Rest with the Lord Jesus is absolutely
critical to Christian life. I don't know how you do it in
your lives, but one of the things that's absolutely essential is
that you find time, and the Lord, I pray, will give you time for
you to go and be with Him. to walk with him in the garden
alone and to rejoice in just the warmth of his fellowship. I know there are seasons in our
lives when it seems that the dizziness of the world and just
the hardness of our own heart and just the wickedness of sin
and unbelief that just plagues us all the time in our flesh.
It's just such a It's such a trial living in this out of the flesh.
But there are times where the Lord Jesus comes and gathers
his people to himself and takes you to a place where there is
just rest and there is peace in the midst of trials. And so
in the midst of all the busyness of this ministry and when you
think of what was lay before the apostles and the Lord Jesus,
they have this huge nation Israel with all of its impressive history
and all of its amazing religious institutions and multitudes flocking
to the Lord Jesus. And so often we see that He goes
away by Himself to a secluded place to be with His Father and
He takes His disciples away And part of the rest of God's people
is to know that our Lord sits on a throne in heaven. Our Lord
has determined the end from the beginning. For our Lord, there
is nothing that surprises Him, nothing that takes Him unawares.
And it's just so important that we actually come back again and
again and again to the character of our God the fact that he is
absolutely sovereign. And one of the wonderful things
about this extraordinary miracle is that the Lord Jesus, in the
midst of all this busyness, seeks some time of solitude with his
disciples. But even that solitude is disturbed
because the crowds, the multitudes, follow him, and they follow him,
see him going to this place, and they come. They come from
many cities, and they follow him from all these villages of
Galilee, of northern Galilee, and they come. And then there's
another remarkable opportunity for the Lord to display His character. The purpose of Him revealing
Himself is to display the character of God. Read Romans 9, the purpose
of this creation is that God will display the fullness of
His character, the fullness of His character to His children
who believe. And if you ask why are things
like they are in the world or why are things like they are
in my life, there is one big answer we need to get right all
the time. It's that God has ordained things
as they are because He's in the business of displaying the fullness
of His glory to the objects of His love. The fullness of His
glory to those who will be the objects of His wrath. That's
the reason for things being the way they are. God is in the business
of displaying His character. And Satan in the garden attacked
the very character of God. We cannot understand the Gospel,
we cannot understand the Scriptures, unless we see supernatural things,
unless we see what's going on around us through the eyes of
faith. The character of God was attacked
by Satan in the garden. And we have drunk. Satan's wine in our Adam flesh. The character of God in his word
was attacked as Satan said, did God really say? And in our hearts,
in our Adam flesh, we say, did God really say? Did God really
say? The character of God was attacked
by Satan in the garden. And we drank that wine of Satan's
giving. And one of the things that was
attacked was that Satan caused Eve to believe that God, who
had been so bountifully good to her, was withholding some
good. There was a tree there, that
if you actually go and eat the fruit of that tree, you will
have something that God is withholding from you. It was an attack on
the compassion and the goodness of God. And it was an attack
on the deity of God and his right to be judged. You will not die,
says Satan. And such is the nature of our
Adam flesh, and we see it in the lives of these apostles in
this multitude before us, that again and again and again, unless
God opens our eyes to cause us to see the things of our life
through the eyes of faith, through the supernatural spiritual eyes,
we are blind. We are blind and dead to who
God is and what He is doing. And we are blind and dead to
His character. And so we have a wonderful depiction
in this parable of the character of God. And the first thing that
happens as the Lord Jesus sees this multitude is that He was
moved, His whole being was moved with compassion. And it's one
of the things that I think is so easy for us to misunderstand
in our Adam flesh, is to misunderstand the compassion of God. We must,
according to God's word, see God as a God who is compassion,
who loves compassion. Micah 7.18 says, Who is a God
like you who pardons iniquity, who passes over the rebellious
act of the remnant of his position? He does not retain his anger
forever, but he delights in mercy. Exodus 34, when Moses asked to
see the glory of God, the Lord passed in front of him and he
proclaimed, The Lord, the Lord God, compassionate and gracious,
slow to anger, abounding in loving kindness and truth. I don't know
what your Adam Flesh is like, but one of the things that is
so quick in my Adam Flesh is for me not to see that God is
compassionate toward me. When he says he's working all
the things for my good, it's a compassionate goodness, it's
a loving kindness, it's an infinite love, it's an immutable love,
it's a love that's tied up in who the Lord Jesus is and what
he is doing. for his people in this world.
