John 6:1-15 - Why Does God Cause Problems? - August 1, 2021

Of the many reasons that the unbelieving world scoffs at Christianity, one of the most common is the one proposed in our sermon theme this morning. It can sound like this: “So you Christians believe and confess that God is all-loving and all-powerful and so he can help you in any and every need – explain this to me: why doesn’t he? Why doesn’t he solve your every problem and take care of your every need? Either he doesn’t care or he’s not all-powerful!” Maybe you’ve heard that criticism, maybe you’ve thought it yourself. This well-known story gives opportunity for us to confront the question: Why does God cause problems in our lives?

Now, I understand that the question itself might appear to be offensive or even blasphemous to some. “What? God sends problems into our lives? I thought that the source of all evil in the world is the devil, the world and our sinful flesh – not God.” Well, while I could cite a number of passages which prove that God does indeed sometimes send trouble into the lives of his children – (40 years wandering in the wilderness or the exile, for example), but I don’t have to do that today. Our text proves the point. Who caused the problem of hunger on that hillside? Jesus did. Jesus could have shooed the people away immediately – given that he had intended to give his disciples a little vacation to rest after their first missionary journey (Mark 6:7-13; 30-33). Jesus could have listened to the apostles when they came to him and said, basically, “Alright Jesus, time to wrap it up, time to send the people away so that they can find something to eat” (Luke 9:12). But he didn’t do that. He continued preaching until dusk. I suppose he could have let his disciples know his plan for solving the problem before it even emerged – as he knew he would. But no. Jesus didn’t only create the problem – he then delegated it to Philip, asking where can we buy bread for these people to eat?

So what did Philip do? The obvious thing: he used his head. He turned to math. He calculated that two hundred denarii (perhaps the amount in the disciples’ treasury?) worth of bread would not be enough for each of them to have just a little. While he’s obviously right that 200 days’ wages wouldn’t feed a crowd that likely numbered closer to 20,000 – if you include women and children – that’s not very helpful, is it? It’s like when the spouse who pays the bills goes to the other and says, “Honey, we don’t have enough in checking to pay all of these.” Accurate – but not helpful. Math isn’t the solution to every problem. Andrew, Simon Peter’s brother, apparently went off exploring for a solution. I’m not sure what he was expecting to find. A fleet of food-trucks? A Costco? All he found was a boy… [with] five barley loaves and two fish. The disciples come up empty-handed. They have no solution to this problem Jesus caused.

So what’s the point? The point is that not every problem you face in life is there for you to solve. Sometimes God doesn’t give you problems so that you can solve them but in order to test you. This is nothing new. Before God created a huge problem for Abraham by commanding him to sacrifice Isaac, Genesis 22 explicitly says that this was God testing Abraham (Genesis 22:1). After God had created numerous problems for the children of Israel by forcing them to wander in the wilderness for forty years, Moses told them remember the whole journey on which the LORD your God led you these forty years in the wilderness, in order to humble you and test you, in order to know what was in your heart, whether or not you would keep his commandments (Deuteronomy 8:2). The question is: who is this testing for? Well, it can’t be for God’s benefit, right? He already knows what’s in our hearts, better than we do (Jeremiah 17:10). So who needs the testing that problems provide? We do. We’re the ones who really don’t know what lies in our hearts. Jeremiah says that the heart is more deceitful than anything. It is beyond cure. Who can understand it? (Jeremiah 17:9) We can’t know what’s in our own hearts unless and until God holds up a mirror to us. In other words, God sometimes sends problems into our lives, not to see if we can solve them – but to force us to do a little self-examination.

And what do you see when you’re forced to examine yourself under the pressure of life’s problems. Well, it’s not a pretty picture, is it? I see that I break the 1st commandment daily, because I often do exactly what Philip and Andrew did. I look right past Jesus. I don’t see him as the solution to whatever momentary problem I’m facing. And that’s really sad, isn’t it? I come here and sing and confess that Jesus is the solution, the only solution, to eternal problems, but I don’t think that he’s capable of solving momentary, earthly problems. “Yes, Jesus, you may have conquered sin, death and the devil once and for all – but what do you know about viruses, 401k’s and dysfunctional families? Jesus, you may have been able to create the universe with a word and feed a multitude with a boy’s lunch – but I think my marriage and my children and my career are beyond your control.” It’s pretty ugly, isn’t it? To look in the mirror and come to the realization that all this time you’ve been singing: “I’ve got the whole world in my hands.” Here’s the thing: you don’t come to that understanding of yourself until God sends a problem into your life that those hands of yours can’t solve.

Not every problem is there for you to solve – and John tells us that Jesus didn’t create this problem for Philip to solve: Jesus was saying this to test him, for he himself knew what he was going to do. And right there we have another answer to why does God send problems into our lives, don’t we? There are times in life when we think that we’re caught between a rock and a hard place – with nowhere to go, no one to turn to, no answers in sight. But God is never in that position. He always has a solution – and often that solution is something we never would have imagined.

