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We’re in Matthew chapter 15:29-39. This summer—I realize that summer’s over, but it’s not for me—I’ve been re-reading the book Undaunted Courage by Stephen Ambrose, which is the story of Thomas Jefferson, Meriwether Lewis, and the opening of the American West. Just in case you have forgotten your ninth-grade U.S. History, let me give you a little history here.
In 1803, the United States purchased from France 828,000 square miles of land called the Louisiana Purchase for $15 million, or four cents an acre. I wish they could have cut off maybe 100 for me. I’d have paid eight cents an acre and kept those 100 acres for myself.
Thomas Jefferson had already been planning exploration of the West, so once the Louisiana Purchase was done, he was ready to send Captains Merriweather Lewis and William Clark across Louisiana, seeking an all-water route to the Pacific. They believed that there would be an all-water route to the Pacific, up the Missouri River, across Montana, and then into the West, seeking a connection to the Columbia.
Trade was a big goal here. It’s amazing to read some of the things that were going on. One of them was beaver pelts— so valuable. Ambrose says that $900 worth of beaver pelts would be sold to a trader in the West, would be shipped to New York and resold for $9,000, and shipped to China and sold for $90,000. So valuable. Many people say that Beaver Pelt’s built the West.
The Corps of Discovery, these 33 men and Lewis’s dog, traveled over 8,000 miles in less than two and a half years on foot, boat, and by horse.
This book is amazing. I’d read it several years ago, and re-read it because we spent some time in Montana and Wyoming this summer. I was like, “You know what? If I’m going to be out west, I’m going to read about the Great Plains.” Those stories of that corps going across the untouched Great Plains are just like— your mind will go wild. The flora and fauna they experienced, which had never been cataloged, Lewis carefully cataloged, drew pictures, and wrote descriptions of everything he saw.
They only had one man die. Sergeant Charles Floyd died of a burst appendix. Doctors said he would have died in New York City. It had nothing to do with him being on the frontier. He’s buried today in “Floyd’s Bluff” in Sioux City, Iowa. He died on August 20th, 1804.
Of course, who can forget Sacagawea, the daughter of the Shoshone chief who was born in Lemhi, Idaho (we’ll get back to that in a minute), who would guide the Corps through the Rocky Mountains.
Thomas Jefferson and Meriweather Lewis were functioning on two assumptions about the American West. Here they are:
Number one, they were functioning on the assumption that from the western continental divide, there was a river to the Pacific. They thought they would travel up the Missouri, find the headwaters of the Missouri, hop over to the headwaters of the Columbia (or a major tributary), and sail right down to the Pacific. That’s what they thought.
Number two, the second assumption was that the mountains in the west are very similar to the mountains of the east. They had heard stories that they couldn’t imagine, but what they could imagine were the Blue Ridge Mountains. We can figure out a way through that, right? That was their two assumptions.
On May 26th, 1805, the Corps was on the eastern end of the Missouri River Breaks in central Montana. Lewis scrambled up the banks and looked West. In his journal, he wrote this:
“From this point I beheld the Rocky Mountains for the first time.”
He goes on,
“While I viewed these mountains, I felt a secret pleasure in finding myself so near the head of the heretofore conceived boundless Missouri.”
And then,
“When I reflected on the difficulties the snowy barrier would most probably throw in my way to the Pacific, and the sufferings and hardship of myself and the party in them, it in some measure counterbalanced the joy I had felt in the first moment in which I gazed upon them.”
Counterbalanced might be an understatement.
And finally resolving,
“As I have always held it a crime to anticipate evils I will believe it a good comfortable road until I am compelled to believe differently.”
Mr. Positivity.
Even then, what Lewis thought he was looking at was a single range of mountains that could be relatively easily and quickly portaged to the next water route. But reality had something different in store for Lewis.