He can only ever do good and loving things. His people are
all of his delight, says Psalm 16. But his compassion for these
people is a compassion that was actually driven by the fact that
these were the people, the covenant people of God, the people who
had been the descendants of Abraham, had witnessed miracle after miracle,
they had witnessed God's goodness for thousands and thousands of
years. They are the people who were
at Mount Sinai after being miraculously rescued out of Egypt, and these
people are the people who said, God, you tell us what to do,
and we'll promise to obey you. And these people had seen God
act true to His character again and again, act true to His character
in judgement, act true to His character in loving faithfulness
to His eternal covenant. without a shepherd, that wandered
into a wilderness place to seek the Lord Jesus, and he'd taken
them away from the religious world. And Israel at this time
probably had more religious teachers than at any time in its history. They had 7,000 Pharisees, all
of whom would have claimed to have been able to teach God. They had the teachers of the
law, scribes, Levites, priests, and they had many who loved to
be called Rabbi. They had Bible colleges galore. Gamaliel and Nicodemus. If you'd
said to Gamaliel and Nicodemus that these are sheep without
a shepherd, they would have been absolutely horrified. They would
have said, we are training shepherds all the time. We are shepherds
and we are training hundreds and hundreds of shepherds. We're
not only training shepherds, but we're sending shepherds overseas
as missionaries. And we're getting these shepherds
to do all of these things. We're getting them to be so zealous
for God's law that they're tithing, they're minting, they're coming.
We're getting them to tie God's words onto their foreheads and
their forehands. These guys know their Bible so
well they can quote Genesis to Deuteronomy without any problem
and a whole bunch of other Psalms. We are teachers. We are teachers. The Lord Jesus said, and just
read Matthew 23 again. It's a shocking, shocking indictment. of the religious world that these
people were in. They were zealous. In fact, Paul
said that under that system of legalistic righteousness, he
was blameless. He was a product of their Bible
colleges in Jerusalem. And look what happened to him.
Jesus makes a summary statement of where they were at. They were
mistaken. not knowing the scriptures nor
the power of God. And so these people according
to Ezekiel 34 were actually feeding themselves, feeding their self-righteousness. and they had taken the very things
that God had given them, their amazing history, their amazing
sacrificial system. Each day at the temple they went
and they cut the throat of a lamb and its blood poured out and
they said, they were saying to everyone, this is what I deserve
and that lamb is taking my place before God. They did it in the
morning, they did it in the evening. again and again, and yet the
very things that God had given them to remind them of who they
were and what they had done had turned into something that they
had used for their self-righteousness. And rather than feeding the people
of God with the Gospel of the Lord Jesus, they were feeding
themselves. They were covetous, these false
teachers. But the Lord Jesus shows something
else in this passage. If you have a look at the end
of verse 34, His movement of compassion that filled the Lord
Jesus here leads Him to do the one thing that is most needful
for God's people, and that is for them to be taught. And so He began to teach them. He began to teach them many things. His compassion leads to teaching. It is so sad so often in religious
life that especially the most serious teaching is left to a
secondary place. We all know it's much easier
to do good and do right things and to be seen doing these right
things than it is to teach the truth. The truth, God's truth,
which cuts to the heart. God's truth, which puts man in
his right and proper place. God's truth, which says that
your heart and mine, according to Jeremiah 79, is deceitfully
wicked and beyond cure. And who can understand it? We
spend so much time trying to work out and understand what's
happening in human nature. Supernaturally is the only way
to understand it through the eyes of faith. Our hearts are
deceitfully wicked. And we also must remember that
the Lord Jesus shows by example here that he never did good deeds
that were not accompanied by teaching. And that teaching was
often offensive, often deliberately offensive to the people who were
listening to it. And it's always a temptation,
a temptation with all of us to put the sword of the Spirit away,
to sheathe it, to make sure that people don't feel the point or
the edge of it, to soften God's Word. how often we have fellowship
with people, it seems, and we have warm, it seems, Christian
fellowship. And we can gather with them and
enjoy their company and enjoy the social activities that go
along with it, enjoy the warmth of being in fellowship with people.
