Today on Renewing Your Mind, a miracle and a controversy. The miracles we read about in the New Testament are remarkable, to be sure. Healing the sick and raising the dead aren't commonplace, and the people of that day were astounded. But in the centuries that have followed, skeptics have questioned the truthfulness of those miracles, some denying they even occurred.
Dr. R.C. Sproul will help us see through the skeptics' arguments today as we turn to Luke chapter 9, starting at verse 10. On their return, the apostles told Him all that they had done, and He took them and withdrew apart to a town called Bethsaida. When the crowds learned it, they followed Him, and He welcomed them and spoke to them of the kingdom of God and cured those who had need of healing. Now the day began to wear away, and the twelve came and said to Him, "'Send the crowd away to go into the surrounding villages and countryside to find lodging and get provisions, for we are here in a desolate place.' But He said to them, "'You give them something to eat.' And they said, "'We have no more than five loaves and two fish, unless we go and buy food for all these people.'
For there were about five thousand men. And He said to His disciples, "'Have them sit down in groups of about fifty each.' And they did so, and had them all sit down, and taking the five loaves and the two fish, He looked up to heaven and set a blessing over them. Then He broke the loaves and gave them to the disciples to set before the crowd. And they all ate and were satisfied. And what was left over was picked up twelve baskets of broken pieces." Well, if you've been in church at all during your life, you've heard this story a hundred times.
You know it from beginning to end. You know that Jesus withdrew from the town, from the city, and went out into the desolate place apart from there. And there He was busy preaching the kingdom of God and healing multitudes that were brought to Him with various diseases and maladies. And as it was coming towards evening, the disciples had a sense of concern and compassion for this vast multitude that numbered five thousand men.
That doesn't count the women and children. There could have been easily twenty thousand people assembled in this spot listening to Jesus. And so the disciples said, "'These people have been here for a while.
It's getting late. We have to dismiss them so that they can go into the villages. There they may provide lodging and get food.'" Now it's interesting to me that once again we have the disciples coming to Jesus, giving Him advice as though He needed it. How like the disciples, we are in our prayers when we try to give counsel to God Almighty and be His instructors.
But in any case, Jesus didn't debate with them. He said, "'You feed them. Go ahead and feed them.'"
And you can read between the lines. They're saying, "'Are you nuts? We have five loaves and a few fish. That's not enough to feed this multitude. What do you mean, go feed them?' "'Well, if you can't feed them, at least you can organize them. Organize them in groups of fifty and tell them to sit down, and I'll make sure that they're fed.' We don't have time, we don't have the money to go to any store or any town that has a bazaar where we can buy enough food to feed this multitude, Jesus." Jesus said, "'Just get them in groups of fifty and let me take care of the rest.'
Well, you know what happened. Jesus took the five cakes and the fish and by the power of God multiplied and multiplied and multiplied them so that every person who was gathered there that day not only was fed but was fed to the point of satisfaction – one writer says they were filled. It's not like we're passing around a little piece of bread during communion. These people were filled to a sufficient level by the bread and the fish that Jesus provided for them. And not only they were filled, but they were filled abundantly because when He was finished they gathered twelve baskets full of leftovers so that Jesus provided more.
He didn't just give them what they needed, He gave them way beyond their needs, which is one of the things, one of the points that Dr. Futada made recently in our missions conference that when God blesses His people, He blesses them abundantly. Well, on the one hand we see that for reasons not explained to us the New Testament writers saw a singular significance to this particular miracle because as I said it's one of the few that's contained in all four gospels. But on the other side of that coin, this particular miracle has been singled out by critics and skeptics as exhibit A for the mythological teachings of the New Testament. This particular miracle has been targeted by those who since the Enlightenment have braised a philosophy called naturalism. And naturalism as an ism simply teaches this, that we have nature around us and nature is all there is. There's no supra or super nature, so that anything that we find in the written record of the New Testament that suggests a supernatural event must be rejected out of hand. Because if we're naturalists, we can't believe in the supernatural.
So ergo, anything that pretends to be supernatural must be rejected as unscientific and irrational. Now, when the naturalists invaded the church in the 19th century, we saw a movement spawned in Europe which was called 19th-century liberalism. It wasn't just liberalism in general, but it had a specific agenda, a specific philosophy, a specific theology. And 19th-century liberalism was based on the assumption that the Bible is to be criticized by biblical scholars and demonstrated to be false in many places. And again, systematically, 19th-century liberals took out of the New Testament record anything that smacked of supernaturalism.
