Christ’s Banquet for Believers

This sermon is from Grace Fellowship Church in Edmonton, Alberta, Canada. To access other sermons or to learn more about us, please visit our website at graceedmonton .ca.

Herod’s Banquet Versus Christ’s Banquet

So we're moving on to something that's a lot more positive than last week's passage. If you were here last week, I know there were a few of you that weren't. We had a very difficult text, at least I had a very difficult text to preach.

And the reason for that was it was just a dire passage of Scripture, probably one of the most troubling sections of narrative in the whole New Testament. We looked at the beheading of John the Baptist.

And if you recall, if you were here last week, that last week's text was just filled to the very top with dysfunction. It was filled to the very top with immorality and perversion and murder and darkness.

And if you were to summarize all that we looked at last week in just a couple of quick sentences, I might rightly call it this, Herod's devilish banquet. That's what we looked at yesterday. Just the total sin or the total depravity of sin.

The very ends of human wickedness. And so as I came to our study today, our text for today, frankly, my soul was longing for something that would pick us up from last week. Something that would lift our spirit.

Something that we could look at besides sin and death and dysfunction in the world. And I was so glad that God in His good providence has actually given us something that's almost the exact opposite of what we looked at last week.

Last week, He took us to the very bottom of the barrel. This week, He takes us to the very heavenlies with God. Last week, God gave us man. He gave us the sinfulness of man, the wretchedness of man. And this week, God gives us the goodness of God, the sweetness of Christ, the very beauty and excellency of the Lord Jesus.

And as we turn to our text today, what we're going to do is we're going to find the disciples. They're coming back from a mission. They had been sent out two by two, if you remember. They had performed miracles.

They had cast out demons. They had preached a message of repentance, and they were coming back. And Christ is going to take them to a secluded place on the northern shore of the Sea of Galilee. And as we read our text, we're going to find, as we've heard already, that He was met with a large crowd.

But He's going to have, rather than what Herod would do to the crowds or what Herod did to John the Baptist, He's going to have compassion on the crowds. He's going to teach them. He's going to feed them.

And what we're going to see is this. It's something that's just refreshingly opposite from last week's passage. And this is the big idea of the text. In stark contrast to Herod's evil banquet, here we're going to see a righteous banquet hosted by Christ.

And we're going to see that all of the blessings that Christ himself gives to those who come to his banquet. We're going to see Christ's goodwill as God and Savior. And that He seeks to give. It is His will to give every good and perfect thing to those who love Him.

To those whom He loves. Every good thing for life and godliness. So last week we got Herod's devilish banquet. This week we get Christ's perfect, good, righteous banquet. And I'm so excited to bring this text to you.

I am just overjoyed that we get to look at something that is excellent and good. As compared to the difficulties of last week. And so we're going to begin. Come with me now. And begin at verse 30. Mark chapter 6 and verse 30.

We read this. We're going to read the first three verses. The apostles returned to Jesus and told Him all that they had done and taught. And He said to them, Come away by yourselves to a desolate place and rest, rest a while.

For many were coming and going and they had no leisure even to eat. And they went away in the boat to a desolate place by themselves. So the disciples had just returned from this mission. Preaching two by two the message of repentance.

Healing the sick. Performing miracles. We read about Christ's send off of these disciples in verses 7 through 13 of the same chapter. Mark chapter 6. And what we see is that the disciples were met with great success.

After all, it was the news of this ministry that had made it back to John the Baptist. And what had pricked his conscience when it reminded him of John the Baptist. It was a tremendous success as far as ministry successes go.

And in verse 30, when the disciples returned, they had much to tell Christ as they rejoiced in all that they had accomplished. And we see something very similar to this in Luke chapter 10 and verse 17.

A similar response that when Christ sent out the 72 disciples. Again, they came back. When they returned, they were filled with joy. They said, even the demons are subjected to us. And you'll remember that Christ said, Don't rejoice that even the demons are subject to you.

Rejoice that your names are written in heaven. They were overcome. And isn't this often the case when we go out, we really, when we give all of ourselves to some service of the Lord. That's why I love hanging out with Steve when he comes back after camp.

Because the joy is contagious. Or this year we have a sister and some brothers who have just come back rejoicing. The people that live with him would probably know best. Just the joy that comes with giving all of your heart in service to Christ.

And that's exactly what these disciples do. They come back rejoicing. Their souls satisfied. And in verse 31, Christ recognizes something that perhaps the disciples did not recognize. They were not aware of.