And then you start talking serious things about who the Lord Jesus
really is. that He really is God, that He
really does love His people, that He really did come to die
for His people because of covenant engagements that He'd made in
all eternity. That He really did, as John 6
says, say that only those that the Father causes to come to
the Lord Jesus will ever come to him and be saved. He didn't
come into this world trying to do anything. He came into this
world as God and he really did achieve it. And you can do nothing
to save yourself. It must be God's grace. It must
be God's activity. And your works and your worth
and your will are not part of it. All of a sudden, when we
actually proclaim what John 6 proclaims, for example, we find that what
seemed like fellowship all of a sudden turns into something
remarkably different from that. So it is a great temptation,
isn't it? A temptation for all of us. for me particularly, to
actually want to have fellowship and then want to hide the real
Jesus from that fellowship. He never does that. Our Saviour
is an honest teacher. He's a faithful teacher. And
he taught these people The same thing that he taught all of the
others. He always taught in parables. It says that he taught nothing
without teaching in parables. In Mark 1.15 we have the summary
of his ministry, of his Gospel proclamation. The time is fulfilled. God's time has come. God who
reigns over all this universe has designated that this is the
time of the coming of the Lord Jesus. This is the time of the
end of nation Israel. This is the time that was promised
in all of those prophets. You can wrap up all of the Old
Testament and put it together in the life of the Lord Jesus
and you have to say Amen and finish to every one of those
promises. The Kingdom of God is at hand. God's King is here. The King's
dominion is here. It always has been here, but
here it is, manifest in flesh in a way that has never been
there before. And for Nation Israel and for
the rest of the world, the one right and proper response to
that manifestation of who the Lord Jesus is, is that we repent. We take our rightful place in
the dust, because that's where we belong. We take our rightful
place as sinners and worms before God. And we trust something outside
of ourselves. We believe in the good news,
we believe in who the Lord Jesus is. And this is the constant
command, the constant plea to nation Israel. And it was evident
from all of the scriptures, and it's evident from what we see
around us today, that repentance and faith in the Lord Jesus is
a gift from God. It cannot be the activity of
men, because men are dead. And men have no life in them.
They have no spiritual life. They have no eyes to see. They
have no ears to hear. They have no hands to grasp. They have absolutely nothing.
They must look outside of themselves. They must look beyond themselves.
They must look to the Lord Jesus to get something from God that
they cannot muster within themselves. And so this is the message that
he taught these people that day on that hill. He taught them
in parables. The parables are just reflections
of who he is and his saving operations in this world. He took them to
this place to teach them. And he came to them as their
chief shepherd, their great shepherd. He came to them as their one
shepherd. He came to them as a good shepherd. the one who
the Father calls My Shepherd in Zechariah. He is the true
Shepherd of Nation Israel and He reveals what shepherding is.
Shepherding is teaching. Shepherding is being moved with
compassion for the people around you. Moved with compassion for
God's people but moved with compassion for all people around you. That's
just the nature of what it is. to be like our Saviour in this
world. And so the disciples again, as
the Lord Jesus continues their training, are met again with
the failure of seeing this world through anything other than the
eyes of faith. The disciples looked out and
verse 35, now the day was far spent, it was evening time. The
disciples came to him and said, this is a deserted place and
the hour is already late. The Lord Jesus didn't know that.
Then they say words of extraordinary unbelief. There is this flock
that's gathered. to hear this multitude that's
gathered to hear the Lord Jesus. And the disciples say, send them
away, that they may go into the surrounding country and villages
and buy themselves bread, for they have nothing to eat. They were saying, as Israel of
old said, can God prepare a table in the wilderness? Can God feed
us out in a desert? And faith, their lack of faith,
is just revealed yet again. Just like our lack of faith is
revealed again and again, our immediate response to every situation
is to act out our flesh, to put our brains into gear. But faith
believes without evidence. In fact, faith believes contrary
to evidence, according to Romans 4. Just think of Abraham's life.
