The Feeding of the Four and the Feeding of the Four Thousand

Once upon a time, there lived a restaurant owner in the small town of Lexington, Virginia, by the name of Stephanie Wilkerson. Feeling morally superior to those people who walked by her establishment, she posted the following quote from the Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King in her building’s window: “Love is the only force capable of transforming an enemy into a friend.” An admirable sentiment, to be sure, but one that the owner does not seem to have understood, much less practiced.

You see, there came a weekend when four people came to her restaurant to eat a meal. They made no extraordinary requests. They walked in without fanfare or disruptive gestures. Apparently, they simply wanted to eat a meal. However, one of their company was an Enemy – yes, that’s right, a person (a white female, by the way) whose political views were different from those of the owner.

The waiters were the first to notice the presence of their hated Enemy, and they called the owner, who happened not to have been present when the Enemy entered her establishment. The owner, full of moral outrage that the Enemy would dare present her ugly, hated face in Lexington – much less at her own exalted (and morally superior) establishment – not only saw to it that her Enemy was chastised for her involvement in political engagement that struck a nerve with Ms. Wilkerson, but that her Enemy was summarily expelled. Furthermore, the righteous owner made sure that other residents of Lexington were fully informed of this political outrage; she gathered a rent-a-mob together in the street, and harassed and ridiculed the half of the Enemy’s party who had dared seek a meal in another establishment across the street. Satisfied with her righteousness and moral superiority, the owner blithely returned to her building, proudly walking by the sign with the quote from Martin Luther King.

It was truly unfortunate that she did not understand the meaning of King’s statement. She could have avoided closing down her restaurant only a few days later – putting the very waiters who had objected to the Enemy’s presence out of work (unless, in her righteousness, she had paid them anyway – who knows?).

Let us, dear friends, go back into the distant past, to a mountainside in the ancient land of Israel. Let us imagine – it’s not that hard to do, since the illustrious Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King could do it – that we are witnessing the miracle of the feeding of the four thousand (Matthew 15:32-39 and Mark 8:1-9). One does not have to be a Bible scholar to connect the devotion that Martin Luther King showed with the King of kings, Jesus Christ. One does not have to be a Bible scholar to know that the two Gospels reporting this singular event claim (with every right to do so) that Jesus Himself performed this miracle. Please notice, dear friends, the following points:

Jesus did not attach any political requirements to the consuming of the bread He provided. For all we know, there were Temple leaders, Pharisees, Sadducees – even a Roman soldier or two – in the audience. Nowhere in either Gospel account are we told of any political sifting or litmus test, or any other form of discrimination. If you were near Jesus, you got fed.

In verse 3 of the 8^th chapter of Mark’s Gospel, Jesus Himself pointed out, “If I send them home hungry, they will collapse on the way, and some of them have come a long distance.” I have no idea where the Enemy in our 21st-century story lives, but I’m pretty sure she and her entourage came into the restaurant hungry. And they were turned away. I wonder what Jesus would have done.

Jesus required His disciples to serve the people (verses 6 and 7). Imagine: those high-and-mighty (not!) colleagues of the King of kings were instructed by their Master to hand out bread and fish (no questions asked) to every kind of person who was around Jesus – dirty people, angry people, loud children, bratty teenagers, political enemies, even ordinary, God-fearing people!! Maybe some of the waiters at the Red Hen could take a lesson in servanthood from Jesus’ disciples.

Jesus could have elected to leave the bread scraps that were left over to the birds of the air and the beasts of the field. (After all, aren’t they “God’s creatures,” too?) Instead, He ordered His disciples to clean up the picnic area by themselves: “They [the people] ate and were filled. Then they [the disciples] collected seven large baskets of leftover pieces” (verse 8). Gosh, I sure hope Ms. Wilkerson knows all about clean-up procedures; I have a feeling she will be involved in a LOT of it, once the restaurant reopens!

Finally, I just want to ask this question: If Jesus showed up at the Red Hen restaurant, would Ms. Wilkerson even have recognized, much less served Him? I think I know Martin Luther King’s own opinion.

Musings on Variety in the World Around Us

This is just a random musing, but, in speaking to atheist friends, I find they cannot answer the following:

If there is no God except Evolution, why is there such variety in the world?

Take, for instance, an ordinary chicken. Why does the female chicken lay an egg that thrusts her potential progeny out into the cold cruel world before it has fully formed? Why, on the other hand, does a human baby incubate in his or her mother’s womb for nine months? Is it that each being has a different function – a different destiny?

If Evolution were truly the only force present in the universe, how could there be such variety, such stunningly different designs all over the world? Surely if life “determined” itself into being – as Stephen Hawking so irrationally insists – it would “choose” the strongest and best way to evolve! There would be no variety, because Evolution as a force would not choose to produce weak beings – it would “stick” to one form, one “expression.”

