I’ve had the opportunity to go on four international mission trips. I’ve been on two to Haiti, and two to India. In all of those trips, there was a consistent impression I walked away with. It has always impressed me that the power of the Gospel can penetrate through any barrier. In both Haiti and India, the people spoke different languages than we did. In Haiti, they spoke French Creole. On our second trip to Haiti, we had two missions: build a church and evangelize in the community. Steve Harmon, his son, and few others would go, every day of the trip, into the city of Jacmel to share the Gospel, and every evening he would come back telling of many who’d accepted Christ. During that week, our team led 85 people to Christ. Towards the end of the trip, I and another pastor had the opportunity to go with Steve. As we were traveling, we got into a big debate about the best way to introduce the Gospel. The other pastor, Jeff, wanted to ask the standard question: “do you believe you will go to heaven when you die?” Steve and I objected, saying that most people will answer yes to that, regardless of what they know of Jesus. Jeff persisted, though, and when it was his turn to share with a young woman who was living with her Christian grandmother, he asked, “Do you believe if you died tonight, you’d go to heaven?” She responded “Yes”. Jeff didn’t really know what to do with that, so we told him to follow up by asking, “Why?” The young woman’s answer left us all stunned for a moment. She said, “Because, last night I had a dream, and in that dream I was told that men would visit and tell me how I might be saved, and here you are.” When we came to our senses, we told her of how Jesus had lived the sinless life she could not live and died as a sacrifice for her sins and rose again from the dead. She believed on the Lord that day. How is it that a story about an itinerant preacher from a remote, forgotten part of the world, who spoke a dead language and lived over 2000 years ago could have such power in 2014 among Haitians living under entirely different circumstances? How can it have that power over us today, here in Greenville, AL, removed by thousands of miles and millennia from the place and time of Jesus? It can have that power because Jesus was the Divine Messiah, he is still at work today, and his Gospel is for all people.
I say this because we come to a story, in Mark 8, that has received some undue critique. This story records Jesus’s feeding of the 4000, which some say is too similar to the earlier feeding of the 5000. There are some skeptical scholars who point to the similarities of these two stories and assume that this feeding must be an embellishment on Mark’s part or the error of a scribe who was copying the story long after Mark wrote it. But, this skepticism is foolish for a number of reasons. For one, the only thing that is similar about the stories is the fact that Jesus performs the same miracle – he feeds a multitude. But, to say that any repeated miracle of Jesus is just an embellishment would reduce the Gospel of Mark to a few pages. Besides the miracle itself, the details are considerably different. Jesus is in a different place. He uses different foods and different baskets. He also feeds 1000 fewer men. Beyond that, in 8:19-20, Jesus makes reference to both miracles. So, this is obviously not an embellishment or a scribal error. To think so is to confirm what Jerry Clower said about such scholars: “Some people are educated beyond their intelligence.”
But, this still leaves an important question: why did Mark record this miracle, especially because it is so similar to the feeding of the 5000. I think there are two important reasons, but to start, let’s read our text from Mark 8:1-10. From the passage I want you to see two points that get at the reasons for this story: The Dense Disciples and the Delivered Nations.
First, from verses 1-4, see the dense disciples. Mark tells us that Jesus once again finds himself out in the wilderness with a large crowd and no food. And once again, he asks his disciples to feed them. And once again, the disciples are flummoxed by the command. How is it that the disciples who had seen the great miracles and even done some themselves could continually be found faithless? And, if Mark is writing his Gospel to Gentiles scattered throughout Rome, convincing them of the importance of Jesus’s ministry and the authority of his Apostles, why would he record such a show of stupidity on the part of the leaders of the church? I think there are two reasons. First, these dense disciples show us that the Gospel is not about us. Now, certainly, we like to make it about us. We will read each story found in the Gospel and try to get some life lesson out of it. We might say, for example, that the lesson of the story of the paralyzed man who was lowered from the roof is that it is important to have faithful friends. Sure, that’s important, but that’s not the point of the story. The point is that Jesus is the Messiah who fulfills the promise of Isaiah 35 where the lame will leap for joy at the coming of the Lord. You see, the Gospel is not about you! It’s also not about you when it comes to accepting the Gospel. Now, certainly, you must receive the Gospel by faith, but your faith is not the work that saves you. The Work that saves you is Jesus’s shed blood and righteousness, his death and his resurrection. That work saves you. Faith is the empty hand that receives the work. So, when we find these dense disciples, fumbling around, offering no solution, it is intentional because it shows us that we are small, dense people like them, but oh, praise God, Jesus is a great savior!
Second, the dense disciples are proof of the Gospel’s claims. The Gospels are very different from other writings of their times. Writings about the great men of the first century minimized their failures and amplified their successes. But, not so with the Gospels. Keep in mind that the Gospel of Mark was circulating in the Roman world at the same time that the apostles were preaching and planting churches. In our small minds, we might think that they could use some positive propaganda, a few books floating around that elevated them in the eyes of society. But, Mark does the opposite. He tells the truth: the good, the bad, and the ugly truth. This should give us confidence that what we read in this Gospel is true and trustworthy, because not even the disciples can hide from the truth of it.
With that, let’s consider my second point: the deliverance of the nations. The other reason we have this story of the feeding of the 4000 is because it answers an important, lingering question from Chapter 7. Remember the encounter Jesus had with the Syrophoenician woman, where Jesus compared her to a dog who ate the crumbs from the children’s food. Even though Jesus marveled at her faith and healed her daughter, that analogy still haunts us. Are the Gentiles left to receive the crumbs of the Jews? Are the Gentiles going to be second class citizens in the kingdom of Heaven? The feeding of the 4000 is the answer to that. This miracle takes place, not in Capernaum or Jerusalem, but in the region of the Decapolis, which was a majority Gentile region. Beyond that, there are several clues in the story that tell us that this miracle was for the Gentiles. First, In verse 3, Jesus uses a phrase, “far away” to refer to where the people are from. This was a common idiom used to refer to the Gentile lands. It might be like us, today, saying, “He came from Timbuctoo.” Second, the food is different. In verse 7 it says that they had “small fish”. This term is a reference to a small fish, like a sardine, that the Gentiles would have eaten. Third, the baskets are different. In the feeding of the 5000, the baskets referred to were small day packs that Jews used, but these baskets are large storage baskets used for hauling on a wagon.
There is also a literary difference that is beautifully important. Even the numbers that Mark uses are Gentile in nature. Remember, in the feeding of 5000, the number of baskets was important to the needy disciples. There were twelve baskets for twelve hungry disciples. But here, there are seven large baskets. The number seven is significant in Scripture for two reasons. For one, it signifies completeness. In Genesis 10, there are seventy nations that make up the entirety of the world’s genealogy. Those nations were scattered and disowned by God in Genesis 11, at the tower of Babel. But, the hope of the OT (as we saw earlier from Psalm 67), is that the Lord would one day bring all nations to worship him. In some sense, the kingdom of God would remain incomplete until the Gentiles were brought into the kingdom. So, the number seven points to the completeness of the kingdom of God, as Jesus brings the blessings of the kingdom to the Gentiles. So, in Revelation we read of seven churches made up of Jews and Gentiles, showing us the completeness of God’s kingdom.
Brothers and sisters, the Gospel is not about us, but it is for us. The Gospel reveals a gracious savior who extends the blessings of the kingdom of God to the ends of the earth by feeding men from every nation and leaving them with complete abundance.
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