Misinterpreting the Miracles of Jesus

The Feeding of the Five Thousand in Luke 9

Welcome back to Coffee with a Calvinist. My name is Keith Foskey and I am a Calvinist. This is a daily Bible study to accompany your morning coffee. Today we're going to be in Luke chapter nine. So if you want to open up your Bible and turn to Luke chapter nine.

As I've been saying each day, and if you've been keeping up, you know that I mentioned that these chapters in Luke are pretty long. And so we can't focus on everything that happens in the chapter. But my encouragement to you is read the whole chapter.

Think about what it says, write down questions that you may have. And I would encourage you if you do have questions, put a question in the comments below and I'll try to answer it as best as I can. And if it's a question that requires maybe a little bit more digging or a little bit more than I can respond in just a simple comment, perhaps I'll do a special edition based on your questions.

So please remember that I'm here to help and I want to help you grow in your Bible study. But the part that I want to focus on today in Luke chapter nine is verses 10 through 17. This is the feeding of the 5 ,000.

This is an event that is one of the few events that is recorded in all four of the Gospels. Matthew, Mark, Luke and John all record the feeding of the 5 ,000, which tells us a few things. One, it tells us that it was an important event in the life of Christ, that it would be mentioned in all four Gospels, and that it was recognized universally as something that Jesus did that made a point about who he was.

And that's what I want to say today. We're going to read the text and I'm going to make a few comments and then I want to talk about how one of the worst interpretations I've ever heard about this text.

Because this is a text that some have tried to use to totally turn the Jesus narrative on its head. So let's read. On their return, the apostles told him all that they had done. And he took them and withdrew apart to a town called Bethsaida.

When the crowds learned it, they followed him and he welcomed them and spoke to them of the kingdom of God and cured those who had need of healing. Now the day began to wear away and the 12 came and said to him, send the crowd away to go into the surrounding villages and countryside to find lodging and get provisions for we are here in a desolate place.

But he said to them, you give them something to eat. They said, we have no more than five loaves and two fish, unless we're to go and buy food for all these people. For there were about 5 ,000 men. And he said to his disciples, have them sit down in groups of about 50 each.

And they did so and had them all sit down. And taking the five loaves and the two fish, he looked up to heaven and said a blessing over them. Then he broke the loaves and gave them to the disciples to set before the crowd and they all ate and were satisfied.

And what was left over was picked up 12 baskets of broken pieces. So that's the narrative as it comes to us in the gospel of Luke. And we see basically the same narrative in the other gospels. There's a few added details that we see in the other gospels, but they all basically tell the same story.

And what's interesting about this story is that this is not the only time that this happens. Mark records for us that there was another time when he fed about 4 ,000 people. And that's not a second retelling of this same narrative with just a different number.

Mark tells us that he did it twice, that there was definitely at least two times that Jesus fed large groups of people and this affected his following. The people that were around followed Jesus because he was able to feed them essentially out of nothing.

And it demonstrated his divinity. But also demonstrated, we see over in John's gospel, a willingness of some people to follow him simply for what he could give them rather than following him because he was son of God, or because he was righteous, because he was the Messiah.

Some people followed him simply because their bellies were full. That's what the text tells us. But again, this narrative is so important. It's in every one of the gospels. Jesus did this more than once, certainly at least twice.

Could have done it more than that. Of course, John tells us that not everything Jesus ever did is written in the gospels for us because there's so much that happened in his ministerial life that it couldn't all be written down.

This might be one example of something that he did several times. And what does it tell us about him? Well, it tells us about his divinity. It tells us that Jesus Christ can take something, or rather can make something out of nothing.

This is a very important aspect of what it means to be God. When we go back to Genesis 1, we see the Bible say that God spoke the world into existence. That he spoke every day. It says, and God said, let there be, and there was.

