Have you ever wondered how Jesus multiplied the fish and the loaves to feed 5,000 people? Or how He was able to walk on water?
Jo welcomes pastor and author Jared C. Wilson to unpack his latest book . The miracles of Jesus are often misunderstood and Pastor Wilson helps us see they are more than meets the eye. We’ll explore how Jesus’s miracles reveal authority, divinity and the ultimate mission of restoration.
So when it comes to the motivation for the miracles that Jesus performed, was Jesus acting out of compassion or a greater purpose still?
The answer is yes! I think that those things are really connected. You know certainly, even disconnected from a particularly miracle, Jesus looks out at the people. He feels compassion for them, and says because they are like sheep without a shepherd and they’re harassed and helpless. So Jesus really loved people, and so when he’s doing a miracle like a miraculous feeding to provide for them he’s making a theological point that if you want to have provision & sustenance you must come to him and he’s the provider of that, but he’s also filling hungry tummies. He’s seeing. He’s having compassion on them. He sees that felt need of hunger.
Expanding on that point, Pastor Wilson points to Jesus’ feeding of the 5,000 in John 6:
Clearly the crowd is there. They haven’t had anything to eat, and so he works this miracle to feed them all. But then he begins to preach about himself, and he preaches that if somebody really wants life, really wants to live eternally, then they have to eat his flesh and drink his blood, which drives many of them away. It says that most of them flee the scene. The words are too hard. I think we see in that instance that Jesus is not un-compassionate, even the message is not an un-compassionate message. It’s because he loves them and wants them to be saved. But we see where people love the miracle but not necessarily the miracle worker.