In other words, God sometimes sends problems into our lives to help us understand that he doesn’t live in the same box we do; he isn’t limited like we are. Andrew and Philip were stuck in that box. Their experience and logic told them that neither 200 days’ wages nor five loaves of bread and two fish were enough to feed the crowd. They couldn’t escape their own limitations – and so they concluded that there was no possible solution. But they’d forgotten something, hadn’t they? Hadn’t they forgotten what God had said in Isaiah 55? Certainly my plans are not your plans, and your ways are not my ways, declared the LORD. Just as the heavens are higher than the earth, so my ways are higher than your ways, and my plans are higher than your plans (Isaiah 55:8-9)

One reason we can’t escape the box of what math and logic and science and effort declare possible is that we don’t see that God does impossible miracles on a daily basis. Take bread, for example. Every day he makes it possible for tiny little seeds to be planted into dirt, multiplied into millions of more seeds, harvested, processed, baked, and delivered to your table for lunch. But because God works so reliably and regularly through the observable “science” we don’t regard our daily bread as the miracle it is; we don’t see our eternal God at work in our everyday world and everyday lives. We only come to this realization when there’s a problem with the “science.” And so, like in our text, God often causes the problem.  

Again, there’s nothing new here. God led the Israelites into the wilderness where there was no source of food according to the “science.” But when they turned to him for the solution and he provided it, they could see their food for the miracle it was. In the same way, when Philip and Andrew had run out of options and thrown their hands in the air – Jesus steps in and overturns the “science” with a miracle. He came up with a solution they never would have imagined or asked for to show them that God isn’t restricted to working in the ways we can dream up, think up or imagine.

So what does that mean for us? It means that when some problem has us so stumped that we actually turn to God in prayer for help, that we need to repent of, to stop trying to tell him how he should solve the problem. All of the solutions that we can come up with are limited by what we can see, do and think. This miracle proves that God is not limited by what we think is possible. It also proves that he often works in ways that are the exact opposite of our thinking. Andrew concluded that five loaves and two fish weren’t enough. Jesus proved that they were. And the counterintuitive ways of God are certainly not limited to feeding a crowd. God kills our sinful nature with the Law in order to make us alive with the Gospel. He threatens us with hell so that we may cling to his promise of heaven. His strength shines brightest when we are weakest (2 Corinthians 12:9-10). His foolishness is wiser than all the experts in the world combined (1 Corinthians 1:25). And when he provides unimaginable solutions to our unsolvable problems, he helps us better understand his ways.  

So, God sends problems into our lives so that we would understand ourselves, our weakness, our arrogance; he sends them so that we would better understand that his ways are far beyond our understanding; and, finally, he sends problems so that we would better understand who Jesus is and what he came to do.

With full bellies, the crowd had decided who Jesus should be and what he should do. They decided that he should be their king. Note that they didn’t come to this conclusion after they had heard Jesus’ preaching but only after they had eaten as much as they wanted. He had fed their souls for eternity, but all they were really interested in was satisfying their hunger for a few hours. Here was a guy who would write them unlimited stimulus checks; here was the welfare king they’d been waiting for! Sadly, isn’t that the kind of Jesus we often look and long for? Every single week – and every single day, if you take the time to meditate on the Word of God – Jesus comes to you to forgive your sins, to give you eternal salvation, to free you from sin, death and the devil – he will bring you these heavenly gifts from sunup to sundown. And yet, how often do we actually pray for those eternal gifts? How often don’t we desire a “welfare King” who will solve all our earthly problems? A Jesus who can and will fix the problem I’m facing today, right now. If he just did that, then he’d really be my king.

Well, that’s not who Jesus was then and that’s not who Jesus is now. Jesus didn’t descend from heaven into the womb of the virgin Mary to be nailed to a cross just to fill our bellies, heal our bodies and fix our finances. Jesus didn’t come simply to take care of our earthly problems. He came to redeem us from our eternal problems of sin, death and the devil. And that redemption couldn’t be accomplished by feeding the hungry, healing the sick, and giving a handout to the poor. That redemption demanded that Jesus trust his Father’s plan perfectly, never questioning his absolute love and power and then die the damned death we deserved. Jesus didn’t come to be your earthly king, to solve your temporary problems – but to be your eternal king, to solve your permanent problems by his life, death and resurrection. Jesus doesn’t just want to keep you alive today – he wants you to live forever.

And this becomes very clear in the things he left us; the miracles he still does on a regular basis today. He didn’t leave us bread to fill our bellies but the Bread of Life to fill our souls. He didn’t leave us water to quench our thirst but the water of Baptism to wash away our guilt. He didn’t leave us a book of life-hacks or bits of advice to make life easier – he gave us the words of absolution which solve the problem of sin forever. These are the miracles Jesus continues to perform on a daily and weekly basis. So what’s the problem? The problem is that these means of grace don’t look like miracles. When I baptized Liam he didn’t glow with Jesus’ righteousness – but we know he has it (Galatians 3:27). When we receive Communion we don’t see Jesus coming to us in flesh and blood with a meal straight from the wedding banquet in heaven – although with the saints and angels we sing about it! When we hear the absolution we don’t see our record of sin being wiped clean – but we have Jesus’ word on it (John 20:22-23). Whether it’s the feeding of the 5000, baptism, communion or absolution – these miracles remind us that while Jesus is fully capable of providing for our every earthly need – and he does, on a daily basis – that Jesus didn’t come to be our “bread king” but our Savior.

If you have problems in your life there are three things you can be sure of: God sent them to help you better understand yourself, himself and your Savior. And when that’s where your problems lead you, that’s really no problem at all, is it? Amen.