this belief. Jesus had indeed said, “Except ye eat the flesh of the Son of man, and drink his blood, ye have no life in you. Whoso eateth my flesh, and drinketh my blood, hath eternal life; and I will raise him up at the last day. For my flesh is meat indeed, and my blood is drink indeed. He that eateth my flesh, and drinketh my blood, dwelleth in me, and I in him.” (vs. 53-55) But….. that’s not all He said.

Many who heard Jesus’ teaching objected to it, and departed, precisely because they interpreted it the exact same way Romanists do, as though it were intended of Jesus to be taken literally, and we were to without figure of any kind… “eat his flesh”. But a rather conspicuous context makes the genuine meaning as opposite as plain. Jesus pointed out this misunderstanding in the Romanists of His day, (if you will), explaining that they had misunderstood Him, pointing out that He was going to ascend into heaven where this grotesquely ignorant interpretation would not be possible. How will you eat his flesh when he’s NOT THERE, but in heaven? And more importantly, because His WORDS were the instrument explicitly stated as that which grants the “life” promised, and explicitly denying it to be His flesh, according to some occultic and hyper-literalist construction on His promise. (vs.63)
He had said except you eat the flesh of the son of man you have no life in you, but also said that His WORDS were spirit and that His words were LIFE, and that to come to Him was to eat, and to believe on Him was to drink, (vs.35), so that true believers receive these blessings the way they were prescribed…. by coming and believing, long before they could ever exegete the passage. Those who “believe not” were those who got offended and left because they took it literally and not in the way quite explicitly revealed by the Lord Jesus, because they were not of His sheep. Thus do Roman Catholics seem quite committed to demonstrating that they are not His sheep in the same manner, by giving it the same exact interpretation, and by forsaking the Lord in so doing.
These contemporaries of the Lord were blinded to the true meaning of what He had taught, because they abode in unregeneracy, and couldn’t hear his words. But no better if they embrace such a perverse notion and yet suppose to stay. That is not the coming and believing which spiritually receives the grace and LIFE of salvation through faith in Jesus Christ, the Redeemer of the elect. To take this beautiful truth and transform it into this hideous deformity of eating a wafer-god of bread turned to flesh for life (!) is so grotesque, despicable, and idolatrous, that only those most ignorant of it’s meaning could ever embrace it as the truth. “Because they received not the love of the truth….. ” IIThes.2