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?The Biblical Illustrator - Luke (Ch.5~6)?(A Compilation)

05 Chapter 5

Verses 1-14
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Verse 1
Luke 5:1; Luk_5:3
And it came to pass, that, as the people pressed upon Him to hear the Word
of God
The gospel and the masses
What could have been the wonderful secret power by which the great Prophet
of Galilee drew all men after Him?
1. One simple and very intelligent element in it was the way in which he
recognized the wholeness of human nature, that, at the bottom, peer
did not differ from peasant, nor monarch from villager.
2. And not only did He recognize the wholeness of human nature, hut also
its many diversified needs.
3. He was sinless, and yet He never had a harsh word for the sinners--
provided they were not hypocrites.
4. He had the tenderest feelings for those who enjoyed fewest
opportunities.
5. He recognized the natural or social wants which are common to all men.
Feeding five thousand; making wine at wedding.
6. He disdained no man.
APPLICATION. Oh that God would give us grace to preach fully, faithfully,
wisely, lovingly this gospel in the spirit, and with the simplicity and
abounding sympathy with which it was first preached in the cities and on
the mountain slopes and by the lake shores of Galilee; and then I believe
the people would be found pressing to hear it as they pressed then. (Bishop
Fraser.)
The Word of God
I. THE WORD OF GOD THAT IS NOW PREACHED AMONG US.
II. THE EXISTING URGENCY TO HEAR IT. Of diffusive religion we have
abundance; a concentrative Christianity is what we require.
III. THE PEOPLE WHO ARE ITS FAVOURED, AND TOO OFTEN ITS FORGETFUL HEARERS.
TWO great classes; those who know the revelation of the will of God through
Christ as a mass of doctrines and commands demanding from our
understandings a simple assent to their truth; and those who know it in
such a sense and degree, as that it becomes the pervading principle of all
their actions. Beware of the Christianity of the formalist. When rightly
received, "the Word of God is quick and powerful, and sharper than any two-
edged sword." (W. A. Butler, M. A.)
To hear the Word of God
One of the finest conceivable pictures presented in this verse--people
pressing to hear the Word of God! They often pressed to see Christ's
miracles, and to listen to His parables, with more or less of mere
curiosity; but in this case the motive was spiritual and pure. Why do
people attend the sanctuary? To hear the word of man? Then will there be
debate, opposition, doubt, or at best, admiration, fickle and selfish. The
remedy is partly in the hands of ministers themselves. When they insist
upon delivering the message of God without any admixture of human
speculation, their spiritual reverence and earnestness may carry a holy
contagion amongst the people. God's Word should always be supreme in God's
house. "Them that honour Me, I will honour." (J. Parker, D. D.)
The Lake of Gennesaret
It is the centre of the ministry of our Lord; it is not too much to say of
it what Dean Stanley has said, "It is the most sacred sheet of water that
the earth contains." The Rabbins say, "I have created seven seas, saith the
Lord, but out of them I have chosen none but the sea of Gennesaret." In the
day of our Lord, it was a scene of teeming life as well as the centre of a
peculiarly hushed and hallowed solitude. No doubt, as compared with many
quarters of the globe, it was secluded; but still its shores and its waves
were the way of traffic. It was situated in the midst of the Jordan valley,
or the great thoroughfare from Babylon and Damascus into Palestine; hence
it was "the way of the sea beyond Jordan." Along its banks a wondrous
vegetation spread, and full of especially beautiful birds and flowers and
fruits. What a scene it must have presented--fishermen by hundreds on the
Lake; in hamlets around the numerous shipbuilders; and the sails and boats
of pleasure flying before the frequent gusts from the mountains. There was
no other spot which would so instantly have been a conductor to the words
of our Lord. There is a Divine providence in even the very spot itself. The
dwellers of the Sea of Galilee were free from most of the strong prejudices
which, in the south of Palestine, raised a bar to Christ's reception. There
were the people of Zabulon and Nephthalim, by the way of the sea beyond
Jordan, Galilee of the Gentiles. They had sat in darkness; but for that
very reason they saw more clearly the great light when it came to them in
the region of the shadow of death. There He came, to that spot, to preach
the gospel to the poor, the weary, and the heavy laden, to seek and to save
that which was lost. Where could He find what He sought so readily as in
the ceaseless turmoil of those busy waters and teeming villages? Roman
soldiers, centurions quartered with their slaves; here, too, the palaces of
the princes. Hardy boatmen, publicans, and tax-collectors sitting at the
receipt of custom, women who were sinners from neighbouring Gentile cities
and villages. Thus all was prepared to concentrate and give effect to the
power of His teaching by the Lake. (E. Paxton Hood.)