Ah, but perhaps evolution does not exist; perhaps there is a Designer Who wants variety because He wants to please someone other than Himself…perhaps He wants to please His creation – mankind!

Back to the chicken:

The age-old famous Chicken Question is this: “Which came first: the chicken or the egg?” In my own experience, this very question is supposed to reveal the utter “foolishness” of Intelligent Design.

“Neither came first,” the worshipers of Evolution maintain. “One day, a random bird-like creature ‘decided’ to become a chicken, and so he / she laid eggs and – voila! – the next generation of the bird-like creature became what we now gather eggs from for our breakfasts."

Atheists want to believe in Evolution, but they just can’t figure out how that amphibian crawled out of the primeval goo and “decided” to become a chicken – or any other mammal or reptile or land-dweller. Luckily, some people have grown beyond accepting the “the creature just decided” theory. There really is no evidence – fossilized or experiential – that any creature (even man) “decided” to take on some other form. (Remember, we are talking about eons before plastic surgery!)

All the time, atheists insist that God – as an answer to where we came from – is definitely out! But I repeat: Why is Evolution apparently so “creative”? So far, the god Evolution hasn’t answered its followers (although man, anthropomorphizing his idol, tries to put words into its mouth).

There is delicate beauty in this world – a world where we are supposedly at the mercy of impersonal forces. The touch of an infant’s hand, a newly-opened crocus, a bud on the side of a fallen branch that insists on opening and giving beauty, despite its ultimate doom – these are tactile and visual facts which demonstrate the truth of a Creator’s involvement. Beyond the delicate beauty all around us, even the most hardened of those who worship Evolution are at a loss explaining how Love, Sacrifice, Joy, Patience, Kindness, Self-control, etc., supposedly “evolved.” Although “evolutionary psychology” attempts to explain away these phenomena as merely imaginary constructs we sentient humans assign to them (“because we want to”), the truth is that this so-called science which attempts to explain Evolution’s “purpose,” is merely the latest falsehood that the worshipers of Evolution have dreamed up so far. There is no outside evidence to support their assertions.

Where does all this lead us with respect to our original question? It points out how utterly foolish Evolution is as a rational theory. The very fact that there is delicate beauty, as well as strong mental and spiritual forces within man’s psyche, seriously undermines the idea of Evolution as a rational explanation of how our world came into being. It just isn’t that “creative.”

Abortion by the Numbers

And here’s the news today:

·         Fetus # 3,567 was aborted today in New York. It would have been a male, but shortly after its demise, its identifying genitals were harvested for a company’s continuing research on “male characteristics.” The company intends to makes its finding public in about 10 years, by which time Fetus # 3,567 would have reached the age of 10 and been a wonder athlete at fencing. Twenty-five years from now, Fetus # 3,567 would have married and started a peaceful, productive life of its own with three children and a career in botanical gardening.

However, the Determiners decided that Fetus # 3,567’s biological mother was too poor to raise the Fetus properly, and no one else cared much about its future. So it was cut out of its safe space and discarded (except for its valuable genitals).

·         Fetus # 5,240 was also aborted today in Beijing. It was not hard to guess that its “assigned gender” had been female, but it was considered undesirable, so its organs weren’t even harvested.

About twenty years from now, Fetus # 5,240 would have written a book about Jesus Christ that would have touched the heart of the Chinese leader, and radically transformed the direction of that country. In forty years, it would have traveled the globe, touching even the hardest of heart with its God-given message.

However, the Determiners decided that Fetus # 5,240’s parents had exceeded their allotted number of children, so the Fetus was taken by force and left to die (it was a swift death) in a covered trash can. No one – thankfully – heard the infant’s last gasp in darkness and pain.

·         Fetus # 4,210 was aborted today in Oklahoma. The abortionist was late for his golf game, so he pitched the formerly-alive baby into the collection dish and ordered his assistant death-dealer to take the “matter” to the lab immediately. He then left for his game, allowing his assistant to clean up the formerly-pregnant female lying on the table as best she could.

Fetus # 4,210 was rather unique; it would have been the only autistic female child in the state who could flawlessly perform Chopin and Beethoven on the piano by the age of 12.

However, the Determiner – its own mother – was so career-driven that she could not bear the thought of the inconvenience its piano practicing would cause. And so Fetus # 4,210 disappeared into a stainless steel dish and vanished into the “body parts” freezer after being dissected.

·         All of these numbered fetuses would have brought smiles to others at some point in their lives, had they been allowed to breathe air and grow.

·         All of them would have cried for sheer joy at some point in their lives.

·         All of them would have loved someone else at some point in their lives.

·         All of them went back to their Creator with their purpose – to be a human on earth – unfulfilled.

·         All of them woke up in eternity and were comforted by the love of God, instead of the love of a mother and father who had engaged in their procreation.

·         We call them numbers; God calls them Human Beings.