The Father’s love for His children
Read Mark 8:1-21
“He makes them go over the particulars of the miracles―hardly to refresh their memories―but to make their hearts dwell on them. For they had already forgotten or had failed to see their central revelation―the eternal fact of God’s love and care and compassion. They knew the number of the men each time, the number of the loaves each time, the number of the baskets of fragments they had each time taken up, but they forgot the Love that had so broken the bread that its remnants twenty times outweighed its loaves.
Having thus questioned them like children, listened as to the answers of children, He turns the light of their thoughts upon themselves, and, with an argument to the man which overleaps all the links of its own absolute logic, demands, ‘How is it that you do not understand?’ Then they did understand, and knew that He did not speak to them of the leaven of bread, but of the teaching of the Pharisees and of the Sadducees. He who trusts can understand; he whose mind is set at ease can discover a reason.
The lesson He would have had them learn from the miracle, the natural lesson, the only lesson worthy of the miracle, was, that God cared for His children, and could, did, and would provide for their necessities. This lesson they had not learned. No doubt the power of the miracle was some proof of His mission, but the love of it proved it better, for it made it worth proving: it was a throb of the Father’s heart.”
~George MacDonald
“He makes them go over the particulars of the miracles―hardly to refresh their memories―but to make their hearts dwell on them. For they had already forgotten or had failed to see their central revelation―the eternal fact of God’s love and care and compassion. They knew the number of the men each time, the number of the loaves each time, the number of the baskets of fragments they had each time taken up, but they forgot the Love that had so broken the bread that its remnants twenty times outweighed its loaves.
Having thus questioned them like children, listened as to the answers of children, He turns the light of their thoughts upon themselves, and, with an argument to the man which overleaps all the links of its own absolute logic, demands, ‘How is it that you do not understand?’ Then they did understand, and knew that He did not speak to them of the leaven of bread, but of the teaching of the Pharisees and of the Sadducees. He who trusts can understand; he whose mind is set at ease can discover a reason.
The lesson He would have had them learn from the miracle, the natural lesson, the only lesson worthy of the miracle, was, that God cared for His children, and could, did, and would provide for their necessities. This lesson they had not learned. No doubt the power of the miracle was some proof of His mission, but the love of it proved it better, for it made it worth proving: it was a throb of the Father’s heart.”
~George MacDonald
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