Feeding the Five Thousand (John 6:1–15) — A Sermon by R.C. Sproul

0:00 We continue this morning with our study of the gospel according to St. John, and this morning we will begin our study of the sixth chapter, which is one of the most important chapters of the entire gospel. So our lesson this morning is from John chapter 6, verses 1 through 14, and here we have John's record of the feeding of the 5,000. After these things Jesus went over the Sea of Galilee, which is the Sea of Tiberias.

0:36 And then a great multitude followed Him because they saw His signs, which He performed on those who were diseased. And Jesus went up on the mountain, and there He sat with His disciples. Now the Passover, a feast of the Jews, was near. And then Jesus lifted up His eyes, and seeing a great multitude coming toward Him, He said to Philip, Where shall we buy bread that these may eat? But this He said to test Him, for he himself knew what he would do. And Philip answered him, Two hundred denarii worth of bread is not sufficient for them, that every one of them may have a little.

1:33 One of his disciples, Andrew, Simon Peter's brother, said to him, there is a lad here who has five barley loaves and two small fish, but what are they among so many?

1:55 And then Jesus said, make the people sit down. Now there was much grass in the place, so the men sat down in number about five thousand. And Jesus took the loaves, and when He had given thanks, He distributed them to the disciples, and the disciples to those sitting down, and likewise of the fish, as much as they wanted. So when they were filled, He said to His disciples, gather up the fragments that remain so that nothing is lost. And therefore they gathered them up and filled twelve baskets with the fragments of the five barley loaves which are left over by those who had eaten. Then those men, when they had seen the sign that Jesus did, said, this is truly the prophet who has come into the world.

3:04 He who has ears to hear the Word of God, let them hear it. Let us pray. Again, our fathers, we turn our attention to this extraordinary sign given by Jesus during His earthly ministry. we ask that we may see the significance of it for His people and for us today. We ask these things in His name, asking that the same Spirit who inspired this text in the first place may now illumine its application to our lives, for we ask it in Jesus' name. Amen.

3:53 In this portion of John's gospel that I've just read, we have a record of a miracle of Jesus, which is the only miracle that is reported in all four of the gospels. That in itself should call attention to its importance for us, and of course one of the reasons for that is that John spends most of his time focusing attention on Jesus' ministry in Judea, and this event occurs in Galilee, in the northern part of the nation, along the shores of the lake of Tiberias, or the Sea of Galilee, or Kenareth, you find it called various times and various places in the Scriptures. The lake was renamed early in the first century when Herod Antipas dedicated a city on its shores to the reigning emperor of the time, Tiberius Caesar.

4:58 And so when John is writing his recollection of these events, he makes reference to the Sea of Galilee, which is the Sea of Tiberius. There are some details that one might consider minor that are included in John's record of this event that we don't find in the other Gospels. I'll mention them when we come to them. But we're told here, as in the other Gospels, that a great multitude was following Jesus after He went over the Sea of Galilee, and the reason they were following Him was because they saw the signs that He had performed on those who were sick and afflicted. They had witnessed His miracles, and so that attracted this great crowd. Now, we read that the Passover was near. There are several times in John's gospel when John indicates that what he is reporting takes place during various feasts of the Jews, and three times, I believe, he makes reference to the Passover, and that becomes significant in a few moments, as we will see.

6:12 So, in any case, it was near to the time of the Passover, and Jesus went up onto this mountain and sat there with His disciples, and He looked up and He saw this tremendous multitude that was following after Him. And when He sees this crowd approaching, He says to Philip, where will we buy bread that these people may eat? This is one of those times where the Scriptures tell us that Jesus was putting His own disciples to the test. There's a logistical problem that they're encountering here and a serious problem similar to that which the steward of the feast faced at the wedding feast of Canaan when Jesus performed His first miracle when they were running out of wine. Here you have this huge throng of people pressing up towards Jesus, and presumably Jesus instructed them for quite some time, and now they're hungry, and they have no food to eat. And so Jesus says to Philip, where are we going to buy enough bread to feed all of these people?

