8:4
The disciples had encountered this situation before, but they still thought purely in their old mindset, they still thought that feeding the crowds was impossible. We may not have encountered such dramatic happenings as the feeding of the five thousand, but there are times when we know God has acted in our lives, or has worked through us. Yet so often we learn nothing from these times. As well as the event itself we need to consider the God behind the event, and what the event reveals about Him, both His capabilities, His love for us, and His love for others.
8:5-10
So Jesus takes them through essentially the same routine as the last time. He asks them how many loaves they have, gets the crowds to sit down, thanks God for the food they have , and gets the disciples to distribute the food. As well as the loaves, they also had a few small fish. He also gave thanks for these and they were distributed. Everyone had more than enough and there was plenty leftover.
Having fed the people Jesus sent them away, and He and the disciples got in a boat to go to Dalmanutha.
It is worth noting that the procedure here was almost identical to the feeding of the five thousand. Moses got into big trouble when he struck the rock a second time with his staff (Num 20:1-13), doing what he had done earlier (Ex 17:1-7). As a result Moses was not allowed to enter the Promised Land. On the second occasion Moses had been told to speak to the rock, so he had disobeyed God. What these two pairs of incidents teach us is that sometimes things will be done in more or less the same way, at other times they won’t. We need to listen to God, and there is no virtue in doing things differently for its own sake.
No comments:
Post a Comment