and that faith believes that the things which are impossible
with men are possible with God. So these disciples just reflect
us again, don't they? Rather than trusting the Lord
to do which was the wisest and best, they presumed that they
knew what was wisest and best, and they judged by what they
could see. They leaned on their own understanding
rather than trusting in the Lord. But we have another example of
the Lord revealing his character. He's a remarkably patient and
good shepherd with his wandering, straying sheep. And he challenges
them, doesn't he? And he says, In verse 37, you
give them something to eat. Again, he just exposes the hopeless
inadequacy of human effort and human merit. God must provide. The Lord Jesus then shows the
fact that he does operate in this world through the means
of what's provided in the hands of his people. He actually says,
you go and find what you can. He could have created all this
bread and all this fish out of absolutely nothing. But he says
to them in verse 38, how many loaves do you have? Go and see. And they went and we know that
it was a little boy, maybe a little boy like Daniel, who comes along
and says, I have five loaves. They're not big loaves of bread,
they're five little cakes and two fish. They might not have
been big fish like your dad catches, they might have been just little
fish, maybe just like sardines, five and two fish. And then the
Lord Jesus shows how He is a God of order, not a God of chaos.
He actually orders these 5,000 men and the multitude of women
and children beside, He orders them to sit down in ranks. Mark mentions that they actually
sat on the green grass. It was springtime in Palestine. And the picture is that this
is a people who are sat down in ordered ranks, just like a
well laid out garden it was. There are several reasons for
this, aren't there? The first one, of course, is
that God is a God who has order in everything He does. It looks
like chaos from our point of view, but there is order in everything
that God does. The other thing is that by placing
them all in ranks, none shall miss out. The little ones will
be fed, the women will be fed, the men will be fed and they
will be fed in due order. I think the other great thing
about this miracle is that it means then that everyone is seated
except for 13 men. The picture is amazing that you
have 13 men who stand and 5000 men and I don't know how many
women and children sitting. And one man is just distributing
bread. He gives thanks to God. He wants
these people to see that this is not just a miracle working
man. This is a man who has come commissioned
by God, sent by God. He looks up to heaven and he
blesses the food and he commands them all to sit down and then
they are fed. 13, 12 men distributing basketfuls of
fish. They come back to the Lord Jesus
and there's another basketful. They come back again and there's
another basketful and another basketful. It's the most extraordinary
thing. I just don't know how it all
worked out. But if you imagine that there
were 10,000 people there, assume there were 10,000 people there,
and it takes one second to feed each person, then it ends up
taking 2 hours and 45 minutes to feed them all. Now maybe they
worked out some way of doing this extraordinarily quickly
and people were fed in half a second or a quarter of a second. But
unlike the other miracles, this is a miracle that was just there
for these people to see plainly that the Lord Jesus in all of
his miracles is expressing his deity. He is saying that I am
God, your creator. He wills something and it's done. He doesn't try and do things.
He commands something and it's performed. He's the God who creates
light out of darkness. He's the God who makes order
out of chaos. He's the God who brings strength
out of weakness. He's the God who turns sorrow
into laughter, weeping into singing, mourning into gladness of heart.
He brings food out of nothing. To show who He really is, He's
just again revealing Himself. Also, I think there's something
important in the fact that in His order, God wants to honour
these apostles. that as in the preaching of the
Gospel, God gives his food to his appointed apostles, and his
appointed apostles then feed the others. He wants to honour
the office of these men, that they are God's servants, they
are God's messengers, and if God is going to feed people,
he's going to feed them through the apostles, through his word
that comes to us through the apostles. And then in verse 42
and 43, we have just a remarkable evidence of the provision of
the Lord. For those who come and feed on
the Lord Jesus, there's always sufficient. For those who come
and feed on the Lord Jesus, not only is there sufficient for
now, but there's enough left over for tomorrow. It's plenteous
redemption with the Lord Jesus. His righteousness is enough for
all of our souls. His forgiveness is infinite forgiveness. He's loved us with a love that
passes understanding, with an everlasting love. He loves His
children. He gives life and it's abundant
life, life that goes on forever and ever and ever and never stops.