On the morning of August 12th, 1805, Lewis ascended a gentle slope headed toward a pass where they found the headwaters of the mighty Missouri. In fact, Ambrose says, and Lewis says in his journals, that the men could stand at the headwaters of the Missouri and put a foot on either side. They died laughing because they thought it was so great they had battled the boundless Missouri for thousands of miles, and now they could put a foot on either side of it.
Lewis says that from there, once they found the headwaters of the Missouri, they walked a little further to the top of Lemhi Pass (where Sacagawea was from), on the border of today’s Montana and Idaho. Lewis’s journal:
“We proceeded on to the top of the dividing ridge from which I discovered immense ranges of high mountains still to the West of us with their tops partially covered with snow.”
Ambrose writes this:
“With Lewis’s last step to the top of the Divide went decades of theory about the nature of the Rocky Mountains, shattered by a single glance from a single man. Equally shattered were Lewis’s hopes for an easy portage to a major branch of the Columbia.”
I don’t want to ruin the ending for you, but they made it. By December that year, they made it to the mouth of the Columbia River (which is where Washington and Oregon meet) and made it to winter camp. Then the next year, they came back across the nation.
Now, this story—I love historical nonfiction, American history. It’s so fun. I did terrible at it in school, but I liked it. I just couldn’t remember all those dates—it contains a historical reality, and that is this:
We often make assumptions about what’s ahead or what’s going to happen that reality checks. We think “this is how this is going to happen,” and it often is different than what we expect. That’s certainly true of the Corps of Discovery, and I think if you think about your lives, you can expect how marriage is going to be, how raising kids is going to be, how this job is going to be, how school’s going to be, how this or that’s going to be. Then, when you walk through it, you’re like, “Oh, it wasn’t exactly how I thought it was going to be,” or maybe, “That wasn’t at all like I thought it was going to be.”
There is a similar spiritual truth, a spiritual reality: when God is working, reality is often different than we expect. We might expect God to do one thing, but something else happens. Or I’ll say it this way: God’s kingdom and God’s work is always more than we imagine. God’s kingdom and God’s work is always more than what we imagine.
When God is working, it is always different than what you experience with your senses. It is bigger and better than we imagined. And also, the very nature of the thing being accomplished by God is different than what we first thought.
A really easy biblical example is the story of Joseph, at the end of the book of Genesis, where Joseph’s brothers sold him into slavery in Egypt. He comes into slavery in Potiphar’s house, and then he’s over Potiphar’s house. Then he’s falsely accused and thrown in prison, and then he interprets dreams and is forgotten about. Then finally he’s raised up into Pharaoh’s house, and famine hits the land, and Joseph’s in charge.
Here comes his family to Egypt to get food, and they don’t recognize him. His brothers and his dad are bowing down before him. Then they find out it’s Joseph, then they’re really in trouble. And Joseph says, “No, no. God sent me on ahead of you to keep many people alive. What you meant for evil, God meant for good.” That is beautiful. That happens all the time, where we think one thing is going on when really the spiritual reality and what God is doing is way bigger than we can imagine.
This book is called When Faith is Forbidden (it’s from The Voice of the Martyrs): 40 Days on the Frontlines with Persecuted Christians. I planned to tell the story I’m about to tell weeks and weeks ago. I got this book from my daughter, who got it from Charlie Kirk. He was giving these books out. It’s so ironic. She gave it to me for Father’s Day, and I’ve been reading it. It’s just story after story of people who are persecuted for their faith.
One of them is Sister Tong, who was arrested in China in 2002 for holding a gathering of Christians in her home. Todd Nettleton went to China and was interviewing Sister Tong about her imprisonment. He said, “Would you tell me about your imprisonment?” And she said, “Oh yes, that was a wonderful time.” Tom looked at the translator and said, “I think she misunderstood the question.” He’s like, “No.” She said, “Yeah, that was great.”
She goes on to tell a story about being arrested for just having Christians in her home. She was thrown into prison. She said,
“I’d never experienced the power of God and the presence of God ever in my life until that moment.”
