6:29
Jesus replies that the work of God is to believe in Him whom He has sent. This is still the work that God requires of us today. Now believing is not just a mental assent to some facts, nor just an emotional response, rather it is a whole life commitment. Indeed, in John’s gospel there are several references to times when people believed but the faith was only skin deep.
Now Jesus is telling the people that God requires them to believe in Him. Note that it is not to believe in some facts, or some philosophy nor some ideology, it is to believe in Jesus Himself. Our commitment is to a person. Note also the arrogance of this if Jesus is not actually the Son of God, if he was just a man. The deity of Jesus is implicit throughout the gospels.
6:30,31
The people then asked for a sign. This at first seems totally unreasonable, for Jesus had healed people, and fed people miraculously. What more did they want? Well we need to think a little more. They were expecting a prophet like Moses (Deut 18:15) and part of the teaching they had (though this bit wasn’t in the Bible) was that the one like Moses would provide manna from heaven, just as Moses had done. So the situation is that the miracles did indeed show that Jesus was someone special, but what He has just said showed that Jesus was not just claiming to be from God, but was claiming to be the One promised in Deuteronomy, so the people wanted more of a sign than they had already had. And verse 31 shows that this is what they were thinking.
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