His grace is super abounding grace. As John says at the opening
of his Gospel, we have all received, we didn't make it, we just received
from His fullness, grace upon grace, overflowing grace. We come to a fountain of grace. As Robert Hawker says, if from
a few loaves and fishes the Lord Christ made such a supply for
so great a multitude and left such an oversupply, think what
infinite resources are with our God, for every occasion, for
both the spiritual and temporal necessities of His chosen. But
my God, says the Apostle, shall supply all your need according
to his riches in glory by Christ Jesus. So it's a wonderful picture
of the Gospel, isn't it? That mankind is lost and wandering
in a wilderness in this world. All of the sons of Adam are perishing
souls, lost, helpless, starving and on the verge of eternal ruin
without the Gospel of the Lord Jesus. There is but a breath
between them, an everlasting ruin. And the only hope, the
only hope of salvation is the Gospel of the Lord Jesus. And
that which seems so insignificant to satisfy needs in this world. A declaration of the Lord Jesus
and Him crucified, a declaration of His deity, a declaration of
His successful, sufficient, satisfactory substitutionary death. That gospel,
that declaration of Him seems insignificant, as if it's a few
crumbs you can sweep away. But in fact God says it's power,
it's power to feed. And it comes through men. God doesn't put men out of the
picture. He's given us the responsibility,
this treasure in jars of clay, in pretty rotten looking clay
it is most of the time. In fact it is all of the time.
It's just sometimes to us we think it's pretty shiny, but
it's not. It's jars of clay, isn't it? But we have a treasure. We have an amazing treasure in
jars of clay, a treasure which is life, eternal life for people,
a treasure which honours our God, a treasure which he'll take
and use and supply abundantly, super abundantly. And so it's
a wonderful picture of who God is, a wonderful picture of the
way the Lord feeds his people. But there is a sad postscript
to this story, and we don't have long to dwell on it today, but
this same multitude who had gathered to the Lord Jesus in this wilderness
and then saw amazing miracles that same evening, and saw the
Lord Jesus almost disappear from their sight and be on the other
side of the Lake of Galilee, This multitude, among others,
around the towns of Capernaum, came to the Lord Jesus in John
Chapter 6. And again he says that they came
because they'd seen fleshly things and they were looking for more
fleshly things. This is a man who does remarkable
things. and we want to see more remarkable
things. So these people who were the
objects of Jesus' compassion, these people who were witnesses
to a great miracle, a creative miracle, these people who were
witnesses and reminded as they were as Jews that now they had
someone among them who was doing the things that Moses did. These
people, John says, the Lord Jesus says, are lost people. The Lord Jesus takes this multitude
the next day and proclaims who He really is. He proclaims to
them in John 6, the eternal covenant. All that the Father gives me,
John 6.37, will come to me, and the one who comes to me I will
in no way, by no means cast out. This is the will of the Father
who has sent me, that all that He has given me, of all those,
I should lose nothing, but raise it up at the last day. He proclaims
the deadness of men. No one, in verse 44, can come
to me unless the Father who sent me draws him. He proclaims particular redemption. He proclaims that He came for
them and them alone, and I will raise Him up at the last day. He proclaims effectual redemption,
that he will lose none of them. Absolutely not one will be lost. He's proclaiming the fact that
he came with a purpose, with God's purpose, and that purpose
is achieved by his life. He didn't come and try to do
something. He didn't come and create a possibility
if men will do something pretty pleased to make his death a success. He proclaims who he is as God. He proclaims who he is as God's
sacrifice. And he comes with words of life
in John 6.63. It is the Spirit who gives life. Without spiritual life, all men
are dead and all men remain dead. And all we can expect from them
is deadness, no matter how much their religion is. There is deadness
unless the spirit gives life. The flesh profits nothing. The flesh profits nothing. Israel's
religion was about the flesh. God says it profits nothing.
They sought their rewards, these religious people. They sought
their rewards in the praises of men and Jesus says they have
received their reward in full. They sought the praises of men
and they got the praises of men. End of story. The flesh profits
nothing. The words that I speak to you
are spirit and they are life. And then there is the response.
of this twelve that are left, a multitude was there and Jesus
preached Jesus Christ to them. And a multitude became twelve. Wonderful response from our great
friend Peter in verse 68. Jesus says to them, do you also
want to go away? So offensive is the gospel that
Jesus says after they've all gone, do you want to go as well? And Peter, Simon Peter answered
him, Lord, to whom shall we go? You have the words of eternal
life. You have the words of eternal
life. God has given us the words of
eternal life through His Apostle and through His Spirit for us
to proclaim to this world. It might seem feeble and it might
seem pathetic. But where else can we go? Where
else can you go? Today, tomorrow, the rest of
this week. Where else do you go? There's
nowhere else to go. There is nowhere else to go.
We go to Jesus. Let's pray.