Ten Minute Bible Talks Devotional Bible Study - When God Doesn't Provide | New Testament | Mark 6

Episode Date: October 6, 2023

What happens when you really need God to provide, so you pray, and nothing happens? Are you not praying hard enough? Is God not as powerful as you thought? Do you have enough faith? In today's episode, Jensen uses Mark 6 to discuss the purpose of Jesus's miracles in the gospels. Your support makes TMBT possible. Ten Minute Bible Talks is a crowd-funded project. Join the TMBTeam to reach more people with the Bible. Give now. Join the TMBT community in reading the entire New Testament in one year. Get your FREE reading plan here. Like this content? Make sure to leave us a rating and share it with others, so others can find it too. Use #asktmbt to connect with us, ask questions, and suggest topics. We'd love to hear from you! To learn more, visit our website and follow us on Instagram, Facebook, and Twitter @TenMinuteBibleTalks. Don't forget to subscribe to the TMBT Newsletter here. Passages: Mark 6

Welcome to 10-minute Bible Talks, where we connect the Bible to your life and the time it takes to get to work. I'm Jensen Holt McNair. As a kid growing up in Sunday school, I was very familiar with a section of Mark 6. You see, Mark 6 holds the only miracle to be recorded in all four Gospels, that is, the feeding of the 5,000. This miracle was a great Sunday school story. Jesus takes a small amount of food, multiplies it, and feeds a whole lot of people. people in need. The takeaway? God will provide for you when you need it, even if you can't see away. It sounds great, all tied up nice and neat with a bow on top. Except what happens when he doesn't do that?

When you need money for rent and you have no idea where it will come from and you pray about it and it still never comes. When you need God to provide a miracle to heal you of your chronic illness and no matter how hard you ask, you still face day after day of pain. You ask God to provide reconciliation and a relationship remains broken. You ask God to provide food on the table and your family continues to go hungry. You ask him to provide you family and you continue to face singleness or infertility. Does it mean that God isn't really a provider? Does it mean he isn't as powerful as you thought?

Does it mean you just don't have enough faith for the miracle to happen in your life? Here's the thing. Some people might answer yes to that last question. But I believe that those people are greatly misunderstanding the point of the miracles in the Gospels. You see, Jesus performed miracles to show us that he's the divine Messiah and to show his people what his coming kingdom will look like. And so while God may answer your prayers miraculously, while he may provide, when you can't see a way for him to do it, that is not primarily what the authors of the gospels are trying to teach you and I, as we read about the miracle of feeding the 5,000.

Instead of walking away from this miracle, with a singular nugget we can hold on to and put our hope in, let's just dive into this miracle and see how it uncovers Jesus' divinity and see what it teaches us about His coming kingdom. Mark chapter 6, verse 30. 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 for 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. Now many saw them going and recognized them. 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 the world. And he had compassion on the world.

them because they were like sheep without a shepherd, and he began to teach them many things. So here, we learn that Jesus intends to provide rest for his disciples. He cares for them and sees all the work they've done and wants them to be strengthened. But as they begin to leave, they're recognized, and a great crowd comes to Jesus to learn from him. And we read that rather than be angry or frustrated by this turn of events, Jesus has compassion because they were like sheep without a shepherd. Now this statement, sheep without a shepherd, should evoke the imagery that God uses to describe himself throughout scripture. He's a shepherd. Psalm 23 most famously describes him as such. The Lord is my shepherd. I shall not want. He makes me lie down in green

pastures. He leads me besides still waters. He restores my soul. He leads me in paths of righteousness for his name's sake. Even though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil for you are with me. Your rod and your staff, they comfort me. You prepare a table before me in the presence of my enemies. You anoint my head with oil, my cup overflows. Surely goodness and mercy shall follow me all the days of my life, and I shall dwell in the house of the Lord forever. You see, the Lord is a shepherd who cares for his people, who dwells with them, who prepares a table for them, who leads them, who brings them to find restores them. Maybe you're already making connections between this passage and the description of Jesus in the passage by Mark. He's shown great care for his disciples, and now, as more people come to him in need, he will be their shepherd, and he will lead them through his teaching.

