Compassion and Disbelief

Welcome to God's Word for You, a ministry of Sharon R.P. Church in Morning Sun, Iowa. Check us out online at www.sharonrpc.org. We pray that this message will be a blessing to you and that the Lord will use it to transform your faith and your life. Will you please open your Bibles with me to Mark chapter 8. Mark chapter 8. If you're using the provided New King James Bibles in front of you, you'll find that on page 890. Mark chapter 8. Mark chapter 8. Brothers and sisters, this is God's perfect word. Let's pay careful attention.

In those days, the multitude being very great and having nothing to eat, Jesus called His disciples to Him and said to them, I have compassion on the multitude, because they have now continued with me three days, and have nothing to eat. And if I send them away hungry to their own houses, they will faint on the way, for some of them have come from afar.'

Then his disciples answered him, How can one satisfy these people with bread here in the wilderness? He asked them, how many loaves do you have? And they said, seven. So he commanded the multitude to sit down on the ground. And he took the seven loaves and gave thanks, broke them, and gave them to his disciples to set before them. And they set them before the multitude. They also had a few small fish. And having blessed them, he said to set them before them. So they ate and were filled, and took up seven large baskets of leftover fragments. Now those who had eaten were about four thousand.

And he sent them away, immediately got into the boat with his disciples, and came to the region of Dalmanutha. When the Pharisees came out and began to dispute with him, seeking from him a sign from heaven, testing them, or testing him. But he sighed deeply in his spirit and said, why does this generation seek a sign? Assuredly, I say to you, no sign shall be given to this generation. And he left them and getting into the boat again, he departed to the other side.

Prayer for Illumination

Let's pray. Father, we have read your word and it is perfect and it is true. Lord, we need your Holy Spirit. Father, we pray that these would not just be dead words on a page, but that you would instruct our souls that we might have eyes to see, hearts to believe in Jesus' name. Amen. I don't have a lot of time with you this morning, so I just need to jump right to the point. What do you need to take home with you?

Sermon

Jesus is compassionate. Jesus is compassionate. And yet some people won't believe. If you walk out of these doors today, or if I ask you at Chalk and Talk, I've given you your answer. Jesus is compassionate, and yet some people, despite that compassion, seems they will not believe. And we see Jesus' compassion, Jesus is compassionate, we see that in the first 10 verses of chapter 8.

In those days the multitudes being very great and having nothing to eat, Jesus called his disciples to himself and he said to them, and this is coming from the lips of Jesus himself, what does he say in verse 2? I have compassion. on the multitude. Jesus, the God-man who created all things, seen and unseen, who upholds and sustains things by His mighty power, is not a transcendent overlord, but He's compassionate. Time and time and time again, Jesus is moved with compassion for people, and it's interesting who this is talking to. At the end of chapter 7, we moved into a Gentile phase of Jesus' ministry.

He's been up in Tyre, and then he went to Sidon. He's made his way down by the Sea of Galilee, and now he's in the area of the Decapolis. And there, as he's in the area of the Decapolis, this is a Greek region. This is a Greek area on the eastern, northeastern side of the Sea of Galilee.

And there, Jesus says from His own mouth, He has compassion on this multitude of non-Jewish people. This is not to say that there's no Jewish people in the room or in the group, but it's going to be primarily Jewish people. There's 4,000 of them and Jesus sees them. He's seen the multitude coming to Him for now three days and He notices their needs. They don't have any food. Thank God He knows your frame. He knows the needs that you have. He knows that you need your daily bread. He knows that you might collapse upon the road if you did not have. The food you needed.

And so Jesus looks at him, at his disciples, and he tells them that they need to feed them. I mean, this is almost like deja vu, isn't it? Didn't we just see this? When Jesus fed the 5,000 just a chapter or two before? And the disciples don't seem to get it again. Look at what they say in verse 4. Then his disciples answered him, how can one satisfy these people with bread here in the wilderness? And he asked them the same question he asked them before.

Well, what do you have? Before it was seven loaves, now it's five. It's even less. And they bring him these five loaves. And it's amazing what Jesus Christ can do with just five loaves and two little fish. And we might look at the disciples and think, how did you do this again? How are you not catching this? Jesus did it with the Jewish people before. Now he's doing it with his Gentile population. Why are you getting this, disciples?

Come on, why are you so dull? But if we're honest, How many times has your wife had to tell you about the same sin in your life? How many times do you still deal with that frustration with your children that you know you ought not to? How many times is it a struggle in your life with not understanding something that Jesus Christ, it seems, has clearly taught? And then with foresight, years later, you look back and you go, oh, how could I have missed it?

Jesus Christ is compassionate even with His disciples here. He doesn't jump down their throat. He doesn't make them feel little. He's teaching them. He's showing them, once again, that He is the God of creation. He is the maker and sustainer of all things. And make no doubt about it, what happens in verses 6 through 10 is nothing less than a miracle. Jesus takes these, I misspoke before, seven loaves, takes these seven loaves, and he feeds 4,000 people. And there's enough for goodie boxes to go home later. Baskets full of bread. It's like going to Olive Garden in the Middle East. It's abundant, right?