It's good to serve God wholeheartedly and to rejoice in the fruits of the service. But it's also good and necessary, Christ shows us, to get away from the crowds. To go to a solitary place. To rest. To be alone with Christ.

As one commentator puts it, The greater the demands, the greater the need to be alone with Jesus. To be accountable to him alone. The first prerequisite of being a disciple of Christ is being with Christ.

Being with Jesus. So Christ insists on this. And the language that Mark uses, you know I love language. At the end of verse 31, implies that the disciples are to go, he says, To a desolate place. To an empty place.

To an unpopulated place. Like the desert. Or the wilderness. Or if you live in Alberta, maybe to the mountains. It's to get away. Get away from the city. Get away from the crowds. And it's here that they're to settle down and take a breath.

And again, Mark uses a word for rest that is just packed with meaning. It's to breathe. It's to be refreshed. It's to be reinvigorated. Paul uses that same Greek word for rest in Philemon verse 20. When he says to Philemon, he says, Yes, brother, I want some benefit from you in the Lord.

Refresh my heart in Christ. That's the kind of rest that Christ wants to give his disciples. Refreshment in the heart. In Christ. And so as the people scurry about them, coming and going, making demands of Christ and his disciples, Jesus actually takes them away.

That their hearts might be refreshed in him. And so they get in a boat. And we're not told where exactly they went. If we look in the Gospel of Luke chapter 9 and verse 10, we're told that they made their way to Bethsaida.

It's a little fishing village that's located on the northern shore of the Sea of Galilee. If you're looking in the map in the back of your Bible, it's 10 kilometers east of Capernaum, where Christ called his home base.

And there they went to rest. To be alone with the Lord Jesus Christ. Now, what I intend to do is I'm going to take little bits and pieces from the text. We're going to expound it. And then I'm going to show you some realities.

And so I'm going to show you the first two realities that we see, just from these first three verses. And as you'll see as we make our way through it, all of these truths are two-dimensional. And what I mean by this is this.

I have a six-point sermon. I'm going to work very hard to be faithful and to honor your time, as my wife looks concerned in the back of the room. But what we're going to do is it's going to be two-dimensional.

There is an earthly dimension to what we see Christ doing here. And there's an eternal dimension to what Christ sees here. So I'm first going to point our attention at an earthly dimension. The first truth at the outset of this banquet that Christ is throwing is this.

That Christ gives us earthly rest. Christ gives us earthly rest. From the very beginning of creation, God designed that his people would learn to rest, to be still, to know God, and to come to him alone.

In Genesis 1 and 2, we read that God spent six days creating the world. What that means is everything out of absolutely nothing. And he did all of this by the word of his power. And then in chapter 2, after those six days were over, on the seventh day, God rested, we're told, from all of his works.

He set aside the seventh day to be holy unto the Lord. Now, if you've ever read that, it begs the question, why did God rest? Did God need to rest? Did speaking suns and moons and planets and stars and oceans and animals bring God to the point of exhaustion that he had to rest?

Or was he doing something else? As we continue to see revelation unfold, what we learn is that, as God rested on the seventh day, that he made that day holy. He was creating a pattern. He was developing a pattern for his people.

And it looks forward. We don't really find it until Moses, God's interaction with Moses and the nation of Israel. But what we find, beginning in the book of Exodus, is that this seventh day of rest was to pattern, to be a pattern for the nation of Israel, a pattern of rest and of worship.

And some people today might say that the seventh day is a creation ordinance, that it applies for all time, that we are to honor the Sabbath day, Friday evening to Saturday evening, in obedience to the Ten Commandments.

But what we see is that, actually, it was a pattern that God set forward, but it was not enacted in law, truly, until Exodus chapter 31, in verses 12 and 13. And if you know anything about signs, Daryl, let me put you on the spot.

When God flooded the whole world, and then after the flood water subsided and Noah came out of the ark, God gave Noah something as a promise that he would never ever flood the earth again. Do you know what it was?

He gave him a rainbow. It was a sign of a covenant. It was the sign of the Noahic covenant. When God made a covenant with Abraham, he gave him a sign. Does anyone know what that sign was? It was the sign of circumcision.

When God made a covenant with the nation of Israel, what was the sign? The sign was the Sabbath day. And so it was a specific sign to a specific people. Exodus 31, verses 12 and 13 says this, And the Lord said to Moses, You are to speak to the people of Israel and say, Above all, you shall keep my Sabbaths.

Why?

