After the feeding of the 4,000 Mark writes “And He sent them away, immediately got into the boat with His disciples, and came to the region of Dalmanutha.” That miracle had been a revelation of Jesus’ compassion; He was moved by the condition of the multitude and would not leave them hungry or put them in a situation to fail. This may be a bit of an aside, but I believe this is an important part of God’s “Fatherly” character, He does not put us in positions to fail, He is always positioning us to learn to depend upon Him and to be able to be built up, encouraged, equipped and empowered. The ways of God are higher than our ways, so sometimes, we can probably even say often, we don’t see what He sees or grasp what He is working out in and through us but we can trust that He is not putting us in positions of failure or destruction. He will not keep us comfortable, He will even lead us to people, places and things that seem unsafe, but He Himself has promised to be our safety, to be our defense, to be our deliverer and to always have compassion for us. The multiplication of bread and fish the first time was about God’s ability the second time it was about God’s compassion. Tonight as we move to the next verses that follow the feeding of the 4,000 what we will learn is that compassion is something that is often overlooked. Jesus did a beautiful thing for a crowd of hungry people and the first people that met Him afterwards dismissed all He had done before and demanded that He do something else, do something for them right there and right now. I believe that we can equate the Pharisees demand for a sign with our society’s demand for the gospel and the church to be relevant to our culture. We are told that culture and society sets a standard and we must all fit into that standard. Relevance is good but we have to always be sure that we are measuring relevance by the proper standard. What I pray we will learn tonight from Jesus’response and Mark’s letter is that the gospel cannot be bent to fit into the relevance of the culture but culture must always be bent to fit into the relevance of the gospel. The Pharisees will demand a sign and Jesus will refuse, not because He is unwilling to reveal Himself and give them His grace but because their demand can’t actually be met, they are not seeking truth they are imposing their agenda.