She begins to share with the other people in the prison about Jesus Christ, and a revival breaks out. What other people were doing— they thought they were punishing somebody for their faith. Instead, God was doing something way bigger, larger than we could possibly imagine.
That brings us to our text in Matthew 15 (and I’m going to read it), where something way more than we can imagine at first glance is going on here. When I read this passage, you’re going to go, “Wait, haven’t we already studied this story or one really similar to it?” Yes, we have studied one similar. Matthew 15:29:
“Jesus went on from there and walked beside the Sea of Galilee. And he went up on the mountain and sat down there. And great crowds came to him, bringing with them the lame, the blind, the crippled, the mute, and many others, and they put them at his feet, and he healed them, so that the crowd wondered, when they saw the mute speaking, the crippled healthy, the lame walking, and the blind seeing. And they glorified the God of Israel.
“Then Jesus called his disciples to him and said, ‘I have compassion on the crowd because they have been with me now three days and have nothing to eat. And I am unwilling to send them away hungry, lest they faint on the way.’ And the disciples said to him, ‘Where are we to get enough bread in such a desolate place to feed so great a crowd?’ And Jesus said to them, ‘How many loaves do you have?’ They said, ‘Seven, and a few small fish.’ And directing the crowd to sit down on the ground, he took the seven loaves and the fish, and having given thanks he broke them and gave them to the disciples, and the disciples gave them to the crowds. And they all ate and were satisfied. And they took up the seven baskets full of the broken pieces left over. Those who ate were four thousand men, besides women and children. And after sending away the crowds, he got into the boat and went to the region of Magadan” (Matthew 15:29-39).
That sounds super familiar. I feel like we’ve already studied a story of Jesus feeding people on a massive scale. In fact, if you flip over to Matthew 14, you’ll see that we saw him feeding the 5,000. So why include two mass feedings in the Gospel of Matthew? I’m going to give you three reasons why there are two instances of this.
1. They both happened.
That might seem obvious, but there are people who say they didn’t both happen, that this is just a repeat, but actually they both happen. Mark includes it, Matthew includes it, and apparently Jesus thought there were two because in Matthew 16 (that we’ll start looking at next week) Jesus refers to both of them. So they both happened.
2. They’re not identical.
If you were paying attention to some of the details, they sound similar, but they’re not identical.
3. They serve different proclamational purposes.
I’m not sure, strictly speaking, that the word “proclamational” is a word. At least the computer underlined it in red, but I like the word. They serve different proclamational purposes.
Let’s look at the story, which is God’s bigger plan illustrated, and then we’re going to look at God’s big plan predicted and then enacted. So illustrated, predicted, enacted. Let us look at this illustration of God’s bigger plan and compare the two feedings.
First of all, let us talk about the similarities. In both feedings, there are three things:
1. Compassion.
There is compassion on the crowds, compassion through healing. In both cases, the healing precedes the feeding. In both cases, the lame, the crippled, the mute came to Jesus and he healed them.
In both places, he has compassion. In the feeding of the 5,000, it says Jesus had compassion. The feeding of the 4,000—I think—is the only time in the New Testament that Jesus, in the first person, says, “I have compassion on these people.” So compassion.
2. Desolation.
Both places are referred to as a desolate place. You also have desolate people: people who are broken, hurting, diseased, and unclean.
3. Impossibility.
The performing of each miracle is unexpected and fabulous. In Matthew 15, the disciples seem as unaware as they were in Matthew 14 about what was going to happen. Same situation: Jesus says, “Give them something to eat.” “We don’t have anything to eat.” Same thing, and they seem just as likely, “We don’t know what’s going to happen in this situation.” And Jesus does it again.
But we do that. As much as we want to say the disciples were dumb, we do that in circumstances, too. We might see God do something amazing, and then when we face something similar, we’re like, “I don’t what God’s going to do. Do you think he’ll do something?” They kind of have that, “Okay, Jesus, what do we do?”