For this is a sign between me and you, throughout your generations, that you may know that I, the Lord, sanctify you. Now, we could quickly get stuck in the weeds here if we just talked about the Sabbath.

What I'm trying to show you is this, that God has placed such emphasis on our need for rest that he even made it one of the defining covenant features or signs between him and the nation of Israel. Now, we're no longer under the Mosaic covenant.

We're under the new covenant. As such, we're not bound by strict adherence to the seventh-day Sabbath law or any other old covenant laws. We read that in passages like Ephesians 2 and verse 15, where it says that Christ has abolished the law of commandments expressed in ordinances.

Hebrews tells us that the old covenant has been made obsolete. In Romans, we read that we are no longer under law but under grace. But what we see is that God has always valued rest. And he values rest even now in the lives of his believers.

We see that by what Christ is doing with his disciples in this passage. Christ is concerned, still concerned, Sabbath or no Sabbath, that we not only serve him faithfully, but that we go to a quiet place and to be with him.

Like the disciples, we may not immediately recognize our own need, but it's there. And we need it more than we even realize, especially in the busy world in which we live. We need to be, brothers and sisters, we need to be a people who go alone to be with Christ, period.

To rest, to be still, to be away from our phones, to be away from our friends, to be away from the busyness of it all, to seek God's face for hours, to be alone with God even for days, to be alone with our Bibles open in front of us, and to drink deeply from the unfathomable depths of God's word, to walk with God as we pour his word into our souls, and then as we pour our souls out to him in prayer.

But dear friends, we know what the problem is, don't we? And that is this, that we often do not do this. That it does not describe our lives. That we would say, if we were to count, for instance, if I were to ask you, and I'm not going to ask you, but before God, if we were to count how many hours, or how many minutes, or how many seconds this week you were alone with Christ, just you and him and his word, what would that look like?

We don't have time, or we don't make time to be alone with Christ, to be refreshed by him. And so what invariably happens is that we live compromised Christian lives. Our spirit is willing, but our flesh is weak, and it's made weaker still by our insistence on living long stretches without singularly devoting time to spend with the God of the universe, our maker, our creator, in whom we have bold and confident access through his son.

I recently read a story about a man who sat under a pastor, and like we do during announcements, the pastor was describing the months of ministry that was to come, and he made this comment. He said, I'm not going to take any vacation this summer because the devil never does.

And so neither would he. The devil doesn't take a break, I'm not going to take a break. But this man that listened, that was sitting under this preaching, that was sitting under this announcement, he was really interested by the statement.

And so he went home, and he began to read his New Testament, just to see what the Gospels have to say about this attitude towards rest, about Christ's attitude towards rest. And what he found is that in Christ's three years, just three years of active ministry, there were mentioned ten distinct periods of rest and dedicated prayer.

And we know that if we were to go through the Gospels to find all the times where Christ woke up early to be alone, when he woke up, when it was still dark, to be alone, when he went to the Garden of Gethsemane, as was his practice, to be alone with God.

Ten distinct periods of rest and dedication and prayer. And this was in addition to Christ's nightly rest and the Sabbath rest. But it's funny, we can look at stories like that and be like, we would never be like that guy, nor would we ever follow anything like that guy.

But what we find is that this is also a trap that we can fall into. It's a trap that people that we admire have fallen into. People who have a deep grasp of the Gospel. People who should know better. You hear us often, we often quote about Charles Spurgeon.

You know we love Charles Spurgeon. And Steve and I, when it's just him and I, we laugh hysterically at just the giftedness and frankly the weirdness of Charles Spurgeon. And one of the things about the life of Charles Spurgeon was this.

He was a man with a tremendous work ethic. If you want to think about this, for decades, he lived and ministered 18 hours a day. He left 8 hours a day for sleep and recreation. And so during those 18 hours of the day, he would preach multiple times per week.

He ran an orphanage. He ran a pastor's college. He would read 6 books a week. He would take Sundays off so that he could preach a Sunday message. He would often not prepare his Sunday sermon until Sunday morning.

And sometimes after spending the night asking his wife, what am I to do for tomorrow's sermon? It's funny, isn't it, Steve? And this was Charles Spurgeon reading these 6 books a week and then on top of that writing 40 books over the course of his lifetime.

Well, it's not a surprise that he died very early. He died in his mid -50s. But one of the things that is almost as over top of his life is this, that on one evening, it was a Wednesday evening, he was speaking to a gathering of people in the Crystal Palace.

