<p>6:33 <i>For the bread of God is that which comes down out of heaven and gives life to the world</i>-</p><p>These words, and others like them, are misused to support the wrong idea that Jesus existed in Heaven before his birth. Trinitarians take these words as literal in order to prove their point. However, if we are to take them literally, then this means that somehow Jesus literally came down as a person. Not only is the Bible totally silent about this, but the language of Jesus being conceived as a baby in Mary&rsquo;s womb is made meaningless. Jn. 6:60 describes the teaching about the manna as a saying &ldquo;hard to take in&rdquo; (Moffatt&rsquo;s Translation); i.e. we need to understand that it is figurative language being used. The Lord Jesus is explaining how the manna was a type of himself. The manna was sent from God in the sense that it was God who was responsible for creating it on the earth; it did not physically float down from the throne of God in Heaven. Thus the Lord&rsquo;s coming from Heaven is to be understood likewise; he was created on earth, by the Holy Spirit acting upon the womb of Mary (Lk.1:35).</p><p>The Lord Jesus says that &ldquo;the bread that I will give is my flesh&rdquo; (:51). Trinitarians claim that it was the &lsquo;God&rsquo; part of Jesus which came down from Heaven. But the Lord says that it was his &ldquo;flesh&rdquo; which was the bread which came down from Heaven. Likewise He associates the bread from Heaven with himself as the &ldquo;Son of man&rdquo; (Jn. 6:62), not &lsquo;God the Son&rsquo;. In this same passage in Jn. 6 there is abundant evidence that He was not equal to God. &ldquo;The living Father has sent me&rdquo; (Jn. 6:57) shows that He and God do not share co-equality; and the fact that &ldquo;I live by the Father&rdquo; (Jn. 6:57) is hardly the &lsquo;co-eternity&rsquo; of which Trinitarians speak.</p><p>It must be asked, When and how did Jesus &lsquo;come down&rsquo; from Heaven? The Lord Jesus speaks of himself as &ldquo;he which cometh down from heaven&rdquo; (:33,50), as if it is an ongoing process. Speaking of God&rsquo;s gift of His Son, the Lord said &ldquo;My Father is giving you the bread&rdquo; from Heaven (v.32 Weymouth). At the time the Lord was speaking these words, he had already &lsquo;come down&rsquo; in a certain sense, in that He had been sent by God. Because of this, He could also speak in the past tense: &ldquo;I am the living bread which came down from Heaven&rdquo; (:51). But he also speaks about &lsquo;coming down&rsquo; as the bread from Heaven in the form of His death on the cross: &ldquo;The bread that I will give is my flesh, which I will give for the life of the world&rdquo; (v.51). So we have the Lord Jesus speaking here of having already come down from Heaven, being in the process of &lsquo;coming down&rsquo;, and still having to &lsquo;come down&rsquo; in His death on the cross. This fact alone should prove that &lsquo;coming down&rsquo; refers to God manifesting Himself, rather than only referring to the Lord&rsquo;s birth. This is conclusively proved by all the Old Testament references to God &lsquo;coming down&rsquo; having just this same meaning. Thus God saw the affliction of His people in Egypt, and &lsquo;came down&rsquo; to save them through Moses. He has seen our bondage to sin, and has &lsquo;come down&rsquo; or manifested Himself, by sending Jesus as the equivalent to Moses to lead us out of bondage.</p><p><b>A Devotional Appeal</b><br />The Lord's language of coming down from Heaven can be understood from a very powerful devotional aspect. He reasons that because He had <i>come</i> down from Heaven, therefore, whoever <i>comes </i>to Him, He would never reject (Jn. 6:37,38). The connection is in the word &quot;come&quot;. We 'come' to Jesus not by physically travelling towards Him, but in our mental attitudes. He likewise 'comes' to us, not by moving trillions of kilometres from Heaven to earth, but in His 'coming' down into our lives and experiences. If He has come so very far to meet us, and we come to Him... then surely we will meet and He will not turn away from us, exactly because He has 'come' so far to meet us. This theme continues throughout John's Gospel. &quot;What and if you shall see the Son of man ascend up where he was before?&quot; (Jn. 6:62) is therefore not a reference to Him physically travelling off anywhere- He is saying that if people would not 'come' to Him in meeting, then He would withdraw the opportunity from them. He wouldn't stand waiting for them indefinitely. This explains the urgency behind His appeals to 'come' to Him. He had 'come down', and was waiting for people to 'come' to Him. He's come a huge distance, from the heavenly heights of His own spirituality, to meet with whores and gamblers, hobby level religionists, self-absorbed little people... and if we truly come to Him, if we want to meet with Him, then of course He will never turn us away. For it was to meet with us that He 'came down'. This approach shows the fallacy of interpreting His 'coming down' to us and our 'coming' to Him in a literal sense.</p><p>And yet this Lord of all grace also sought to confirm men and women in the path they chose. He admitted that His comment about Himself being the manna which descended from Heaven was a &quot;hard saying&quot;. And yet He goes straight on to say perhaps with a slight smile playing at the corner of His lips something even more enigmatic: &quot;What and if you shall see the Son of man ascend up where he was before?&quot; (Jn. 6:62). Surely He is here choosing to give them yet another, even harder &quot;saying&quot;; and goes on to stress that His sayings, His words, are the way to life eternal (Jn. 6:63). For those who didn't want His words, He was confirming them in their darkness. And He did this by the mechanism of using an evidently &quot;hard saying&quot;. Therefore to simplistically interpret the saying as meaning that the Lord had literally descended from Heaven through the sky just as literally as He would ascend there through the clouds... is in fact to quite miss the point- that this is a &quot;hard saying&quot;. It's not intended to have a simplistic, literalistic interpretation.</p><p>Life was given to the world not only in the sense of eternal life. A way of life was shown to us, the only way of life- the life of the cross. It is a frequently found paradox in Scripture that life comes through death. The Lord&rsquo;s cross and resurrection are the prime example. However, it is not simply that His death opened the way to eternal life for us at His coming. It gives us spiritual life now, in that all that we do in our being and living should be motivated by the spirit of the cross. Each of the myriad daily decisions we take should be impacted by our knowledge of the cross. In this way, the cross gives life right now.</p>