The virgin birth was severely attacked, the atonement of Christ, the resurrection of Christ, the transfiguration of Christ, the ascension of Christ. All the miracles of Jesus were thrown out wholesale, which, by the way, provoked something of a crisis in liberal churches in Germany and in the rest of the continent and in the British Isles. Because the pastors who embraced this liberal theology were left with this question, what do we do with our vocations?
What do we do with these expensive churches that we have built? And one of the so-called pex-bad boys of the liberal movement, a man by the name of Pearson, said to his colleagues in the church, we need to be honest, and we need to leave the ministry, and we need to shut our churches, because really we don't believe historic Christianity. Early in the 20th century, one of the neo-orthodox theologians from Switzerland, Emil Bruner, wrote a book called Das Mittler, or The Mediator, in which he explored the mediatorial work of Jesus. And when he looked at the theories of 19th-century liberalism, he said, what this is, is unbelief. Well, that unbelief that characterized 19th-century liberalism became a pervasive influence in what has been called the mainline churches here in the United States, which for the most part have become monuments of unbelief.
Now, how did the 19th-century liberals deal with this particular narrative? Now, the thing that's ironic is though they rejected supernaturalism, and they were committed naturalists, they still wanted to find some viable place for religion and for ethics. And though they rejected the supernatural claims of Jesus, they allotted Him for His ethical insights and honored Him as a great moral teacher. And they also said there's still room for religion that gets us in touch with our inner feelings and our spirituality.
Does that sound familiar to you in your culture today? People who are rank pagans who won't stand for a minute any biblical theology still talk about being spiritual, whatever that means. Well, how did they go about treating this New Testament narrative? Well, when I was in high school, we had a senior high class taught by the pastor of our church, and he treated this particular miraculous account and gave us some of the theories that were proffered by the 19th-century theologians. The one is at the beginning that it was simply a wholesale, fraudulent myth, the kind of myths that are made up in the imaginations of people who have some high esteem for a local hero, a myth that grows up around a Paul Bunyan, for example, or some other great person. And they say, well, what happened in the New Testament record was that this Jesus, whoever He really was in history, was a man about whom many myths were created to extol His significance. But we can't take this record seriously as history, and this spawned a whole movement in 19th-century thought called the quest for the historical Jesus. And the assumption behind the quest for the historical Jesus was that you can't find the historical Jesus in the New Testament.
We've got to reach beyond it, underneath it, inside of it, to unpack it. We have to demythologize it and come up with something that is rational and natural. So, the first explanation was that it was just a myth.
Now, another theory came forth that was even more critical. It said it was not only a myth, but it was an intentional fraud perpetrated by Jesus Himself. Jesus knew He was going to depart from the city to this place outside, where there weren't any restaurants or caravans, and decided to pull off a supernatural whopper. Before the crowd assembled, Jesus had His disciples buy a gigantic supply of foodstuffs, bread and fish, and conceal it in a secret cave by the plane, where He would later on give His message. And then as He instructed His disciples, He would stand in front of the hidden entrance to this cave when it was time to eat, and say His hocus pocus, and have them form a bucket brigade with the food and pass it through the cave to His back. And He had a cut in the back of His robe, and then like a magician who pulls silk scarves forever out of His sleeve, Jesus kept pulling out bread and fish and performs this miracle.
You know, almost the staging of such a thing would be almost more miraculous than the miracle itself. But this was a favorite way of explaining, or explaining away, if you will, this feeding of the multitude. Now, the third one, which was the one favored by our minister, was that what Jesus performed on that occasion was not a physical miracle of multiplying loaves and fishes, but what our Lord did was perform an ethical miracle. What had happened is that some people, as the little boy was an example, thought ahead and were prepared, bringing their lunches for the occasion, that many people in their excitement to go out and see Jesus and to hear Him were derelict.
They forgot to pack a lunch and didn't make adequate preparations. And like the foolish virgins of the parable, they came unprepared. And of course, the people who didn't have any food were looking at those who were eating, and they were ogling that food, and were extremely annoyed at their neighbor's abundance. And Jesus calmed them down and persuaded the haves to share voluntarily with the have-nots. This was one of the first biblical accounts of the redistribution of wealth under the impetus of the teaching of Jesus. And Jesus was so persuasive that the people did it. And so what we have here is an ethical miracle. Of course, that does radical violence to the New Testament text and completely depletes it of the significance that is found in the biblical text. But I said to you when I read this passage this morning to think about two questions. Do you believe this record?
And if so, so what? What difference does it make? Well, let me ask you this. If you're a naturalist, if you're a naturalist, nothing makes any difference. There's no one home up there, and if there's no one home, and all you have is nature, you don't live your life out in an environment that is hostile to you. Mother nature is not hostile. Mother nature is even worse.
