Bible Study Preparation Assignment
Craig B. Felder
Rawlings School of Divinity, Liberty University
BIBL 110-(D20 LUO)
Professor Michael Sanders
For the New Testament Bible Study Assignment, I will be using APA formatting style,
and my chosen passage is Matthew 15:32-39.
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Matthew 15:32-39
The book of Matthew talks about the many miracles that Jesus performs, one of them
being where Jesus fed four thousand people with a few loaves of bread and some fish. It says that
Jesus had compassion for the Gentiles. He had been teaching a crowd of them for three days
without stopping, so he did not want them to collapse from hunger as they were traveling home.
The Bible says that he instructed his disciplines to bring him the few loaves and fish they had so
that He could feed the hungry crowd. According to Weber (2000), the disciples seemed to “have
forgotten the feeding of the five thousand”, possibly since they “did not understand the purpose
of the teachings” or thought that this would only be done for the Jews, as it had been in Matthew
14. In this miracle, Jesus has His disciples “confess for the record how little food they had in
comparison to the size of the crowd” to make “clear that the feeding was miraculous evidence of
His deity” (MacArthur, 2005, pg. 1153). In this passage, Jesus illustrates kindness for individuals
which we ought to see as an illustration of the way he needs us to treat others. Additionally, this
miraculous event is a simple reminder of the compassion he has for us as his children.
References
MacArthur, J. (2005). The MacArthur Bible Commentary (Illustrated ed.).
Thomas Nelson
Weber, S. (2000). Holman New Testament Commentary -
Matthew. B&H Publishing Group.
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