7:24 We're also told that Jesus knew exactly what He planned to do, and He really wasn't worried about coming up with enough money to buy provisions for this huge multitude. But listen to Philip's great response of faith. Philip who had been present in the other miracles of Christ, he said, "'The two hundred denarii worth of bread is not sufficient for them that every one of them might have a little.'" Now, denarius was the standard daily wage for a laborer in Israel at this time. And so what Philip is saying is eight months' salary of a normal employee is not going to be enough money to buy enough food so that each person assembled here can just get a little taste. And so Philip flunks the test.

8:20 Jesus said, where are we going to get the provisions to feed these people? And what's Philip saying? Beats me. I mean, it's going to cost more than 200 denarii in order to feed this mass of humanity. I have no idea where we're going to get that kind of money. Now into the picture comes another of the disciples, the one for whom our church is named, Andrew. And Andrew, who's Simon's brother, said to Jesus, there's a lad here who has five barley loaves and two small fish. Now if it stopped right there, we would be excited about this projection of faith by by Andrew, Andrew who's always found bringing somebody to Jesus. And Jesus is looking around for provisions for the multitude. Andrew says, well, I've spied out the land and I found one little boy here. He's got five barley loaves and a couple of fish.

9:15 If he stops right there, then you could say, well, that he's indicating, well, I know Jesus, you could take of this and make more than enough for everybody, but instead he says, What is that among so many? His faith isn't any greater than Philip's at this point. Now here's one of those details. John's the only one that tells us that they're barley loaves. The other Gospels leave out that particular descriptive term. And so we have to ask, why barley loaves? What's the significance of that? people say, well, this draws attention to a smaller miracle that is recorded in the book of Kings that was performed by Elisha in the Old Testament where he multiplied the loaves of a servant boy that brought to him in order to feed a lot of people, not nearly as many people that was assembled here, and that there's a connection there because that boy had barley loaves. Whether that's in John's mind or not is pure speculation. But one thing we can learn from the significance of the fact that they were barley loaves was that this boy was carrying the lowest quality of bread available to people at the time. Only those who were living in poverty for the most part would eat bread made from barley. Now also, just another little detail to get it straight, It's not like Andrew goes over and finds this little boy with five big loaves of bread and some fish. He may not have a knapsack or a bushel basket to be carrying around five loaves of bread and these fish. No, no, no. These barley loaves were small cakes, almost like a Twinkie if you were made out of barley and the fish were small fish that were used just to give some flavor to the barley cake sort of like sardines or smoked herring

11:25 or something of that size so really it's not even five big loaves of bread and a boatload of salmon here. The provisions are more meager than we would assume just by reading the words here in the text. Jesus said make the people sit down Another detail, there's much grass in the place, which squares with the description that this was near the time of Passover because they're situated in what would today be described as the Golan Heights, and when summer comes, it burns away the grass and things the scorched earth. But here, it's still grassy. Jesus makes them comfortable, sitting them all down in the grass. Now, ladies and gentlemen, it says there were 5,000 men, not 5,000 people. It's 5,000 men, not counting the women and children. And estimates have ranged anywhere from a total crowd of 10,000 to 15,000 people who were assembled on this place that Jesus is about to feed.

12:46 And Jesus took the loaves, and when He had given thanks, He distributed them to the disciples, and the disciples to those sitting down, and likewise to the fish as much as they wanted. So when they were filled, He said to His disciples, gather up the fragments that remain so that nothing is lost. Therefore they gathered them up and filled twelve baskets with the fragments of the five barley loaves which were left over by those who had eaten. So Jesus not only multiplies these barley cakes that this little boy brings and multiplies the fish to feed fifteen thousand people, but He feeds them to their fullest satisfaction, and after the feast there are twelve huge baskets in which the leftover provisions are filled up. Some think that the reason for the number twelve is that it represents the twelve tribes of Israel and the complete way in which their covenant God meets their needs and meets their provisions. This is the God of providence at work, the God who provides for His people. And it certainly echoes the wilderness experience of the Old Testament when God's people were nurtured daily by the bread from heaven that appeared as manna.

