Luke 9:11 Commentary and Bible Study

It might seem to his disciples that he had crossed the lake in order to have some privacy with his disciples and to teach them, but actually the Lord always knew what would happen. No sooner had he gone ashore in a desert place – a remote and sparsely inhabited part – than he climbed a hill; we read about that in the Gospel of John. And as he got to the top of the hill, he could see that in the far distance crowds were already coming towards that place. Here in Luke we are told that there were five thousand men, but in Matthew's Gospel it is made clear that that is only counting the men. How big was the crowd that gradually assembled? We do not know. It could have been at the very least ten thousand, maybe fifteen thousand, but certainly it was very many more than just five thousand. There were wives and families as well as the men, and in many cases they brought people who were very sick, and they must have carried them huge distances, from the countryside on the other side of the Sea of Galilee, and they assembled during the course of the morning. Far from recoiling from them – ‘I have come here to rest, I've come here for some respite’ – we are told in Mark's Gospel that, moved with compassion, he began to teach, and he went on teaching, and the moments and the hours went by. We are told here what he taught: he taught them about the kingdom of God. Now that is very significant, because we are also told in the Gospels that when he spoke about the kingdom of God, he spoke about repentance and the remission of sins. This would have shocked many people because they were Jewish people, and the Jewish people at that time were being wrongly taught that they were all in God's kingdom by virtue of being Jewish people. All that mattered was how great the reward you got, and how splendid the palace you got in eternity, and things of this kind. Of course, the clergy of the day, the scribes and the Pharisees, the Pharisees particularly, very proudly thought they would do best of all, because they most meticulously kept the finer points of the ceremonial laws of worship. All people believed they were heaven bound, and this was the shock: that when they heard Christ speaking – for all his compassion and his sympathy for the crowds – he was warning them that the kingdom of God was something you had to enter. You were not a member of it by virtue of your race or your birth, which is what they thought. You had to enter it, and you couldn't enter it by your deserving and your merit. You had to come by receiving the mercy and the forgiveness of God, and that shocked people. Many people during the course of Christ's ministry on earth turned away from him because of this message, but many others listened with great gladness. Many were baptized on repentance of their sin and things such as that, and many others were set against him because of his teaching. So what is taking place is this enormous crowd is gathering, and he is teaching them patiently and tenderly these things, and pressing upon their consciences that people must repent and sincerely seek the Lord to come to know him for themselves. But many of them are sick, and they have seen his healings before, and they have brought people in order to be healed, and he healed all who were sick. If the crowds are coming to hear a man who they believe is surely, at the very least, a great prophet of God – and some would have more light and say, ‘This must be the Messiah’ – they would bring their sick, and even the crippled and sorely afflicted people. However many were brought, he healed them all. He must have healed hundreds, maybe even thousands on that day, at a word, at a touch. People knew, therefore that he was from God, and that he possessed divine and special power.