This is without big TV screens, without any amplification. And after preaching to this 23 ,000 people, just with his own voice, he went home and he fell asleep. And one of his biographers writes this.

He says, the exertion of preaching to such a huge audience must have been great, although C .H. Spurgeon tells us that he did not at the close feel conscious of any fatigue. But that Wednesday night, he went to bed and slept continuously until Friday morning, some 36 hours, an experience he had at no other period in his life.

All through Thursday, Mrs. Spurgeon went at intervals to look at her husband, but finding him sleeping peacefully, she wisely let him rest until nature should be satisfied. He slept for 36 hours straight because he had just been so hard on his body.

Now, we laugh at this, but this is a dangerous trap that we often fall into ourselves. We run ourselves into the ground. But unlike Spurgeon, many of us are not spending several times studying our Bibles and seeking the Lord, but we spend those hours studying the world and living amongst the people of the world and focusing on the things of this world.

But this text, brothers and sisters, is our call to return to resting in Christ. Like the disciples, do you go to be alone with Jesus? You must. You must. I think of a brother who had a wonderful strategy, a strategy that I would do well to model my life after.

He said that he would take a chunk of time, maybe for you it's a Saturday morning, from 6 a .m. to noon, and he would say, that is my appointment time with Christ. It's going to go on my calendar. It's a recurring event.

I'm going to do it every single week. And like I wouldn't cancel on heart surgery or an important visit with a specialist who's going to save my life, I'm not going to miss that time for the world. And he kept it and he said that soon that became the most important time in his week to the point that he became jealous to guard that time to be alone with Christ.

Do you make time every day to be with Christ? Do you make time each week to just be alone and to commune with God? Jonathan Edwards, we often hear Jonathan Edwards spoken about. I think I spoke about him last week.

But we don't often hear about his wife, Sarah Edwards. And he once said that the secret of his wife, Sarah's godliness, was the result of her resolve to get alone and spend time with Christ. He says this, he said, she hardly, this was her as a teenager, so young boys and girls, this could be you.

She hardly cared for anything at those times except to meditate on him. She loved to be alone, walking in the fields, in the groves, and seems to have someone invisible always conversing with her. Dear ones, does this describe your life?

If not, avail yourself of this blessing. So that's the earthly dimension. We're going to go now to the eternal dimension of this idea of rest. So not only does Christ give us earthly rest, but Christ gives us our eternal rest.

We're going to move a little bit faster, I promise. In Matthew 11, verses 28 and 29, Christ calls each one of us, everyone, everyone in this room, Christ calls to you. He says, come to me, all who labor and are heavy laden, and I will give you what?

And I will give you rest. Take my yoke upon you and learn from me, for I am gentle and lowly in heart, and you will find rest for your souls. What many modern Sabbatarians, those are people that celebrate the Sabbath religiously, do not realize is that Christ does not commend the Sabbath as a continuous law to observe, but he is the believer's ultimate Sabbath rest.

Christ is the substance of the Sabbath. Paul relayed this to the Colossians, who were being confronted at that time by what we call the Colossian heresy. This idea that this pseudo-Jewish group was insisting on the strict observance of the Sabbath.

And he said, therefore, let no one pass judgment on you in questions of food and drink or with regard to a festival or a new moon or a Sabbath. These are a shadow of the things to come, but the substance belongs to Christ.

The Sabbath pointed to Christ. Christ is the substance of God's Sabbath rest. And so for everyone who comes to Christ by faith in him, he becomes our Sabbath rest. He becomes our Sabbath from striving for our own salvation.

He becomes the end of our toiling to strive and to earn eternal life. Paul wrote to the Romans in speaking about the works-oriented Jews. Do you believe that you are still works-oriented? If you don't meditate on the Gospel, if you don't regularly look to Christ, we all drift towards works.

We all drift towards a performance-based righteousness. When we're doing well, we think that we're more saved. When we're not doing well, we think that we're less saved. But Paul says this to the Romans in Romans 10 in verse 3 and 4.

He says, for being ignorant of the righteousness of God, the Jews, and seeking to establish their own, they did not submit to whose righteousness? To God's righteousness. For Christ is the end of the law for righteousness to everyone who believes.

And he says later in verse 9, if you confess with your mouth that Jesus Christ is Lord and believe in your heart that God raised him from the dead, you will be saved. It's reminiscent of Isaiah 30 in verse 15.

Where he says, in returning and rest you shall be saved. But many are unwilling. It's possible that people in this room, some of you are unwilling to rest in Christ. You are unwilling to be right with him.

