This is a devotional with my thoughts added to verses from the Bible. I highly encourage you to dig into the word with your own thoughts. The Daily Devotion series is one way to do this. However, I know that sometimes we want to read other people’s ideas about Bible passages, so I am starting the Everyday series. I hope and pray that these posts will draw you nearer to Jesus.
DAY 4–Remember to pray before you begin.
Mark 8:14-21 The Leaven of the Pharisees
Now they had forgotten to bring bread, and they had only one loaf with them in the boat. And he cautioned them, saying, “Watch out; beware of the leaven of the Pharisees and the leaven of Herod.” And they began discussing with one another the fact that they had no bread. And Jesus, aware of this, said to them, “Why are you discussing the fact that you have no bread? Do you not yet perceive or understand? Are your hearts hardened? Having eyes do you not see, and having ears do you not hear? And do you not remember? When I broke the five loaves for the five thousand, how many baskets full of broken pieces did you take up?” They said to him, “Twelve.” “And the seven for the four thousand, how many baskets full of broken pieces did you take up?” And they said to him, “Seven.” And he said to them, “Do you not yet understand?”
One excellent method of Bible study is to use your “sanctified imagination” to try to picture the events as you are reading. In order to do this, you need to remember the context of what has happened before and relate it to the present activities. Previous to this passage, the Pharisees had been arguing with Jesus and asking for a sign. After refusing to give them a sign, Jesus and the disciples got into the boat and began their journey to the other side of the lake. The group must have left quickly if they forgot to get supplies before they left.
Here is a possible scenario that explains why the disciples forgot to bring bread. In my mind, I picture Jesus brooding about the Pharisees’ stubborn refusal to be saved as He strides toward the boat. The disciples scramble to keep up with Him while asking Him what He wants to do now. Then, I see Him saying in a distracted and aloof tone to cast off to the other side of the lake. In the disciples’ confusion over the abrupt withdrawal and Jesus’ brooding over the Pharisees, they forget their normal routine of buying bread to take with them. After they have gotten a little way out into the sea, one of them realizes that they have forgotten the bread, and they start looking at the few supplies they have on the boat and discussing what to do. Suddenly, Jesus, who has been sitting quietly since they left the shore, tells them to watch out for the leaven of the Pharisees. The disciples, whose minds are focused on the missing bread, associate leaven with bread and decide that Jesus is making a cryptic statement about their lack of preparation. They continue talking to each other about the missing bread, but now their Master’s words are thrown into the mix.
Did the situation develop in the manner that I imagined? Maybe yes and maybe no. The point is to start to dig into the interactions we read in the Bible so that they make sense to us. Of course, there are cautions to keep in mind when using your sanctified imagination. First, be ready to change your understanding as you receive more information. Do not let your imagined scenario become set in stone. Second, be aware that all the passages of the Bible are connected, so any actions and motivations in your imagination must agree with the Bible as a whole, as well as the specific context of the passage that you are reading.
I always wondered at the seemingly abrupt way that Jesus interrupted the disciples’ conversation with a spiritual lesson and then was disappointed with His disciples when they did not comprehend His meaning. However, if we take this event and connect it with the larger context of the previous verses—the Pharisees’ refusal to believe and Jesus abruptly leaving—it makes sense that Jesus’ mind was still on how the Pharisees not only could not be saved, but also on what made these religious leaders so resistant to His teaching. He would have pondered about how the Pharisee’s teachings had spread to others making it more difficult for the common people to follow God also. Jesus was always more concerned with the spiritual openness of humans (which He will never force) than the physical (which He could always easily take care of by simply breaking a little bread). His disciples, on the other hand, were easily sidetracked by physical needs. Jesus questioned them about why their priorities were all screwed up even after being with Him for so long.
The group had been focused on bread or the lack of it for days. On the boat, Jesus taught the disciples to stop worrying about what they did not physically possess. He said that they were foolish to be preoccupied with only having one loaf of bread since He had already shown them that He could take a few loaves and feed 4,000 and 5,000 people with enough left over for the disciples to have plenty to eat. Even today, Jesus reminds His followers that He has always provided for them and not forgotten their physical needs. Just like the disciples, we must stop thinking with our bellies and start thinking about the mission that Jesus has given us. Jesus wants us to focus on the world’s need of salvation and the problems imposed by having to deal with false religious ideas taking hold of the people’s thinking. In Jesus’ eyes, both His disciples and His followers today are blind and deaf because the mission that He has assigned us is often ignored in favor of focusing on the physical needs of the moment.
DAY 5–Remember to pray before you begin.