Description of the lake
The Sea of Galilee is shaped like a pear, with a width at the broadest
part of 6.75 miles, and a length of 121; miles; that is, it is about the
same length as our own Windermere, but considerably broader, though in the
clear air of Palestine it looks somewhat smaller. Nothing can exceed the
bright clearness of the water, which it is delightful to watch as it runs
in small waves over the shingle. Its taste, moreover, is sweet, except near
the hot springs and at Tiberias, where it is polluted by the sewerage of
the town. There is much more level ground on the eastern side than the
western, yet the western side was always, in Bible times, much more thickly
peopled by the Hebrews than the other; partly from the fact that "beyond
Jordan" was almost a foreign country; partly because the land above the
lake on the east was exposed to the Arabs; and in some measure also because
it always had a large intermixture of heathen population. (Geikie's "Holy
Land and the Bible.")
Description of the surrounding scenery
The original population of the shores of the lake was Sidonian, and when
Tyre and Sidon were founded on the shores of the Mediterranean they moved
westward, but the town of Bethsidon still retained the name given it by its
first inhabitants. The richest part of the shores was at the north-west,
where is a luxuriant plain of half-moon shape, walled out from the north
and west winds by mountains, and exposed to the sun. This was where the
princes and the nobles had their country residences, and the gardens were
filled with all kinds of flowers and fruit. The lake was called by its
first colonists, Cenuereth, or the Harp, from its shape. The Jews thought
so highly of its beauty that they said, "God created seven seas--but for
Himself He elected but one, and that the Lake Gennesareth"; and again, "It
is the Gate of Paradise." Josephus says, "It is a district where Nature
seems to have constrained herself to create an eternal spring, and to
gather into one spot the products of every one." To the present day the
date-palm, citrons, pomegranate, indigo, rice, sugar-cane, grow there;
cotton, balsams, vines, thrive; the purple grapes are as big as plums, and
the bunches weigh twelve pounds. Here also the fig-tree yields her fruit
throughout the year, ripening every month. The Jews call Gennesareth the
Garden Lake, and if there were any place in Palestine that could recall the
lost Paradise, it was this fruitful, beautiful tract, watered with its five
streams. At Chammath, about two miles south of Tiberias, are hot springs,
of old much used for baths, and half an hour's walk above Tiberias a cold
spring of beautiful water bursts out of the mountain side, and pours down
to the lake in five or six streams. At Tabigha also are hot springs, that
gush streaming down into the blue waters of the lake. Now the neglect of
mismanagement of the Turkish Government have led to the devastation of this
beautiful corner of the world, and many of the foreign plants once
introduced into it have died out, or are disappearing. We can only guess
what a garden of delight it must have been in the time of our Lord, when
the aqueducts were in working order, and canals carried water to all the
gardens and fields. (S. Baring-Gould, M. A.)
Attractiveness of the true preacher
Let a man be a true preacher, really uttering the truth through his own
personality, and it is strange how men will gather to listen to him. We
hear that the day of the pulpit is past, and then some morning the voice of
a true preacher is heard in the land, and all the streets are full of men
crowding to hear him, just exactly as were the streets of Constantinople
when Chrysostum was going to preach at the Church of the Apostles, or the
streets of London when Latimer was bravely telling the truth at St. Paul's.
(Phillips Brooks, D. D.)
The personal power inpreaching
The nameless and potent charm of intense personality cannot all go down
into a dead book. Truth in personality is where the hidings of power are.
We look in vain along the pages of Whitefield for the secret of his mighty
effectiveness. We search the famous sermon of Edwards, and wonder what
there was in it that moved men so. It was not the sermon on the printed
page; it was the sermon in the living preacher. While men are men, a living
man before living men will always be more than white paper and black in