You'd rather work, you'd rather strive, you'd rather toil, you'd rather do anything. But Christ calls you to find your rest in him. There was a man named William Grimshaw, and he was a pastor, a lost pastor.

And I don't know what it is, but I just love reading stories about men that believe that they're called into ministry, that spend some time serving God as a minister, as an elder, as a pastor, and at some point discover that they are not saved.

And such was the case with William Grimshaw. It was in 1731 that he entered the ministry. He lived in England. And because he felt that to be a clergyman would be a very respectful job, he entered into ministry service.

And every Sunday, just faithfully, continuously, repetitively, religiously, he performed the duties with diligence. But he had no spiritual life or feeling whatsoever. He would read the prayers with seriousness.

He would preach the sermons zealously, as zealously as he could. But he was not a believer. He thought he was a Christian, but he never knew the justifying power of Christ or the thrilling hope of eternal life that comes by saving faith in Christ.

And so he labored. Picture this. A lost man behind the pulpit for 11 years, preaching and praying and reading and serving. If a man can be lost behind a pulpit for 11 years, how many people are lost in the pew for much longer than that?

But he labored painstakingly as a blind man, leading some with vision and some who were blind. But after his death, he began to notice that all was not well with his soul. He realized that there was not true life in his being.

And so he began to earnestly seek power over sin and to purify his heart. And he tried with some success to give up worldly pleasures and to avoid outward transgressions and sins. He fasted. He almost sounds like Martin Luther.

He fasted. He kept a diary of his sins. He prayed prayers of vows and confessions. But the more that he tried to deal with the sin, the more he was confronted with the vileness of his own heart, the bitterness of sin, his utter inability to set himself right with God.

He remained in this state, we're told, for years. Lost, wanting to be saved, striving to be saved, working and giving his best for years, but burdened with the guilt of his own sin, his own feelings of unworthiness.

And then one day he went to a friend's house. And I can tell already that I like his friend, because his friend had a nice library, and in that library he had The Doctrine of Justification by John Owen and Precious Remedies Against Satan's Devices by Thomas Brooks.

And as he leafed through these pages, his friends, I'm not sure if he let him read the whole book or if he just sat there by his bookshelf perusing, but he discovered the truth of Christ's substitutionary atonement, that Christ went to the cross, the righteous for the unrighteous, that he might bring us to God, that he went to the cross to be accursed on our behalf on that tree, that he might impute, oh, that glorious doctrine of double imputation, that he would impute his righteousness to us, and that our sin would be imputed to him, that he would impute his perfect, God-pleasing, sin-erasing, heaven-admitting righteousness even to William Grimshaw.

And as he discovered this for the first time, he discovered that it is by resting in Christ that one is saved. Yes, resting in Christ's active obedience, his perfect life, resting in his passive obedience on the cross.

He learned the meaning of what I think is one of the sweetest English words in the whole English dictionary. Justification, standing before God, declared righteous, standing before God, and God does not have a frown on his face but a smile, perfect confidence, perfect peace, no judgment, no condemnation, standing before God, resting from all of your works by faith in Jesus Christ alone.

So Grimshaw read these books, or looked into these books, and then he said this, he said, I was now more willing to renounce myself, every degree of fancied merit and ability, and to embrace Christ only, for my all in all.

Oh, how many of you have embraced Christ as your all in all? You have given up striving, given up trying to earn merit before him, to establish your own righteousness, and you have just let go and fallen into the forgiving arms of Christ, the finished work of Christ, the person of Christ.

It is not by toil, it's not by labor. I remember at one time having a conversation with my wife, and saying, I'm just trying to be a Christian. I think what I was trying to articulate is I just want to live a righteous life, but to be a Christian requires no trying.

It requires resting in what Christ has done already for you. So we see resting. We'll look next at verse 33. Now many saw them going and recognized them all, and they ran there on foot from all the towns and got there ahead of them.

When he went ashore, he saw a great crowd, and he had compassion on them, because they were like sheep without a shepherd, and he began to teach them many things. So just as Christ and his disciples are about to rest, it would seem that word had gotten out that they were going to Bethsaida.

And so even before they could get to the place where they were going to be retreating, the crowds beat them, and they were awaiting them there. Now imagine for a moment that you are tired, or maybe even that you are with someone you know that they are tired, and you're just trying to bring them to Christ, just trying to bring them rest, and you see this crowd waiting for you.

Now many of us would probably grow a little bit frustrated. If you think, you're messing with my plans. But what does Christ do? We're told that he responds with compassion. And this compassion that he responds to, it's a word that is only used of Christ's feeling towards someone.