She's indifferent. The stones, the rocks, the cells, the stars, the animals are indifferent to you and to your circumstances. Because from the perspective of nature, you're nothing more than a grown-up germ. You're a cosmic accident. Your origin comes from nothingness and meaninglessness, and you were sitting on one cog of a huge wheel of a vast cosmic machine that is running down inexorably to the abyss of meaninglessness. And so the two poles of your lives, one that begins in meaninglessness and ends in meaninglessness. And here's where the naive humanist jumps into the pot, tries to borrow some capital from Christianity, and says, Oh, we have to protect human dignity.
We have to tolerate everybody. How naive can you get? If you start with meaninglessness and you end with meaninglessness, what you have at every point in between is meaninglessness. The only philosophy I respect at all, apart from Christianity, is total nihilism, where nothing matters. If nature is all there is and she is indifferent, she's not a kind and compassionate mother. And to call the impersonal forces of nature mother at all is an insult to human motherhood. But you see, if naturalism is all there is, who cares whether black people or white people sit on the back of the bus?
Neither the black nor the white has any dignity whatsoever. Who cares if we kill 50 million unborn children? There's so much domestic garbage to begin with if you're a naturalist. And so, if you're a naturalist, there's no such thing as right. There's no such thing as wrong. All you have are personal preferences. And if the stronger guy has his personal preference over the weaker guy, then he'll use his club on the weaker guy's preferences. That's the way it is in naturalism.
When are we going to wake up to that and see what's at stake here? But let's assume just for a minute that on that day in Galilee, Jesus of Nazareth fed thousands of people to their satisfaction with five loaves and a few fish. What that means, friends, is the radical breakthrough of the supernatural into the natural. What that means is that Jesus of Nazareth is not a clever, ethical teacher. What that means is he is who he said he was, the incarnate Son of God. What that means, that not only God is, but that God cares, that he might dwell among us and that he might deal with our sin, with our disappointment, with our pain. And what that means is that every human being is made in the image of God, and who sits in the back of the bus matters, and it matters forever. And what it means is that your life matters, not just for now, but forever. 19th-century liberalism spilled over into the 20th, and we got the existential theology of the hik et nok, the here and the now. That's all there is. You only go around once. So, eat, drink, and be merry.
Live life with gusto, because tomorrow you die and nobody cares. Or at least nobody ought to care, because the word ought is a meaningless word. But we don't seem to see what's at stake here. I can remember in seminary dealing with professors who believed this kind of higher critical stuff, and who couldn't wait to attack the integrity of the Scriptures. And one time I talked to one of these professors, and I said, I get it that you don't believe that the Scriptures are going to get it, that you don't believe that the Bible is the Word of God. He said, no.
And I said, but here's what I don't understand. It seems to me that you seem to have some kind of delight in teaching that, where I would think that if you came to the conclusion that the Bible was not the inspired Word of God, that it's a conclusion that you would reach with tears. Because without this, we're without Christ. And without Christ, we're without hope. And we are, as the Apostle Paul declared, the most to be pitied, because here we are wasting another Sunday morning while other people are out having a good time. They're at the beach or wherever else they're enjoying themselves while we're sitting around here listening to philosophical poppycock. What difference does it make?
All the difference in the world. This was the bread of life who was there to feed those thousands of people who were hungry. It's the same bread of life who feeds us when we come to Him today. I have no interest in adoring, worshiping, praising, or working for a myth. If the nineteenth-century liberals were right, then I for one am going to sleep in tomorrow morning. But they're not right. They're wrong, desperately wrong, fatally wrong, eternally wrong. Thank God.
Thank God. Those who deny the supernatural and the Bible in reality deny the sovereignty and omnipotence of God. And as we heard Dr. R.C. Sproul boldly claim today, those liberal theologians are wrong, and they should be ignored. Thank you for joining us today for the Sunday edition of Renewing Your Mind. For the past several months, we have been privileged to look at the historical and theological context of the first eight chapters of Luke. Let me recommend that you request our resource offer today. It is a digital download of Dr. Sproul's expositional commentary of this gospel. You can request it today with your donation of any amount to Ligonier Ministries. Our offices are closed on this Lord's Day, but you can give your gift and make your request at renewingyourmind.org. Let me also encourage you to take advantage of Ligonier Ministries' interactive question-and-answer service. Questions about the basics of Christianity, theology, and the Bible can be answered in real time when you go to ask.ligonier.org. It's available 24 hours a day, Monday through Saturday. You can be confident that our team will work quickly to provide you with clear and trustworthy answers to your questions. That web address again is ask.ligonier.org. Renewing Your Mind is the listener-supported outreach of Ligonier Ministries. Thank you for being with us, and I hope you'll make plans to join us again next Sunday. you
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