Mark 8:4 Commentary and Bible Study

‘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.