This compassion, it's a sense of empathy, of pity, of love, of concern. And why does he show them compassion? Why does he feel pity for these people? If we follow it down the line, he says this, he had compassion for them because they were like sheep without a shepherd.

Now, why would Christ use imagery like that? Sheep without a shepherd. For one, sheep were the most common livestock in Israel. And so maybe for us Alberta beef eaters, it would be like cows without a ranch.

I'm not sure, I'm just winging it right now. But here you've got sheep without a shepherd. Certainly it's something they would have been familiar with, but there's more to it than that. If we study the lives of sheep, what we find is this, that sheep without a shepherd are often helpless.

Sometimes I like the little rabbit trails that I go on as I study texts, and I try to study, can a sheep survive without a shepherd? Apparently it is possible in the perfect conditions. But outside of the perfect conditions, sheep are hapless.

Sheep will be within a couple hundred meters of a flowing stream of water, and if they are not led to the water, they will die of thirst. Sheep need to be fed. Some sheep have fallen onto their backs and unable to get up, or fallen on their backs in a mud puddle, and have drowned in a shallow body of water like a deep mud puddle.

Sheep need someone to come and to pick the bugs and the thistles out of their fur to keep them comfortable. If they are wounded, they need someone to bind their wounds. If they encounter a wolf or a bear or a lion, they're done, unless there is a shepherd who is willing to lay down his life and protect the sheep.

And so Christ looks with great affection on this crowd. They are people without a leader. They are people without a guide. They are helpless, lost, and confused. But this was contrary to God's plan from the beginning.

Now, I need to trim, and I'm going to trim a little bit out of here, but hopefully I make sense here still, that when Moses was about to die, as he led the people into the Promised Land or up to the Promised Land, he expressed concern at the nation of Israel's welfare.

He says in Numbers 27, he says, Who shall go out before them and come in before them? Who shall lead them out and bring them in that the congregation of the Lord may not be as a sheep that has no shepherd or as sheep that have no shepherd?

Now, this was all according to God's foreordained plan to give the nation a new shepherd in the man Joshua. But what we find is that as a result of sin, the nation of Israel often was like this crowd, like a sheep without a shepherd.

This idea of a sheep without a shepherd was spoken of when the wicked kings would bring their nation into foolish battles. We see that at one point in the Book of Chronicles, I think also in Kings. It's definitely used of the religious leaders who failed to care for God's flock, and perhaps one of the most famous ideas, and I know there's some of you in this room that aspire to the office of elder and shepherd and pastor.

And might this never be so of us or of you, but in Ezekiel chapter 34, it says this, Son of man, verse 2, prophesy against the shepherds of Israel. Prophesy and say to them, even to the shepherds, thus says the Lord God, Ah, shepherds of Israel who have been feeding yourselves, should not the shepherds feed the sheep?

You eat the fat, you clothe yourselves with the wool, you slaughter the fat ones, but you do not feed the sheep. The weak you have not strengthened, the sick you have not healed, the injured you have not bound up, the strayed you have not brought back, the lost you have not sought, and with force and harshness you have ruled them.

So they were scattered because there was no shepherd, and they became food for all the wild beasts. My sheep were scattered, they wandered over all the mountains, and on every high hill my sheep were scattered over all the face of the earth with none to search or seek them.

This is a condemnation. Now God is not talking about shepherds with literal sheep. He's talking about the leaders of the nation. They're fleecing the flock. They're ruling them harshly. They're not caring for their needs.

But in the midst of all of this, a prophet, Jeremiah. In Jeremiah 3 .15, again, if you aspire to this office, write this one down.

It says,.

And I will give you shepherds after my own heart, who will feed you. Now feed you with what? Who will feed you with knowledge and understanding. There was a time when the nation was without shepherds.

But Christ, or in this case God through Jeremiah, looked forward to a day when he would give not just one shepherd, we're going to hear about that in a minute, but shepherds after my own heart, who would take the flock and feed them with knowledge and understanding.

Now Christ's encounter with these crowds at Bethsaida anticipates the provision of shepherds for his people. And like the last example, there's two dimensions in the fulfillment of this. And so we'll look first at this.

This is point number three, if you're following along in our heading. Christ gives us earthly shepherds. It was Christ's will from the beginning that when he would establish his church, when he said, I will build my church, that he was going to give that church shepherds after his own heart, who would feed his flock with knowledge and understanding.