Don’t take MY Word for It

The feeding of the 5,000 is a wonderful account of one of the miracles of Jesus. One of the places we find it recorded is in Luke 9:12-17. Here is the text, take a gander:

¹² Now the day was ending, and the twelve came and said to Him, “Send the crowd away, that they may go into the surrounding villages and countryside and find lodging and get something to eat; for here we are in a desolate place.” ¹³ But He said to them, “You give them something to eat!” And they said, “We have no more than five loaves and two fish, unless perhaps we go and buy food for all these people.” ¹⁴ (For there were about five thousand men.) And He said to His disciples, “Have them sit down to eat in groups of about fifty each.” ¹⁵ They did so, and had them all sit down. ¹⁶ Then He took the five loaves and the two fish, and looking up to heaven, He blessed them, and broke them, and kept giving them to the disciples to set before the people. ¹⁷ And they all ate and were satisfied; and the broken pieces which they had left over were picked up, twelve baskets full.

What an amazing thing! I am constantly impressed by the miracles Jesus performed during His time on earth. With only a few loaves of bread and two fish Jesus was able to feed five thousand men!

Something that often gets overlooked as a minor detail, however, is the fact that Jesus had the men sit in groups of about 50 each. While we aren’t told specifically why Jesus said this, we can probably assume that He was setting a precedent for the church that only 50 people should meet in a single worship service on Sunday. Yes…I’m sure that’s it.

Does that last paragraph seem strange to anyone else? It seems strange to me. Maybe it’s the fact that Jesus never said this was a precedent that must be followed, or that the main point of this account has nothing to do with how many were in each group of men, but it seems like quite a stretch to force this into a command for the church to follow, doesn’t it?

It seems like a stretch because it’s wrong. Sometimes we read one article or another, or one commentary or another, and just take the writer’s word for it, even though some of the things proposed are as preposterous as the claim that “only 50 people should meet in a single worship services”. We can weed out this type of error by checking the words of writers with the Scriptures.

Be careful of these types of false teaching when you are studying. They’ll creep up on you, and before you know it they’ll have you believing false doctrine. Make sure you study the Scriptures yourself, and don’t just take someone’s word for it!