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The Feeding of the Five Thousand: How Old Were the Bread and the Fish the People Ate, That Jesus Gave Them?
When I go to the grocery store and I select my items, I don’t very often think of the process. I just push the cart and put into it what’s on my list. My wife was gone for quite awhile recently, so I grocery shopped. A few times I picked up one or two of those tubes of hamburger you’ve maybe seen. It didn’t occur to me when I did that a calf was born, it grazed in a field, grew to full grown size, was herded into a truck, shipped to a meat plant, driven into a building and was butchered, then parts of that full grown cow were ground into beef, which was squeezed into a tube and through various machinations of the supply chain, arrived in my store in Southern Oregon.
I didn’t look at that tube of hamburger and assume that it just sprung up there in the meat department of Walmart with the appearance of age. I know it didn’t. However, something different happened when the Lord Jesus Christ served the five thousand bread and fish in Matthew 14:13-21. I now know that just one cell of a fish exists according to a very complicated code of DNA, information from powerful and intelligent design antecedent to its emergence, let alone the origin of the matter from which it formed. Further along, there’s the fish eye, it’s gills, brain, internal organs, scales, and fins. Its musculature, that allowed for its under water propulsion, becomes the fleshly substance of a meal, also the subject of future digestion and incorporation into a human body.
Everything everyone ate at the feeding of the five thousand had the appearance of age. That was the miracle of it. Sure, it would have been a great miracle if everyone was able to stand or sit there that day and wait for a seed of wheat or corn to grow into the grain necessary to mill to flour, work into dough, and baked to yummy goodness. How long would that take? Perhaps the moment of the feeding was actually an age, once we’ve decided that we’re permitted to conform measurements of time to our preferred version of a scriptural narrative. We all know that a loaf of bread couldn’t have appeared in a moment according to known dating systems, so to help with the believability of Matthew 14:13-21, we allow for our own adaptation and maneuverability of the story.
No. Jesus created bread and fish, skipping the time and the process. He went straight from point A to B or A to Z, depending on how many steps you want to imagine were skipped. That’s the wonder of His power, wisdom, and love. God by nature is supernatural and He divinely intervenes in His creation however He wants. He is not bound by the very natural laws He originated. He’s more than the state highway police traveling as fast as He wants to enforce His own laws.
What’s harder? An instantaneous universe with an apparent appearance of fourteen billion years or thousands of separate bread loaves and fully grown fish? Think of even the milling process for flour. Where was the mill stone? There was none. Flour itself was skipped. What’s harder, the instantaneous creation of matter or the instantaneous formation of that matter to a mature appearing universe? Both are impossible, except with God. If you can believe the first, you can also believe the second.
Without faith, it is impossible to please God.
The Lie or Deceit of the Warfare or Conflict Model Between Science and Faith
True science proceeds from faith. The historical record shows that modern science arose from faith in God. Science and faith harmonize. They don’t conflict.
Like the tearing down of statues in the United States, the elimination of genders unto gender fluidity, and the revisionism of patriarchy as social construct, secular materialists banish faith from the public square by falsifying the true story of faith and science. The false narrative, useful for dethroning God in the hearts of men, says Newton’s science triumphed despite and hindered by his faith. His belief slowed his work. The actual narrative would read something like the following: man’s thinking, human reasoning, implausible speculation, superstition, darkness, little to no scientific progress, publication and propagation of scripture, motivation to know God through His creation, observation, scientific method, discovery and progress (subduing and having dominion).
Whatever scientific progress continues is built upon the foundation of biblical creationists of the past and borrowing from and imitating their work, even if it is separate from faith. The riddance of faith portends to future regression, even as we see this trend and trajectory already. For instance, without the faith in the invisible hand, the world economy is headed back to something more feudalistic.
Faux historians produced the science and faith warfare or conflict model in the late 19th century and this myth, legend, or figment of imagination burrowed itself deep into the psyche of Western civilization. It isn’t history. It is a philosophical presupposition of naturalism masquerading as science. Stephen Meyer writes about this in his most recent book, Return of the God Hypothesis.
Most science historians report the fideistic beginnings of modern science. The founders believed in God and their faith buttressed their work. A few men told a completely different story, John William Draper’s History of the Conflict Between Religion and Science (1880) and Andrew Dickson White’s History of the Warfare of Science with Theology in Christendom (1896). Commenting on this happening, historian Edward Larson writes in his Pulitzer Prize winning book that “they fostered the impression that religious critics of Darwinism threatened to rekindle the Inquisition. . . . Christianity and Science are recognized by their respective adherents as being absolutely incompatible; they cannot exist together; one must yield to the other; mankind must make its choice—it cannot have both” (Summer for the Gods: The Scope’s Trial and America’s Continuing Debate over Science and Religion, pp. 21-22). These above two books helped or aided to fix in the amassed minds that science and faith were at war with one another and always have been. Their lie displaced or deposed actual history. Now it is very, very difficult to dislodge.