These are very similar stories, but there are some differences. Let me give you some differences.
1. Numbers
There are differences in numbers. 5,000 in Matthew 14, 4,000 in Matthew 15 (plus women and children). Five loaves and two fish in Matthew 14, seven loaves and a few small fish. 12 baskets left over, seven baskets left over. There are a few other numerical differences that are in there. The number differences are relatively immaterial, not completely, but relatively immaterial (more on that later).
2. Location
The second difference is location. Take a look at this map. The green areas on that map are Jewish regions, and the rest are Gentile.
The first miracle (the feeding of the 5,000) happened in or around Bethsaida. You see where that is on the north side of the Sea of Galilee. Afterward, the disciples and eventually Jesus (walking on water) cross the river from Bethsaida to Gennesaret, which you see kind of on the northwest side of the Sea of Galilee. That’s where all that happened. Jewish territory.
The second miracle happened in Gentile territory. In Matthew 15, Jesus teaches on uncleanness, and then he walks towards uncleanness. He goes up to Tyre and Sidon (we talked about that last week). Then he walks on from there. Mark tells us he walks down the Sea of Galilee, he walks around to the Decapolis, and now he’s in Gentile territory. That’s where this miracle happens, where he heals and feeds unclean people.
3. Audience
His location is different, which brings us to number three: his audience was different. This is a very important point that gets us to the third answer of why there are two mass feedings. That third reason is: they serve different proclamational purposes. This miracle happened to Gentiles. The healing and the feeding were for Gentiles.
There are little indicators, like they had them sit on “the ground.” In chapter 14, it was “the grass” because that area was fertile. This area was not. He’s in Gentile territory now. The leftovers are 12 versus seven. I don’t want to make a huge deal about numbers, but many commentators say that 12 represents the 12 tribes of Israel, and 7 represents the perfection/completion of the Gentiles into the kingdom of God. That’s possible. Plus, the word for basket in chapter 14 is the Jewish expression for basket. The word for basket in chapter 15 is a different word. It’s the ancient Greek word that would be the broader term for baskets that would be used.
There are big indicators like Matthew records that after the healings, they “glorified the God of Israel.” That’s specific, not just God. Matthew wouldn’t say, “I glorified the God of Israel.” That’s redundant. He would say, “I glorify God.” But for Gentiles, they glorified God, he said they “glorified the God of Israel.” That’s something to be noted.
Jesus performs a parallel miracle. He did it in Jewish territory for a Jewish audience; now he’s doing it in Gentile territory for a Gentile audience. Two miracles that are almost identical but different to different groups of people because they serve a different proclamational purpose.
Now, what we see is that God is doing way more than people imagined. It made sense to his original hearers that he would do that to a Jewish audience. But now he’s doing the same thing to Gentiles: he’s touching them, healing them, drawing them to himself, and feeding them. Same miracle, generally speaking, with a completely different purpose: the inclusion of the Gentiles in God’s covenant people. That’s the purpose of this second feeding. Matthew is showing us that the Gentiles are included in the covenant people of God.
This has always been God’s plan, so I just want to take a quick jet tour through the Bible to show us how this has always been God’s plan. It’s all over the Bible, but I can’t go all over the Bible; I have to just pick a few. So this is God’s bigger plan predicted, and I just want to pick a couple of verses to show you that.
One is found in Psalm 22:27. This is a Messianic Psalm that Jesus prays from the cross.
“My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?”
is a quote from Psalm 22. In verse 27, it says,
“All the ends of the earth shall remember and turn to the Lord, and all the families of the nations shall worship before you” (Psalm 22:27).
There in that Psalm—which is so perfect that Christ quoted it from the cross—that Psalm predicts that all the nations will be coming into the covenant people of God. How perfect that Christ, as he’s accomplishing that very thing, quotes it from the cross.