14:28 And we also see the strategic placement of this particular event where, as we will see in weeks to come, Jesus follows it up with the bread of life and bread of heaven discourse, that God miraculously meets the needs of His people through His appointed Son who multiplies the loaves, and the fish. And what we have here is a narrative that without ambiguity purports to be a miracle. And it is miracle accounts like this that vex higher critics of Scripture. In the 19th century, there developed a school, an academic school called the Religious Historical school that sought to reinterpret and revise the biblical record to strip it of all supernatural elements and reduce the biblical record to natural events around a man who distinguished himself as a great ethical teacher, namely Jesus of Nazareth. I grew up in a church where the minister was described by the dean of one seminary as, quote, an unreconstructed 19th century liberal.

15:54 And that's what I learned in Sunday school when I was growing up. And I'll never forget the occasion of studying the feeding of the 5,000 and how our minister dealt with that. And he said, well, here's how it really happened. He said, this crowd of people obviously included thousands who had had the foresight before they went out for the day to pack lunches for themselves. But there were also those who neglected to make provision for a long day on the mountain. And so when we have this huge assembly coming together, and it's time to eat, and people are hungry, what you have in that collection are those who are the haves and those who are the have-nots.

16:49 And so what Jesus did was that He found a little boy who was willing to share His lunch with others. And using this little boy as an example, Jesus persuaded those who were assembled who had brought provisions with them to share with those who hadn't, and so the real miracle was an ethical miracle. Other interpretations were even less sanguine. One of the scholars of the 19th century, trying to understand what really happened there came up with this scenario.

17:33 That prior to the event, Jesus and his disciples had found a cave nearby, and they had stored a huge cache of bread and fish in this cave. And you've seen magicians on television who wear clothes like mine, and they pull sausages or scarves endlessly out of their robe. Well, what happened was Jesus had His disciples lined up forming a bucket brigade in the cave, and Jesus stood out there, and they're shoveling all this bread and fish in the behind his robe, and he's pulling it out of his sleeve until he feeds all of these people. Do you know how many loaves and fishes a magician would have to have up his sleeve to feed 15,000 people?

18:33 That was the most prodigious magical act in the history of the world if that's actually what happened. I also noticed a little detail that part of the narrative is that when Jesus distributes the food, He distributes it first to the disciples, and then the disciples distribute it. So I don't know where He found enough extra disciples to hide in the cave. But this is the extent to which people like the Jesus Seminar folks and the higher critics of Scripture go to remove the miraculous from the Scriptures. Now, there's one event, for example, in the Old Testament I was reading about this week that is not given to us as a miracle story, but it is extraordinary. Those who were in Sunday school this morning know that we spent the entire hour doing a profile on the life of David. And we made reference then to his battle with Goliath. And the Bible says that Goliath was a giant and that he was nine feet, nine inches tall. Now that in itself stirs the bile of critical scholars saying it can't be anybody walking around that tall. Certainly we can't believe this is an exaggerated account of battle. And this young boy without armor comes out and hurls this stone at the giant's head and with one fell swoop kills him, knocks him down, then he takes his sword and cuts off his head. And somebody reads that and says, see, the Bible's filled with fairy tales. Just this week I was reading some literature about that. One of the articles was about some of the results of the Dead Sea Scrolls, which much of the information of the scrolls has been kept secret for many decades, and now it's being revealed in one of the

20:40 points of one of the texts of the Dead Sea Scroll has an account of this confrontation between David and Goliath. And this account that dates from more than a hundred years before Christ and about a thousand years earlier than the Masoretic text, which is the surviving Hebrew text that we have for Old Testament records, has a different number for describing the size of Goliath. Instead of describing him as nine foot nine, this ancient text describes Goliath as six foot nine. See, 6'9", you can believe. 9'9", you know, makes Andre the Giant seem like a shrimp by comparison, and this man would tower over Shaquille O'Neal if he were 9'9".