Because with Jesus, there is abundance. So Jesus is this compassionate God, and He's the maker and sustainer of all these things. But then there's a contrast, and I need you to see the contrast, because I think that this is what Mark is doing in telling the story. He shows his compassion to the Gentiles. He gets in the boat with his disciples, and he goes to the other side. He returns to the Jewish side of the lake. And look at what happens in verse 11.

Then the Pharisees came out and began to dispute with him, seeking from him a sign from heaven, testing him. Jesus arrives on the shore of the Jewish side of the lake of Galilee, and there he's confronted with the disbelief of the Pharisees. Jesus is confronted with a disbelief of the Pharisees. Now notice what the text says. It doesn't say the Pharisees came to him because they honestly wanted to have a conversation, because they wanted to have open-mindedness and think maybe he is doing these good things and maybe we should believe him. Notice the posture of their hearts as they come to Jesus. Then the Pharisees came out and began to dispute with him, seeking from him a sign from heaven, testing him.

The same word testing there could have been translated tempting him. They're not there because they love Jesus. They're there demanding more signs. Trying to trip Him up. As if the miracles so far weren't enough. We're only at Mark chapter 8. We're only halfway through the story. And already, Jesus has produced plenty of signs from heaven for them to believe.

In chapter 1, He exercised the evil spirit from the midst of them during the synagogue. He healed Peter's mother-in-law. He healed the sick and the demon-possessed in chapter 1. He cleansed the man with leprosy just by touching him and speaking to him. He healed a paralytic by talking to him. He calmed a storm by speaking to the wind. He's healed a demon-possessed man in chapter 5. He raised the daughter of the synagogue leader from the dead. He's healed the woman with the issue of blood. He's already fed 5,000. He's walked on water. He's healed a deaf and mute man. He's just fed 4,000 more, and they say, we want more signs.

It's not enough, Jesus. They're like Pharaoh with hard hearts, refusing to believe. It's not enough for them. Let's face it, it's not enough for modern critics either. It's not enough for people even in our own day that Jesus truly did these miracles. It's not enough.

In our day, I've met people who say, well, I'm not going to believe in Jesus because I don't see the miracles today. And I think, man, I hope you don't believe the news because they tell you all sorts of stuff that you've never seen and yet you believe is actually happening. And the issue with that is Jesus would have to, if that was the case, Jesus would have to come back every single generation. There would have to be a new incarnation every 30 years. Modern critics will also try to tell you that they don't believe that Jesus is real.

But that takes a lot of faith in and of itself, because you have to ignore historical data. You have to ignore Josephus with his writing. You have to ignore the Roman writer Tacitus with his histories of Rome. You have to ignore all sorts of things. You have to ignore the scriptures themselves, which, like it or not, are a historical record.

Brothers and sisters, this is a book of spiritual truth, yes, but it is a historical book. Biblical scholars blush at the amount of manuscript data that we have. You try to find Homer's Iliad, you'll only find a handful of ancient parchments. You try to find Plato's Republic, you'll only find a handful of parchments. You go and you try to find and even just count up the number of parchments and scrolls and books of the scriptures and you will be left with your head spinning. There are people who devote their entire lives to just trying to catalog the number of manuscripts we have for a book that's historically true.

It's not a bunch of fables, this is why Luke wrote his letter to O Theophilus, I'm writing to you in orderly account. These are the things that actually happened. Modern critics have to ignore that Peter was a real person preaching these sermons in Rome, and Mark was sitting at his feet writing them down. You have to throw away the church historians from the 200s who told us this.

Modern critics will tell us that, well, I just can't believe it because there's not enough. I didn't see it with my own eyes. And I say, well, do you believe that Alexander conquered the known world at this time? Do you think that Hannibal crossed the Alps? Did Lincoln actually preach the Gettysburg Address? You didn't see that. You didn't hear that.

You have to trust a historian for that. You have to trust that somebody wrote it down. See, some people come to Jesus Christ and no matter what they do, their presuppositions, what they hold to is, I won't believe it. It doesn't matter what the historical data says. I'm not going to believe it. This is the heart of the Pharisees. It was the heart of Pharaoh.

But we believe in a historical Jesus. We believe in a Jesus who truly healed the synagogue leader's daughter. We believe in a Jesus who truly did walk upon the water. We believe in a Jesus, and this is not some fable, but Jesus actually put his hands on physical bread, broke the bread, and distributed it to his disciples, and he fed 4,000. We believe in the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ.

But it's not just a 21st century problem. Even one of Jesus' own disciples at the resurrection doubted. When all the other disciples said, we've seen Jesus, Thomas, who wasn't in the room, says, I can't believe it. Not unless I put my finger in his hand and put my hand in his side, I can't believe it. So Jesus appears to him. He says, go ahead, buddy. My hand's here. My side's here. Put your hand in my side. But notice the heart difference. Thomas would believe. He'd fall on his face and he'd proclaim, my Lord and my God. He would believe.

