Mark 8:4 Commentary - Dr Peter Masters | Metropolitan Tabernacle

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Mark 8:4

Comments

‘From whence can a man satisfy these? – such a crowd, four thousand men, and presumably many more, if you were to include the women and children. ‘How can we feed them here in the wilderness?’ The place was sparsely populated. There were not sufficient provisions for this great crowd, even if they had been sent into the surrounding villages. So it tracks the event not very long before, when Christ had fed five thousand. The disciples don't seem to remember how it was done, the great miracle of creation that Christ worked in providing in a deserted place so much food out of nothing. Had the disciples forgotten the feeding of the 5,000? We are told by the experts that it couldn’t have been more than six months before, possibly as short as three months before. They had been involved personally in distributed the bread and the fish to five thousand men. Now it is going to happen all over again and the Lord again tests the disciples: ‘Where are we going to get food’, and they don’t seem to remember what has previously happened.

Application

Perhaps they did remember, but they thought, ‘That was an unusual miracle and the Lord does not usually provide things of this kind to people.’ But equally their faith had faded, even with such a mighty miracle. It can happen to you and to me. We can have tremendous blessing and provision from the Lord and within three or six months faith has ebbed away and we are in a similar crisis and we do not know how to respond. We must cast ourselves upon the Lord in prayer and trust him. Faith has got to be kept alive. Great blessings have got to be remembered and treasured, so that when the next trial comes, we are ready. But we see the human potential to lose depth of trust so quickly. Of course we don’t lose all our trust. We still trust the Lord for some things and love him, but it is amazing how faith can be diminished. Panic sets in, or we turn to earthly things for comfort.

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Mark 8:4 Commentary and Bible Study