21:38 And that may disturb you that you have a discrepancy between an ancient first-century text and an 8th century AD text, but one of the most common forms of discrepancies in the copies of the ancient Scriptures are errors of numbers. As meticulous and as careful as the scribes were, even they would make mistakes copying from time to time, such as you might do when you've incorrectly written down somebody's telephone number or address. I would give anything to find Hebrew scribes to work at Ligonier ministry to get people's orders straight so we wouldn't have any customer complaints about getting the wrong order. I mean, every organization struggles with that, how easy it is to make a mistake with a number. So if that text is correct, then Goliath is only six foot nine. He's just shrunk by three feet.

22:34 That's a yard. A little problem I have with that is that remember Saul, who's the commander-in-chief and king of the Israelite forces that are challenged by Goliath, is himself head and shoulders above everybody else in the community. And it makes his cowardice all the more severe if Saul, let's say he's 6'3", 6'4", maybe 6'5", that he's frightened by four or five inches of a guy taller. But again, what about 9 foot 9? A couple of weeks ago I was watching one of the history channels on television and they had a special report on 20th century giants. They were men who had an anomaly in their brains which caused their development to run amok.

23:36 And two of the men that they showed on the television were over nine feet tall. When you think of the Watousis in Africa as being seven feet tall, that's tall, but over nine feet tall. Most of these men lived until their early twenties and then would die by complications, but they have documented in our world today that strange, extraordinary, but not miraculous reality of men who grow over nine feet tall. So I don't have any problems with the Bible teaching that Goliath was nine foot nine. Maybe there is a textual variant that makes him six foot nine. Either way, I'm comfortable with it, and I don't have to go and try to find a way to escape the sober teaching and declaration of Holy Scripture. Ladies and gentlemen, every gospel writer in the New Testament attests that Jesus miraculously fed this huge multitude. And this miracle reveals to the masses that He is sent from the One who provides our daily bread, who provided the manna for the people of Israel in the Old Testament.

24:58 and quickly let me finish by looking to the reaction of the crowd. In the first instance, when they saw this, they said, this is truly the prophet who was to come in the world. Now, we look to verse 15. Therefore, when Jesus perceived that they were about to come and take Him by force to make Him king, He departed again to the mountain by Himself. is not Jesus the anointed King of kings? Is He not the King of the Jews? Why would He leave when after this miracle these people press on Him because they want to take Him and make Him their King? Here's another reason why I think perhaps John mentioned that this is taking place near the time of the Passover. Remember that at this time in Jewish history, the Passover is not just an exciting and important religious festival, but it is the supreme celebration of national pride during the occupation of Israel. Our celebration of July 4th isn't worthy to be compared with the excitement that the Jews experienced on Passover when they reaffirmed their hope that God would deliver them from the tyranny of Rome. And so while this frenzy is going on, and while the people are desperately looking for somebody that would rescue them from the yoke of Roman tyranny. Now the perfect political candidate appears on the scene.

26:47 The thing that wins political votes everywhere, a chicken in every pot, a loaf and a fish in every lunch. It doesn't get any better than that. This is the kind of king we want, one who will care for us from the cradle to the grave. And Jesus read their hearts, and He knew that the kind of king they were looking for had nothing to do with the kingdom that He had come to inaugurate. They were looking for the kingdom of man. and He came to bring the kingdom of God. And the spiritual import of that event, as I said, becomes central to the subsequent discourse that follows soon thereafter that we will look at in the weeks to come. For now, let us celebrate the providence of God, remembering that the word providence means the one who provides, that Christ is our provider.

28:02 He is the one who is the bread of heaven. He is the one who more than duplicates the manna that is spread in the wilderness. This is our King who gives us all that we need and enough left over to fill a multitude of baskets. Let us pray. We thank You, O God, for the lavish way in which You provide for Your people, that where we are uncomfortable, You give to us comfort. Where we are hungry, you fill us. Where we are thirsty, You give us to drink.

29:01 You give us food that we have never paid for, by which we are sustained. We thank You for this event that so clearly bears witness to the superiority of Jesus, That this sign signifies that He is our Messiah. In Him do we trust. Amen.