He had seen these same promises, but the Pharisees don't believe Jesus. They don't even know if he's really from heaven or from hell. They were part of the group circulating that the miracles he was doing is from the prince of demons, Beelzebub himself. And as Jesus, as he looks upon them, they have to...

I wish the Bible was ten times longer sometimes so I could ask Jesus, what were you thinking right then? Because at his baptism, From heaven, there was a voice. This is my beloved son in whom I am well pleased. What more proof could be given to them? Whether he was from heaven.

Why are people so hard hearted about this? Let's stop for a second and get ourselves correctly oriented. The question shouldn't be, why are people so hard-hearted against us? The question should be, why would the Lord be so gracious to us that he would allow us to believe it?

Faith is a gift. Why would he be so kind to the 4,000 Gentiles who he just fed. He just told the woman at Tyre that it wasn't right to give the bread to the dogs. And now Jesus is giving the crumbs to 4,000. To the Jew first and also to the Gentile, that's us. Why would he be so gracious to us? Why would he be so kind to give us a spirit of understanding and of faith? Do you see, we want to read ourselves in the story, we want to see ourselves in the 4,000, but there's nothing that keeps us from having been one of the religious Pharisees. Stuck in our traditions, comfortable with our own self-righteousness.

But there are some people who just won't believe. And I know many of your hearts break as you think about your family members that you've pleaded with God. You've told them the gospel. You've read them the scriptures and it's like no matter what you do, no matter how much mercy you show them, no matter how much you pray for them, it seems like heaven is made out of brass.

So I need to ask you a hard question. The last point of the sermon is to ask you a hard question. Will Jesus turn his back on you? I think one of the hardest verses in the Bible is one that we find here. They came and they disputed with him. Verse 11. Notice Jesus' reaction in 12 and 13. But Jesus sighed deeply in his spirit and said, why does this generation seek a sign? Assuredly, I say to you, no sign shall be given to this generation.

And it was some of the saddest words in the entire Bible. And he left them. And he left them. Children, someday you're going to leave this church. The question is, will Christ leave in your hearts with you? Or will Christ depart from you? Jesus doesn't take this lightly.

Notice He sighs. He's deeply distressed at their disbelief, at the hardness of their hearts. Just like His children Israel in the wilderness. He brought them out of the Red Sea. He gave them manna. He gave them the quail. He gave them water from the rock. He gave them the promised land. He's made them into this mighty nation. And there, at the edge of the southern border of Canaan, they won't believe Him. The spies come back and they don't trust that God is actually good.

Some of you, I don't know each one of your hearts. I don't know what's going on in your life or in your hearts. Many of you... Many of you have sat under the preaching of the Word. You've heard the Scriptures read week in and week out. These sayings have been proclaimed to you, but it's not until you receive and rest upon Jesus Christ as He's offered in the Gospels that you will find rest for your souls.

Now, some of you are going to object. You're going to say, this is a little bit too harsh, Brian. We don't know people's hearts. And you're right. As long as somebody is sucking in oxygen into their lungs, there is hope for them. The difference is Jesus does know what's going on in their hearts. And there are people that Jesus walks away from. Jesus does judge perfectly.

So I ask you, Is the historical record enough for you to believe? Are the miracles enough for you? Are the words of Jesus Christ sufficient for you to believe? Was the cross and the resurrection enough or that last great day when Jesus Christ judges.

Well, he saw amazed at your disbelief. Brothers and sisters, Jesus is our compassionate creator. He is the one who takes note of your frame, who knows your frailties, who cares for your needs, who loves you and calls you to love him. He's our King. He's our Savior. He's our Redeemer. He's the only one who makes us right with God, who paid with His own blood the price for our sins. Rest in Him. Love Him. Trust in Him. Go to Him all the days of your life. For in him there is fullness of joy, and in his right hand there is pleasure forevermore.

Closing Prayer

Let's pray. God, we do not deserve such grace. And Lord, I confess to you that there are many people in this congregation whom I do not know what's going on in their hearts. Father, please, by your Holy Spirit, impress the urgency and the truth of the gospel of Jesus Christ upon the souls of every person in this room.

Lord, we pray that we might not wait until tomorrow to call out upon you, but that we might continue to love you and to follow after you. For you are our only hope. You are our rescue. You are our redeemer. Lord, we pray that you would fill our eyes and our hearts with love for you. And Father, we pray that that love for you would spill out as we go and tell others. Whether they believe it or not, Lord, is not up to us. Father, but we thank you that you are compassionate. In Jesus' name.

We pray that the message would be used by God to transform your faith in your life this week. If you'd like to get more information about us, feel free to go to the website, SharonRPC.org. We'd love to invite you to worship with us. Our worship time is 10 a.m. every Sunday at 25204 160th Avenue, Morning Sun, Iowa, 52640. May God richly bless you this week.