Mark 8:22-26 Walking Trees
He came to Bethsaida. They brought a blind man to him, and begged him to touch him. He took hold of the blind man by the hand, and brought him out of the village. When he had spat on his eyes, and laid his hands on him, he asked him if he saw anything. He looked up, and said, “I see men; for I see them like trees walking.” Then again he laid his hands on his eyes. He looked intently, and was restored, and saw everyone clearly. He sent him away to his house, saying, “Don’t enter into the village, nor tell anyone in the village.”
In Bethsaida, Jesus was asked to heal a blind man. This man had not been born blind since during the healing process he described people as walking trees. He knew what trees looked like. The blind man was well loved since his friends or family were begging Jesus to heal him. We are fortunate to have friends who love us enough to bring us to Jesus when we are in trouble. We should pray that we will always be that kind of friend in our interactions with others.
While the blind man could not see Jesus, he could hear his loved ones asking that Jesus touch him, so his expectation was to be touched. At that moment, the man’s faith in Jesus was partially based on other people’s belief in Jesus’ touch. Jesus led the blind man out of the village. This allowed them to avoid having more crowds, but it could also have been to work with the blind man’s own faith rather than the faith of his loved ones.
Have you ever wondered why Jesus performed different miracles in different ways? The Bible tells us that Jesus had to work with the faith of the people who received the healing. Their faith was based on their expectations, so He worked within their expectations. The blind man could not see and was used to strange hands touching him, so he may have needed to feel more than just a hand on his face to believe in his healing. Jesus may have spit on his eyes so that the blind man would realize that more was going on than simply having a stranger touch him.
It may seem confusing that Jesus did not completely heal this man from the beginning, that it was a two-step process, whereas other healings were complete from the first. One explanation might be that some kind of material came out of this man’s eyes as they were made whole and simply needed to be wiped away so that he could see clearly. In other words, the healing could have been complete from the first, but cleaning was necessary for the man to know that he was completely well. Something similar happened during Paul’s healing when scale-like material fell from Paul’s eyes. Often, we are in similar situations. For some of us, we are healed completely when Jesus comes into our lives, but we are surrounded by so much grime that we cannot clearly see that we are now whole, so God has to work with us, cleaning us up so that we know that we are healed. It is only at that point that we can see clearly and not just in part. Our prayer should be that Jesus will take all the filth away from our lives so that we can have a close relationship with Him without anything mucking up our connection to Jesus.
DAY 6–Remember to pray before you begin.
Mark 8:27-30 Who do you think I am?
Jesus went out, with his disciples, into the villages of Caesarea Philippi. On the way he asked his disciples, “Who do men say that I am?” They told him, “John the Baptizer, and others say Elijah, but others: one of the prophets.” He said to them, “But who do you say that I am?” Peter answered, “You are the Christ.” He commanded them that they should tell no one about him.
Jesus and the disciples left Bethsaida and went to the villages of Caesarea Philippi. They did not walk in silence. The group must have spoken about many topics in their travels on the Sea of Galilee and as they hiked from place to place. On this journey, Jesus questioned the disciples about the opinion of the crowds of people who had been gathering around Him. He asked who people thought He was. The disciples informed Him that some thought that He was John the Baptist raised from the dead. This was illogical as Jesus was nothing like John the Baptist from ministry to appearance. Most tellingly, John the Baptist had not performed any miracles. This belief despite the obvious dissimilarities between the two men demonstrated how large the person of John the Baptist had loomed in people’s minds. Other people said that Jesus was Elijah returned. Here they were working with a prophecy from Malachi. “Behold, I will send you Elijah the prophet before the great and terrible day of Yahweh comes. He will turn the hearts of the fathers to the children, and the hearts of the children to their fathers, lest I come and strike the earth with a curse” (Malachi 4:5-6). Another group of people believed that Jesus was just an ordinary prophet.
All three choices denied Jesus as the Messiah and gave Him a lesser role. We may wonder at the people’s blindness in not seeing that Jesus was the Messiah, but Jesus had been careful up to this point to avoid claiming that title. He had demonstrated that He was the Christ in multiple ways from casting out demons to healing multitudes to feeding thousands from just a few loaves of bread to the quality and clarity of His teaching, but the crowds expected that the true Messiah would actively claim the title. Also, Jesus had not shown any signs of overthrowing their rulers and making Israel the center of the nations. Thus, worldly expectations that misapplied prophecies became a stumbling block to their understanding of who the Messiah would be and what He would do. Sinful humanity has not changed in 2,000 years. Many Christians still misunderstand the Savior and misapply prophecy to meet their own worldly ideas of power and authority. We would do well to frequently reexamine the Sermon of the Mount and the parables of the kingdom of heaven to ensure that our own ideas of God and His dominion are in line with the scriptures rather than clinging to illogical traditions and misguided ambitions.