Isaiah 42:6, of the servant of the Lord, says,
“I am the Lord; I have called you in righteousness; I will take you by the hand and keep you; I will give you as a covenant for the people, a light for the nations…”
Remember that one, Isaiah 42, as we talk about Luke 2. In Luke 2, after the angels announced to the shepherds,
“I bring you good tidings of great joy, which will be for all people,”
then Jesus was born. Then, Jesus, Mary, and Joseph, a few days later, go to the temple to dedicate Jesus. In the temple, there’s a man named Simeon who’s been waiting, it says, for the consolation of Israel. Simeon sees Jesus and realizes he’s looking at the Messiah. He takes Jesus in his hands, and it says,
“…he took him up in his arms and blessed God and said, ‘Lord, now you are letting your servant depart in peace, according to your word—”
Now he quotes Isaiah 42.
“…for my eyes have seen your salvation that you have prepared in the presence of all peoples, a light for revelation to the Gentiles, and for glory to your people Israel” (Luke 2:28-32).
Simeon is saying this child is for your people, and it’s for a greater purpose for the Gentiles. God is building his church, consisting of all nations. This was not an afterthought. When he sent Jesus, and the Jews rejected Jesus, God was not like, “I don’t know what I’m going to do. I guess I’ll try something else.” It was not that. It has always been God’s plan to grab a people for himself from all nations, Jews and Gentiles coming before the throne of God. He predicted it, and then he enacted it. So Jesus is telling us this (you have this prediction in the past), Jesus is illustrating it in the present, and then God will enact it.
There are places all over the New Testament we can look, like the Great Commission in Matthew 28, where Jesus says to go into all the nations and preach in my name and baptize people, calling them to me. Then in Acts 1:8, when he says,
“You will be my witnesses in Jerusalem and in all Judea and Samaria, and to the end of the earth.”
You have those. Then there’s this really great story in Acts 10 that I’m sure you already know, but I’m going to go through it again.
In Acts 10, there’s this man named Cornelius who was a centurion (Greek, Gentile) who feared God. He had a vision while praying. The Lord said to him, “Send some guys to this other city, and you’re going to get a guy named Peter. Have him come back to you guys.” He was like, done. So he obeys.
The next day, while those men are approaching the city where Peter is, Peter’s on his rooftop waiting for lunch to be made. He has a vision, and the vision is this: Acts 10 says,
“[he] saw the heavens opened and something like a great sheet descending, being let down by its four corners upon the earth. In it were all kinds of animals and reptiles and birds of the air. And there came a voice to him: ‘Rise, Peter; kill and eat.’ But Peter said, ‘By no means, Lord; for I have never eaten anything that is common or unclean.’ And the voice came to him again a second time, ‘What God has made clean, do not call common’” (Acts 10:11-15).
That happened three times. Peter’s sitting there thinking. It ended, and Peter’s pondering, trying to figure this out, and there’s a knock on the door. He answers the door, and there are these people who came from Cornelius’s house. They say, “Hey, Cornelius told us to come get you and take you down to Cornelius’s house.” He’s like, “Okay.” So he goes down to Cornelius’s house, like God told him to.
He’s following these unclean Gentiles and comes to Cornelius’ house. When he arrives, there’s a bunch of unclean Gentiles in Cornelius’s house who have gathered to hear Peter, and Peter got it. He got the connection. Acts 10:28 says (this is Peter),
“You yourselves know how unlawful it is for a Jew to associate with or to visit anyone of another nation, but God has shown me that I should not call any person common or unclean.”
Peter made the connection between the animals and the people, that God was doing something bigger than he imagined. Then Cornelius tells his story, and then Peter preaches the gospel, and then the Holy Spirit falls and fills the Gentiles, and they speak in tongues and extol God, and Peter baptizes them.
In Acts 11, Peter is criticized then for associating with the unclean by the Jewish Christians. So Peter tells them about his vision, Cornelius, and the Holy Spirit, and what he had done. Verse 18 says,
“When they heard these things they fell silent. And they glorified God, saying, ‘Then to the Gentiles also God has granted repentance that leads to life’” (Acts 11:18).
