Mark 6:30-44

Interpretation:

In this passage the apostles who were sent out in Mark 6:7-12 have returned. Jesus commands them to rest in a desolate place so they gather together and prepare to leave. A crowd notices who they are and run after them setting up the scene for Jesus to teach and feed five thousand men with the food the apostles took to eat in the desolate place.

Jesus teaches the large crowd because He took pity on how aimless they all were. They were looking for something from Christ and they didn’t necessarily know what it was. Jesus did however and taught them late into the night. The crowd needs food. The disciples have a little and Jesus makes it enough to feed five thousand people and have heaping loads of leftovers.

This story of Jesus illustrates God’s provision and God’s use of us as holders or trustees of His provision.
His disciples ask Jesus in verse 36 to send them away to villages so that they can be fed. Jesus looks at this as an opportunity to serve or provide for the crowd, as He and his disciples had already put aside the rest they sought when the left for the desolate place. Instead of sending them away He tells the disciples to feed them in verse 37. Before assessing how much food they actually had, they respond with a maybe sarcastic jab at how much money it would cost to feed the 5,000. ‘Shall we go buy two hundred denarii worth of bread?’ Denarii was a day’s wages. At $8.00 / hr for 8 hrs (for a day) – you can imagine roughly $12,800 in our day. But money wasn’t the issue.

Jesus asks them what they do have. They had five loaves of bread and two fish. Jesus took what little they had and prayed a blessing over it. Then everyone is provided for.

When we give what we do have to God to use for His work —- He takes it and uses it beyond our imagination.

Application:

The application is simple. We must give to God what we have.

We think in worldly ways. We think we know how things work. If you want to feed a crowd of five thousand you need $12,800. But what Jesus illustrates in this passage is that you actually need Him. In verse 34 of this passage Jesus says He saw the crowd and had compassion for them because they were like sheep without a Shepard. The point is we don’t know how things work. We sign off all miracle as serendipity, chance, or freak occurrence. We deny that miracle is possible. One way we deny the power of  God is to pretend we know what it takes to get something done.

So lets change or premise from knowing how things work (financing, marriages, learning, etc.) to relying on God’s power to provide and shape our lives.