GREAT THINGS ENTERPRISE
CLAUDE BLACK
Mark 6:40
Orderliness
I would not make a smudge on a chef’s spatula, but I occasionally get into a baking mood. The first thing I do is search for a recipe. There are cooks who begin by adding a bit of this and a bit of that. Such a process comes from years of experience. I watched my paternal grandmother bake biscuits, and she started with flour, yeast, and other mysterious ingredients to make delicious biscuits. When my brothers and I stayed with our grandparents for a visit, my grandmother’s biscuits would disappear during the day as hungry boys would walk through the kitchen, grabbing a biscuit—a delicious biscuit.
But in my baking experiences, I need to know the exact proportions of ingredients, the order in which the ingredients are added, the baking temperature, and the baking time. It’s not that I need a recipe to boil water, but it’s pretty close to that.
Mark said that when Jesus prepared to feed the huge crowd gathered on a hillside near Bethsaida, on the east side of the Jordan River, where it flows into the Sea of Galilee, he directed the disciples to have the crowd sit down on the lush, spring-green grass. “And they sat row by row in groups of hundreds and in groups of fifties.” (Mark 6:40) There was probably some logic behind such an orderly arrangement—so that the numbers might be better known, so that the feeding might be done in order, and so that everyone might have his portion. The orderliness of this process precedes the miraculous event about to take place.
When the Apostle Paul wrote to the Corinthian church, he emphasized the importance of order when they came together: “For God is not a God of disorder but of peace.” (1 Cor. 14:33) Sometimes life becomes chaotic when too many things come at once. It is in those times that one realizes the value of having orderliness.
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