=26, 27. Verily, verily, I say unto you.= See Matt. 5:18, note.--=Ye seek me, not because ye saw the signs, but because ye ate of the loaves and were satisfied.= Christ leads the people from the lower to the higher, from the earthly to the spiritual, making, as was his wont, a simple incident the text of a deeply spiritual discourse. See Matt. 11:7; 16:6; Luke 13:1; 14:7; John 4:10. The meaning here is this: You are not seeking _me_ because you have seen and recognized the evidences of my divine commission, and really desire to put yourselves under me as your Lord and Master; you are seeking my _gifts_, and because you have eaten and been satisfied. He thus characterizes and impliedly rebukes those who seek not Christ but Christ’s, because they want not _him_, but something external to himself, which they think he can give them.--=Busy not yourselves about the meat which perishes.= It is not literally true that we are not to _labor_ for the meat that perishes (Acts 18:3; Eph. 4:28; 1 Thess. 4:10-12); it is true that the meat which perishes is not to be the object of our life-work (Matt. 5:24). “If any be idle and gluttonous, and careth for luxury, that man worketh for the _meat that perisheth_. So, too, if a man by his labor should feed Christ, and give him drink, and clothe him, who so senseless and mad as to say that such an one labors for the meat which perisheth, when there is for this the promise of the kingdom that is to come, and of those good things? This meat endureth forever.”--(_Chrysostom._) Comp. with Christ’s language here Isa. 55:2, to which perhaps he refers, and John 4:13, 14, where an analogous metaphor is used to enforce the same teaching.--=But about the meat which abides unto everlasting life.= _Unto_ (εἰς) indicates the purpose for which it remains, namely, that it may nourish eternal life, _i. e._, the life which continues unto, not which begins in, eternity; for eternal life is a present possession (vers. 47, 54). This food abides in us. Chaps. 5:38; 6:56; 8:31; 15:4, 7; 1 John 2:6, 27; 4:12, 15; 2 John 2 indicate both what is the meat and what the abiding of which Christ speaks.--=Which the Son of man shall give to you.= The phrase _Son of man_ is here, as everywhere in Christ’s use of it, equivalent to the Messiah (Matt. 10:23, note), and would be so understood by his hearers. This food of the spiritual life is the _gift_ of God through the Messiah (Rom. 5:17; 6:23). We might well wonder that Christ’s characterization of it here as a gift should not have prevented the question of the multitude in the following verse, but for the fact that, despite the explicit teaching of the N. T. that eternal life is _given_, even the disciples of Christ have ever been seeking to earn it as wages by labor. Christ says _shall give_ (future) because the great sacrifice was not yet offered, and so the unspeakable gift (2 Cor. 9:15) was not yet perfected.--=For Him hath God the Father sealed.= In the East the