And the Spirit set fire to the Gentiles, and the Church exploded. God was doing something way bigger than they could even imagine, even though they walked with Jesus, they read the Old Testament, they heard all these things, and yet still God was doing something bigger. And he still is.
We get a little picture of that in Revelation 5, which says,
“And they sang a new song, saying, ‘Worthy are you to take the scroll and to open its seals, for you were slain, and by your blood you ransomed people for God from every tribe and language and people and nation, and you have made them a kingdom and priests to our God, and they shall reign on the earth” (Revelation 5:9-10).
This is what God’s doing.
I think I’m talking to a room of mostly Gentiles. Aren’t you glad that this was God’s plan from the beginning? To grab you and me and pull us into his kingdom? That’s what God has been doing. He was always planning on doing that. He did it through the life of Christ, and he will complete it. That’s what he’s doing.
Doesn’t that sound just like him? To do something more than we could possibly imagine. Jesus, in Matthew 15, is illustrating exactly what God predicted and is enacting and will complete God’s kingdom and God’s work. It’s always more than we imagine. Always. That’s what’s going on in Matthew 15. Jesus is illustrating a spiritual reality that’s going worldwide.
How do we respond to that? If you think about it, take some time, you could probably think of some things for you. I want to share a couple that I thought of and see if they can be helpful in how we can respond. So here are just two:
1. Humility
One is humility. When we have those realities in our life, those spiritual realities when we realize God is doing something different than I thought he was going to do, reality can be cold and surprising, like those mountains that Louis saw. It can be cold when we run up against, “That’s not what I thought God was going to do.”
God’s plan marches on, and it can’t be thwarted. Receiving his plan can be very hard, and we are slow sometimes to understand the full wisdom of God.
We’re in great company. The disciples didn’t understand it either. Even Peter—after Acts 10, after him getting it, and Cornelius, and the council in Jerusalem in Acts 15, Peter got it, it seemed like, “Okay, we’re good,” after that— Peter reverted from hanging out with Gentiles out of the fear of man, of the Jews who criticized him. “Why are you hanging out with the unclean?” He was like, “Who?” In Galatians, Paul says he rebuked Peter. Even Peter took steps back.
Experiencing the unfolding of God’s kingdom in space and time can be rough because sometimes it feels like we’re taking steps backwards. Katie and I were talking this year about (I have three teenage children), and I said to her, I came to the realization that I had an expectation that I didn’t know I had: I wish that, as my children matured, it was linear when it’s really like circles. What I mean by that is I wish, once we covered ground, we didn’t have to cover it again, that we’re always building on previous maturity, instead of sometimes feeling like we’re covering ground we already covered.
How stupid of me to think that, because that’s the way I am, that’s the way humans are. Our own maturity is like concentric circles, not lines. We grow and we have to relearn things and grow on top of that, and we take two steps forward and then one back. That’s how we are. Why would I think my children would be anyone different than the rest of humanity?
God’s kingdom feels that way, too, where we see God working and then, “Wait, it feels like we’re taking steps back now.” As we hear Jesus and we recognize our own limited wisdom, I just want to call you, my brothers and sisters, for all of us to seek the humility of our Savior. Which leads me to the next one, and that is faith.
1. Humility
2. Faith
Throughout the Gospels, Jesus is calling his people to trust him. “Just trust me. I know you can’t see what’s going on. I’m doing something more than you can imagine. Just trust me.” Over and over again, he’s calling us to move into faith and to trust Him. In other words, don’t let your eyes deceive you into thinking that that’s the only thing God’s doing. He is working in ways that we cannot imagine.