Finally, Jesus asked the disciples who they believed Him to be. Peter answered that Jesus was the Messiah. Up to this point, Jesus had not claimed this title, and it seems that He still did not want to make a public announcement about who He was. It was not yet time to proclaim His mission. This was still the gathering time when people were given a chance to hear the message, not the climax when He would be rejected, so He told the disciples not to publicly claim the title of Messiah for Him yet.
A lot of Jesus’ ministry seems to be about timing, more specifically, hurry up and wait. In some ways it seems like He was in a holding pattern. He kept crisscrossing the Sea with seemingly no pattern going to one side and then another eventually reaching most of the places around the area, but not in a systematic way, unless the system was to go to a place far away from where He had just been in order to let the seeds He had sewn have time to spread and grow. By going to a new place where He had not been before, He planted new seeds of faith. Interestingly, Jesus was not going to harvest these seeds. He would leave that job for His disciples later. However, beyond covering a great deal of territory, there does not seem to be an obvious pattern to His movements. His methods were the opposite of the way a modern business would systematically divide territory for maximum coverage. However, just because we do not see the pattern, it does not mean that He was simply wandering aimlessly around Galilee waiting until it was time to go to Jerusalem. It simply means that humans do not see the logic of His journeys. Too often we become confused by God’s way of working because we expect a defined pattern and structure to the work that we participate in, but we are too limited to see the grand plan that is being enacted on a worldwide scale. What may seem unsystematic to us may in reality be very systematic. We need to have faith in the progress of God’s work even if we do not see step-by-step progress. Our job is to serve God and trust in His choices regardless of whether we see specific results and understandable patterns. God is working on a much larger scale than we could ever fathom.
DAY 7–Remember to pray before you begin.
Mark 8:31-33 Setting your mind on the things of man
He began to teach them that the Son of Man must suffer many things, and be rejected by the elders, the chief priests, and the scribes, and be killed, and after three days rise again. He spoke to them openly. Peter took him, and began to rebuke him. But he, turning around, and seeing his disciples, rebuked Peter, and said, “Get behind me, Satan! For you have in mind not the things of God, but the things of men.”
The verse says that Jesus began teaching about His suffering, rejection, death, and resurrection. How did Jesus teach His disciples? He probably began by showing them the scriptures that said that the Messiah would suffer and die. Then He could clearly state that these prophecies applied to Him. When Peter took Jesus aside, he most likely thought that he was being respectful by not disagreeing with his Master’s interpretation publicly. Peter was not doubting that Jesus was the Messiah. It was because Peter knew that Jesus was the Messiah that he was confident that the prophecies pointed to the triumphs of the Messiah, so Peter was sure that Jesus was wrong in His focus on the suffering servant passages of the Bible. Peter was disagreeing with his Rabbi, not on who the Messiah was, but on what the Messiah would do according to the scriptures. He was only repeating the established interpretations of the day to His radical Teacher who was turning everything upside down in society. Peter may have been the one to say it, but surely the other disciples believed the same prophecies as Peter and were happy for him to talk to Jesus about their concerns. This passage shows that at this time, the disciples did not see Jesus as being directly connected to the Father. They viewed Him as being fallible–making mistakes and misunderstanding the scriptures. However, Jesus did not rebuke Peter for this failure to believe in His infallibility, but instead Jesus censured Peter for focusing on the world so much that it clouded Peter’s ability to understand the scriptures.
Peter may have taken Jesus aside privately, but the other disciples were there right behind them listening. Jesus reprimanded Peter with the strongest words calling him Satan, the accuser, and telling Peter to get behind Him. In a sense, Jesus was telling Peter to stop trying to be the Teacher and return to his place as a student. Jesus was telling Peter that he was speaking Satan’s words and following Satan’s path. The strength of Jesus’ words was acceptable in a Master-student relationship when the student has been too forward, but the strength was also because Jesus was rebuking Satan, himself, who wanted to control Peter. Jesus said in Luke “Simon, Simon, behold, Satan asked to have all of you, that he might sift you as wheat, but I prayed for you, that your faith wouldn’t fail. You, when once you have turned again, establish your brothers” (Luke 22:31-32). Satan had requested permission to try Peter in the same way that he had asked for Job. Somehow, Jesus knew about this. Thus, Jesus knew that Satan was trying to sift Peter. When Jesus was with Peter, He could protect him, but Jesus knew that there would come a time when He could not be with Peter in person. Jesus was telling Satan that he could not have Peter. Jesus was telling Peter to be careful who he gave his thoughts to. Jesus clearly tells us here where to find our satanic thoughts: the world. When we become focused on the desires of society and try to modify the teachings of God to fit the objectives of men, we are listening to Satan. We must seek God first and His will, then we must attempt to modify the worldly aspects of our life to fit God’s will. We need to pray that God will teach us to think and act like He does rather than following our attraction to the world.