That references the divinity of God. This is an example of Christ. Somebody says, well, he's not making something out of nothing. He's got five loaves and two fish. He's multiplying. Yes, but to multiply, he's having to multiply out of nothing.

None of us could take two fish and make four fish. None of us could take two fish and make enough fish for 5 ,000 people because there has to be other material for us to make something. We don't have the power to make a fish anyway.

We don't have that ability, but Christ can make fish and bread essentially multiply out of nothing, which is a statement of his divinity. Now I mentioned earlier, I've heard a really bad interpretation of this, and it was from a textual scholar, John Dominic Crossom.

John Dominic Crossom, he is a textual scholar. He's what we might refer to as a higher critical scholar, meaning that he doesn't just investigate the text for things like textual variation and things like that, but that's what's sometimes called lower criticism or textual criticism.

Higher criticism looks to the question of whether or not the things that happen in the Bible are actually true. There's a group called the Jesus Seminar, and John Dominic Crossom is a part of that. They get together and they discuss the historicity of the statements made in the Bible.

Much of the New Testament, they would say, just didn't happen. They don't take it as the truth. Obviously, they would not believe the Bible is the inerrant, infallible word of God. They would dismiss that out of hand.

I remember him teaching. I think he was doing a debate with Dr. James White, and the subject of feeding the 5 ,000 came up, and he said, this is not true. This is a parable. And the parable, according to Crossom, was that Jesus didn't make fish and bread out of nothing.

He didn't create and multiply the fish and the bread, but what he did was he took people who had brought food, who had, and he convinced those who had to share with those who didn't have. And he has a very convincing narrative that he goes along with us.

In a sense, if you interpret it that way, it becomes a great communist miracle where we see a group of people who have, and we have a group of people who have not. And so the goal of Jesus is not to truly multiply bread and fish, but to multiply compassion in the hearts of the haves to share with those who have not.

And again, it sounds great. It sounds, oh, what a wonderful thing that people who have would share with people who don't have. But the problem is that's not what the text says. The text doesn't say anything like that.

The text does not give that as an option of interpretation. You have to read that into the text. That is a textbook definition of eisegesis. Remember the difference between exegesis and eisegesis. Exegesis is to read out of the text what's there.

Eisegesis is to read into the text something that is not there. And John Dominic Crossan reads into this text the concept of sharing, which is not mentioned. The concept of people who have sharing with people who have not, that's not mentioned.

And essentially he robs Jesus in this picture of his divinity because he's saying this isn't something that Jesus did because he was divine. This is something that Jesus did because he was essentially a wise sage.

He was a man of integrity and leadership, and he was convincing the haves to share with the have nots. Again, I repudiate such an interpretation. I would say that's absolutely not in any way, shape, or form in line with what the text says.

And it's a good example of misinterpreting the text because you do not believe in the supernatural. The people who come at the Bible with an anti-supernaturalistic presupposition begin with the assumption that there just can't be miracles because they don't believe in miracles, and therefore miracles cannot happen.

And if you come at this with that presupposition, then you're not going to really see what the text is saying. This text is a miracle. Jesus performed a miracle. He was a miracle worker. Why? Because he was God in the flesh.

He was the God-man. And this is one of the many texts that reminds us. In fact, if you go further down in Luke chapter 9, we get to the transfiguration, which is a picture of Jesus's divinity where he, for a moment in time, the glory of Christ shone for his inner group of disciples to see.

We should never question or never doubt for a second the divinity of the Lord Jesus Christ, which is demonstrated in his miracles and one of the greatest being the feeding of 5 ,000 people with five loaves and two fish.

So I hope this was helpful to you. I hope this has been an encouragement to you. I hope these daily Bible studies continue to be a blessing to you. Please, if you would, take a moment to like, comment, share, and subscribe to our page if you haven't done that already.

It helps us to reach a wider audience. Again, thank you for watching Coffee with a Calvinist. My name is Keith Foskey, and I am a Calvinist. May God bless you.