It’s difficult to see. It’s a sad statement on the Pharisees in Matthew 16, the next chapter. See, in chapter 15, Jesus heals the unclean disciples, and what does it say? They glorified the God of Israel. In chapter 16, the Pharisees—the spiritual ones, the ones who knew the Bible—said, “Can you show us a sign to prove that you’re from God?” All of us want to go, “Seriously? How many tricks does he have to do? What do you want him to do?” “Just show me another sign. More, just give me more.” It’s a sad statement on their part: while the Gentiles are glorifying God, the Pharisees are saying, “No, show us another one.”
It’s hard for us to see and trust God’s massive plans in the moment, but I believe that Christ is calling us to faith to say, “I know you’re doing more than I can imagine, so I have to press into you. I have trust you. You’re doing more than human will can exert.” We sang it early:
“There is hope in every trial
For I can trust the Lord
He will turn my heart towards him
And help me bear the thorn
So in faith I follow Jesus
On the road not understood
For I know that he is working
For his glory and my good” (CityAlight)
Years ago, when I was pastoring a church in Spartanburg, we were praying for a place to hold our gatherings, to meet. We had been meeting in rented places and temporary places, and our landlords were like, “Yeah, this is temporary, time to move on.” That kept happening, so we were looking for some place where we could meet permanently. We began to pray, and God provided.
He always provides in the most surprising ways. We’re praying and praying and praying, and I had a connection with this pastor who was like, “Hey, our church is shutting down. We’ve really retracted, and we believe that God’s doing something else. We would love to bless another church with a building.” And I said, “Here, my Lord, send me.” I was like, “Really?” He’s like, “Yeah.” So they sold it to us for a dollar. I was like, “I’ll pay for that!” So we got this whole building. And not only did they sell it, they sold us everything in it, too. They’re like, “We’re not going to need all the nursery stuff and appliances. Here, you just take it all.”
I was talking to somebody, and they were like, “Man, it’s like plundering the Egyptians on the way out.” I was like, “Yeah, it is like that.” And he said to me, “That sounds just like God, to not only provide, but to go overboard!” Doesn’t that sound just like God? It’s exactly what God does.
That phrase struck me, and I’ve sought to remember it when I hear of a surprising work of God, when God does something that’s like, “Okay, God did that, but then he did THIS” to go, “Yeah, that sounds like God. That sounds exactly like God.”
When our neighbor came to faith in Christ in a way that we didn’t expect or predict— that sounds just like God. When Sister Tong gets thrown into jail and revival breaks out in the prison— that sounds about right, doesn’t it? That sounds like God’s definitely doing it, because no human would do that. No human would draw that one out. But that’s something that God does.
Just like the Israelites plundered Egypt when they left, God is plundering the domains of lesser gods, lesser kings, and lesser kingdoms. Kings have their thrones, but brothers and sisters, we serve the King of kings. He is, we sang earlier, the Lord most high. He is the most high God. He is the Lord of Lords, and he is the King of kings, and he will plunder the nations and domains and kingdoms of others in order to build a people for himself whose lives are purchased by the blood of the lamb.
The elders got to hear this week the story of what God’s doing in the Omo Valley in Ethiopia (we’ll share that with you in the coming weeks). We got to hear that there are over 50 tribes of people that are hungry for God’s word and how God is moving, and our opportunities to be a part of that. That sounds like what God is doing because God is moving into places where there is darkness and no light, and he’s getting people for himself. That’s what God does. That’s what we’ve seen here in Matthew 15. That’s why Jesus is showing us that his kingdom is not as limited as we thought. It is gigantic.
Famously, Dutch theologian Abraham Kuyper said,
“There is not a square inch in the whole domain of our human existence over which Christ, who is Sovereign over all, does not cry, Mine!”
And Christ, who is sovereign over all, is looking at people all over the world and saying, “Mine. You are my people. I’m building a kingdom.” There is no one like our God, and there is no kingdom like his.
We’re going to stand and sing. As we do, our prayer team will be along the front. If you need somebody to talk to or pray with, we would love to serve you. Let’s go ahead and stand.
