Luke 9:10 Commentary and Bible Study

These miracles, like the parables, were for teaching. Yes, when Christ worked great miracles of healing, obviously they were to authenticate him, they were to make it clear to the people that he was precisely who he was said to be, the eternal Son of God come from heaven to earth; they were authenticating signs. In the Gospel of John, they are always called signs rather than miracles, so that was certainly their primary purpose. But they have a greater purpose than that. They are also to be studied because they reflect great spiritual principles. As the Lord Jesus Christ healed, so he adopted a manner of healing and a way of going about things that taught how he dealt with people at a spiritual level. So the physical healings became pictures of spiritual healing, healing of the soul, the giving of spiritual life to lost and needy people. This is how we should examine these great miracles of Christ: not only as betokenings, authenticating proofs of who he was, but of what he had come to do and his manner of working. The feeding of the five thousand is a very remarkable event, recorded in all four Gospels. There is a little bit of information in each Gospel, which is exclusive to that Gospel, so we can gather information from all the Gospels to see some of the details of what went on. We find that the Gospel are in fully agreement. The Lord had crossed the Sea of Galilee – the lake as it's here called – and he had gone to the other side.