The warfare or conflict model buttresses the uniformitarian template that man lives in a closed system without supernatural or divine intervention. It eliminates design with everything occurring according to chance. This view cancels God, His authority over and judgment of mankind. Man gets to live like he wants, because nobody’s going to do anything about it. Many if not a majority of professing Christians now at least surrender to this viewpoint, clashing with the Bible and a true, historical account.
Power Comes from Somewhere
When you turn on your lights or your appliance and open your refrigerator and see it working, you know that power comes from somewhere. It didn’t just happen. Your heart is beating, the power for that comes from somewhere. You look up and see a burning sun. The power for that sun comes from somewhere. Nuclear, gravitational, and chemical energy all come from someplace. They have their start somewhere.
We all need power. Our body is burning energy, our brains are using it, our heart needs it, and every other creature does too. It’s there. People are but dust. Power holds this dust together in a complex and functioning form.
The Big Bang Theory supposedly explains the origin of matter, but the explosion could not have occurred without energy. Senior writer and editor of Quanta Magazine, Natalie Wolchover, wrote on June 6, 2019:
The Big Bang theory . . . . pioneered 50 years before Hawking’s lecture by the Belgian physicist and Catholic priest Georges Lemaître, who later served as president of the Vatican’s academy of sciences — rewinds the expansion of the universe back to a hot, dense bundle of energy. But where did the initial energy come from?
The Big Bang theory had other problems. Physicists understood that an expanding bundle of energy would grow into a crumpled mess rather than the huge, smooth cosmos that modern astronomers observe.
Men guess, but they don’t have an answer to the origin of energy or power.
The English word “power” is found 272 times in the King James Version. The first time the English word appears, it is koah, and it refers to God’s strength, ability, might, and force. That Hebrew word is used 126 times. The first is used of God in Exodus 15:6, “Thy right hand, O LORD, is become glorious in power: thy right hand, O LORD, hath dashed in pieces the enemy.” Another one is Exodus 32:11, “And Moses besought the LORD his God, and said, LORD, why doth thy wrath wax hot against thy people, which thou hast brought forth out of the land of Egypt with great power, and with a mighty hand?” A lot of the usages of koah are like that one.
Another Hebrew word translated power in 1 Chronicles 29:11 is gebera, the verse reading: “Thine, O LORD, is the greatness, and the power, and the glory, and the victory, and the majesty: for all that is in the heaven and in the earth is thine; thine is the kingdom, O LORD, and thou art exalted as head above all.” That word is used 61 times in the Old Testament with another example, Psalm 21:13, “Be thou exalted, LORD, in thine own strength: so will we sing and praise thy power.”
The New Testament uses mainly two Greek words, which are translated “power” in the King James Version. Matthew 6:13 reads:
And lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil: For thine is the kingdom, and the power, and the glory, for ever. Amen.
“Power” here comes from dunamis. The English “dynamite” comes from dunamis, which BDAG, the foremost Greek New Testament lexicon, says means:
potential for functioning in some way, power, might, strength, force, capability
That Greek word is used 120 times in the New Testament. The very next usage of “power” in the New Testament is in Matthew 9:6:
But that ye may know that the Son of man hath power on earth to forgive sins, (then saith he to the sick of the palsy,) Arise, take up thy bed, and go unto thine house.
1. a state of control over something, freedom of choice, right2. potential or resource to command, control, or govern, capability, might, power
1 Let every soul be subject unto the higher powers. For there is no power but of God: the powers that be are ordained of God. 2 Whosoever therefore resisteth the power, resisteth the ordinance of God: and they that resist shall receive to themselves damnation. 3 For rulers are not a terror to good works, but to the evil. Wilt thou then not be afraid of the power? do that which is good, and thou shalt have praise of the same:
James 4:12, There is one lawgiver, who is able to save and to destroy: who art thou that judgest another?Matthew 10:28, And fear not them which kill the body, but are not able to kill the soul: but rather fear him which is able to destroy both soul and body in hell.
The Fine-Tuning Argument, to be abbreviated by FTA in what follows, claims that the present Universe (including the laws that govern it and the initial conditions from which it has evolved) permits life only because these laws and conditions take a very special form, small changes in which would make life impossible.
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