continuing on verse 35 when it grew late his disciples came to him and said this is a desolate place and the hour is now late send them away and go into the surrounding countryside and villages and buy themselves something to eat but he answered them you give them something to eat and they said to him shall we go and buy two hundred dinari worth of bread and give it to them to eat and he said to them how many loaves do you have? Go and see. And when they had found out, they said five and two fish. Then he commanded them all to sit down in groups on the green grass. So they sat down in groups by hundreds and by 50s. And taking the five loaves and the two fish, he looked up to heaven and set a blessing and broke the loaves and gave them to the disciples to set before the people. And he divided the two

fish among them all, and they all ate and were satisfied. And they took up 12 baskets full of broken pieces and of the fish, and those who ate the loaves were 5,000 men. I hope you continue to hear the language choices used here to evoke the imagery of Jesus as their shepherd. He tells them to sit down on green grass. He provides a table for them, full of food, so much food that it overflows. There's more than enough for everyone to be satisfied. You see, Mark is alluding to Jesus' divine nature by pointing his reader back to their knowledge that God is their shepherd. And now Jesus, God become man, has taken up that role as a shepherd to the lost sheep. And what is so cool is that we also see Mark pointing his audience back to a time where God specifically shepherded his people. If you remember, back in Exodus,

God's people found themselves in the wilderness. They longed for the food they once had back in Egypt as they faced a wilderness without provision. And God, who was leading them through this wilderness, also provided for them. He miraculously sent manna to his people to sustain them, and he provided more than enough each day. Just like God provided in the desert, Mark tells us that these people now find themselves in a desolate place with a need for food. And while the disciples urged Jesus to send them away to fend for themselves, a logical option,

Jesus chooses to miraculously provide food in the desert, once again as a sign that he is God. Mark writes in such a way to make his reader look back and be reminded that the God they follow is a faithful provider, and that as they now look forward, this man, Jesus, is that same God, the Messiah, who will continue to shepherd them by leading them and providing for them in the wilderness. In his commentary, Mark Strauss points out that just as Mark is urging his audience to look back and see Jesus' divine nature, he's also urging them to look forward. In Isaiah 25, we're given a beautiful picture of what is called the messianic banquet. It is a banquet on a mountain where the Messiah will provide a feast for his people.

And it gives us a beautiful picture of what the kingdom of God will look like when Jesus returns and establishes his kingdom on this earth. Let's read from it now. Verse 6. On this mountain, the Lord of hosts will make for all peoples a feast of rich food, a feast of well-aged wine, of rich food full of marrow, of aged wine well-refined. And he will swallow up on this mountain the covering that is cast over all peoples. the veil that has spread over all nations, he will swallow up death forever, and the Lord God will wipe away tears from all faces, and the reproach of his people he will take away from all the earth,

for the Lord has spoken. It will be said on that day, behold, this is our God. We have waited for him that he might save us. This is the Lord we have waited for him. Let us be glad and rejoice in his salvation. You see, when we read the miracle of the feeding of the 5,000, we do learn that Jesus will provide for his people, but in a much bigger way than we sometimes think. When we don't get an answer to that specific prayer we want, it isn't because he isn't good or isn't able, but because Jesus and his infinite wisdom and divinity is doing something far better for us as our good shepherd. The miracle of feeding the 5,000 reveals to us the divinity of Jesus. It reminds us that he is God.

He is the good shepherd. He provided manna for his people in the desert and loaves and fishes for them in a desolate place on the mountain. And we have hope that he will once again lead his people into his kingdom where he will provide a feast for them. Where death will be swallowed up forever and tears will be no more. So as for today, as we read Mark Six, made in cursory. us that our God is a good God who made away in the wilderness, who became man to die and rise from the dead so that he could provide resurrection for you and me, and who will one day return and bring us into his good kingdom forever? That is the hope we find in the Gospel of Mark today. May it sustain us,

may it encourage us, may it give us a lasting hope that Jesus is the divine king, who is intimately guiding us as our shepherd in every valley and on every mountain of this life, until we live alongside him forever in his kingdom.