Mind-Boggling Grace

 

It’s a story of outrageous, mind-boggling grace.  It makes skeptics laugh out loud, the doubter question the logic of it all, and believers to bow before Jesus and call Him Lord.  The thought of feeding over five thousand people with a small boy’s lunch of a couple of sardine-size fish and five small barley loaves, is a bit much, don’t you think?

           

Then, again, the whole of idea of God coming into history in the person of Jesus is a bit much.  Feeding five thousand people is a minimal concern if the incarnation of God into history really did, in fact, occur.   If Jesus really is God with us there is something more going on by the Sea of Galilee than who is buying lunch—something wonderful and mysterious and powerful and God-like?

           

By sunset the people were reaching conclusions about Jesus, one of them being, “This is truly the Prophet who is to come into the world” (John 6:14).  They saw something that made them think more deeply than about their hungry tummies.  They saw God in Jesus that day.

           

Interestingly enough when John tells this story he doesn’t call it a miracle, like we do.  He called in a “sign” (vs. 14).  It was sign to point them to something deeper than the need for lunch.  They needed God, and they needed God now.  They didn’t need a miracle worker, they needed God.    

           

By the way, we don’t need a miracle worker either.  We need God.  We need to humble ourselves before God and let God do what God does.  We need to let God be God in us.  If God gives you a lunch today enjoy it, but know that you will be hungry by sundown.  However, if He gives you the bread of His life, you will never go hungry again in your inner being.  At Sundown on all the days yet to come, you will still be satisfied because in Him you have “eternal life” (John 6:54).