While I was in seminary, one of the in-vogue approaches to Jesus was an attempt to humanize him and remove as much of the miraculous from his ministry as possible. Where this approach reached a point that was completely untenable in my mind was in its approach to the miracle of the Feeding of the Five Thousand, as proponents of the theory claimed that rather than Jesus causing the loaves and fish to multiply abundantly to feed so many, people in the crowd that day each gave of what they had been hoarding to share it with others. The challenge in my mind was in reading the story of that miraculous event in isolation, in forgetting the words of our Daily Dwell this week: “You open your hand and satisfy the desires of every living thing.”
God’s hand is what provides for us, and in His abundance we each have abundantly more than we can ever imagine. Our blessings are not due to the people around us feeling that they should change their hoarding tendencies to give us what we wish; rather they come from the Lord’s desire to provide for us. One of the challenges we can run into in reading these words is found in that word “desires.” There are many things that each of us wishes to possess, desires to possess, yet those things still elude us. We know that God’s dream is that we would all be provided for, so why don’t we have all of our desires?
At the heart, there’s a matter of translation coming into play. The Hebrew word that is translated as “desires” has a deeper meaning of “goodwill” or “favor.” God provides what we need not only in order to survive but also to know His goodwill and favor in our lives. We know the not-so-simple everyday blessings of air to breathe, clean water to drink, and shelter to keep us warm and dry, but our Lord also provides for us that which makes life enjoyable and fun—not simply the bare necessities of survival.
To think of this idea from a psychological perspective, God does not simply care for our physiological needs, but He is working within our lives, guiding us, calling out to us each to help us draw ever closer to self-actualization, to the knowledge of what it means to live in right relationship with God and to be the people who we have each been created to be. What I find most amazing about the way in which He accomplishes this feat is that He does it by changing our understanding of what our desires truly are to see His favor as the greatest goal we can attain.