From that point onward, whenever Israel had a need, God would invoke the name “I AM” and then attach to it whatever attribute met Israel’s need. When Israel was hungry and afraid, they called God “Jehovah Jireh,” meaning “I AM your provider.” In Exodus 14, when the Israelites were sick because they’d drunk from a poisoned well, God called himself “Jehovah Rapha,” meaning, “I AM your healer.” When afraid, “Jehovah Shammah,” “I AM the God present with you.”
And that brings us to the Gospel of John. Make no mistake about it—in using this “I AM” name, Jesus is claiming to be God. But it’s bigger than that: Jesus is claiming to be the God that meets us at the place of our deepest need.
Jesus made this audacious claim right after performing one of his most famous miracles, the feeding of the 5,000 (With, what else? Bread). In fact, the miracle was the setup for the claim. John says that “when the people saw the sign that he had done, they said, ‘This is indeed the Prophet who is to come into the world!’” (John 6:14).
The crowd recognizes this as a “sign” and calls Jesus “the” prophet, and this too goes back to the Exodus. When God delivered Israel from Egypt, as they were passing through the wilderness they found themselves in a place without food. So, six mornings a week, God covered the ground with a little bread-like substance. The children of Israel didn’t know what to call it, so they called it “manna,” which in Hebrew literally meant, “What is it?” And this is what they ate every day as they passed through the wilderness.
Several thousand years later in John 6, Israel is under the thumb of another oppressor, the Romans. They’re looking for another deliverer, like Moses, to rescue them from their distress. And Jesus displays the same kind of miraculous power with bread that Moses showed. To top it all off, Jesus did this during the Passover, the feast that marked the Jews’ freedom from Egypt.
Jesus proved himself to be the prophet who provided a new manna and instituted a new Passover meal. The same God who fed bread to his people in the wilderness says in John 6, “I AM the bread of life.”
Yet even with this clarity, the people still misinterpreted the sign.
Some thought the point was that Jesus had come to lead a revolt against Rome, but it wasn’t. Some just wanted more literal bread to fill their literal bellies. But that wasn’t the extent of Jesus’ ministry either. Jesus had come to reveal the starving state of their souls, a state not fixed by deliverance from oppression or eating food. What they craved—what we crave—is a relationship with Him – the God we crave. What we need most isn’t the miracle itself but the Maker of miracles.
This article about the God we crave originally appeared here, and is used by permission.
