Matthew 14:18

What this episode covers

Friday, 21 November 2025   He said, “Bring them here to Me.” Matthew 14:18   “And He said, ‘You carry to Me here – them.’” (CG).   In the previous verse, the disciples said to Jesus that they only had five loaves and two fish. Matthew next records, “And He said, ‘You carry to Me here – them.’” These words are only found in Matthew. Elsewhere, it notes that these were carried by a young boy and were comprised of five loaves of barley along with the two small fish.   Notice how Jesus rephrases their words –   17 And they, they say to Him, “Not we have here [hóde], if not five loaves and two fish.”   18 And He said, “You carry to Me here [hóde] – them.”   Their stress is on the word here. The rest of their sentence fills in details that they consider to be diminutive and unsatisfactory for any grand purpose. Jesus, on the other hand, indicates they are of prime importance. In essence, “You say you have nothing here capable of tending to these people. In contrast, I say, ‘Bring that insufficiency here to Me. I will show you how sufficient it really is.’”   Life application: In the previous commentary, it was noted that “there is nothing to prohibit God from producing abundance out of that which appears to be lacking. We may not understand the mechanics of how He caused a bit of bread and a couple of fish to reproduce in such an astonishing manner, but that does not mean He violated the principles of logic or nature in order to accomplish this feat.”   Someone may balk at this thought and say that such is not the case, citing Lomonosov’s law of conservation of mass, which states that for any system that is closed to all incoming and outgoing transfers of matter, the mass of the system must remain constant over time.   The thought might be, “If there were only the seven little bite-sized pieces of food, how could so much come from it?” It had to come from somewhere, and if it didn’t exist before, God must have created it right then and there. But that would then supposedly contradict the idea of the six days of creation, where all mass was formed at the beginning.   But how limited is that thinking! Who would expect that a small amount of material could produce a nuclear explosion? If the rules of the universe allowed scientists to mentally develop such an idea even before testing it, there may be some process that Jesus used to produce His miracle that we do not yet understand.   At the time of the feeding of the multitude, Jesus was asking His disciples to have faith that He was capable of bringing food, in abundance, out of a seemingly insignificant amount. That faith is requested of us even to this day. We hear of the miracle and are asked to believe it, accepting that what is recorded there (in all four gospels, by the way), actually took place.   Are such things possible? Jesus is said to have made wine from water. Doesn’t that happen all the time at vineyards? If Jesus was able to speed up the process through some mechanism that we don’t understand, does that mean that the process is not true?   Jesus spoke of such things openly. Let us have faith that even in our own lack of faith, we can still believe the Lord of creation can do the things we are not capable of –   “And the apostles said to the Lord, ‘Increase our faith.’6 So the Lord said, ‘If you have faith as a mustard seed, you can say to this mulberry tree, “Be pulled up by the roots and be planted in the sea,’ and it would obey you.’” Luke 17:5, 6   Lord God, even if we don’t have faith to speak to a mulberry tree, commanding it to uproot itself and move, we can have enough faith to believe that You can do it. Help us to consider that You are the Creator and nothing is impossible for You. May we accept this as an axiom and trust that what Your word says is true and reliable. To Your glory, we pray. Amen.

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