Jesus’ feeding of the five thousand (Mt. 14:13-21)

Posted on August 25, 2026 by Pastor Foley

In Matthew 13, Jesus’ first parable is the parable of the four types of soil. After the parables, Matthew shows Jesus encountering these four types of soil in sequence.

The first type Jesus encounters is the “path” soil–those whom the word essentially “bounces off” of. At the end of Matthew 13, the “path” people in Jesus’ hometown do not receive his word and in fact take offense at him. At the beginning of Matthew 14, when John the Baptist opposes Herod’s illegitimate marriage, Herod—the worst soil in the New Testament—likewise refuses the word and instead imprisons John the Baptist, ultimately having him beheaded.

After this, we see the “rocky soil” of the crowds, who receive healing and bread from Jesus. Unlike the people of his hometown, they initially receive Jesus’ word with great joy, like little children. But after that?

It’s worth some discussion.

An early third-century painting of the bread and the fish from the Catacomb of Callixtus, Rome. (https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Eucharistic_bread_and_fish.jpg)

The feeding of the five thousand is the only miracle recorded in all four Gospels. It is not told by any of the Gospel writers as a story about Jesus wandering around, finding hungry people, and feeding them. It is told as a story about Jesus directly providing for all who follow him. This difference matters because the Kingdom of God is about God in Christ providing for, teaching, and leading his people directly, without middlemen.

In John’s Gospel, Jesus withdraws from the crowds after feeding them because he knows they will try to make him king. They want to place him at the top of their existing hierarchy and have him run their nation. But Jesus did not come to reform existing hierarchies. He came to bring a new Kingdom. So, when the crowd follows him and finds him again, he rebukes them:

Jesus answered, “Very truly I tell you, you are looking for me, not because you saw the signs I performed but because you ate the loaves and had your fill. Do not work for food that spoils, but for food that endures to eternal life, which the Son of Man will give you. For on him God the Father has placed his seal of approval. (John 6:26-27)

Notice that Jesus does not rebuke the people for coming to him with their material needs. He rebukes them for living lives focused on meeting those needs. He teaches the same truth in the Sermon on the Mount:

Therefore I tell you, do not worry about your life, what you will eat or drink; or about your body, what you will wear. Is not life more than food, and the body more than clothes? Look at the birds of the air; they do not sow or reap or store away in barns, and yet your heavenly Father feeds them. Are you not much more valuable than they? Can any one of you by worrying add a single hour to your life? And why do you worry about clothes? See how the flowers of the field grow. They do not labor or spin. Yet I tell you that not even Solomon in all his splendor was dressed like one of these. If that is how God clothes the grass of the field, which is here today and tomorrow is thrown into the fire, will he not much more clothe you—you of little faith? So do not worry, saying, ‘What shall we eat?’ or ‘What shall we drink?’ or ‘What shall we wear?’ For the Gentiles run after all these things, and your heavenly Father knows that you need them. But seek first his kingdom and his righteousness, and all these things will be given to you as well. (Matthew 6:25-33)

Jesus delights to provide everything we need. But he does not provide all things so that we can live a good life by the standards of this age. Instead, he provides everything we need so that, with confidence, we can leave everything behind and follow him. The order is: first, serve Jesus; second, do not worry whether he will provide along the way. Jesus did not come to improve our present lives. He came to call us to leave those lives behind.

If the crowds are the rocky soil, does that mean that the disciples are the good soil in this story?

No, they are the thorny soil:

The seed falling among the thorns refers to someone who hears the word, but the worries of this life and the deceitfulness of wealth choke the word, making it unfruitful. (Matthew 13:22)

The disciples hear Jesus’ word, but the worries of this life and the deceitfulness of wealth make them unfruitful in today’s passage:

As evening approached, the disciples came to him and said, “This is a remote place, and it’s already getting late. Send the crowds away, so they can go to the villages and buy themselves some food.”Jesus replied, “They do not need to go away. You give them something to eat.”“We have here only five loaves of bread and two fish,” they answered. (Matthew 14:15-17)

Notice that the disciples do not look to Jesus to act. Instead, because they are preoccupied with the cares of this world, they tell him what to do.

The deceitfulness of wealth does not only affect the rich. Poor people are deceived by the value of wealth, too. Both rich churches and poor churches often assume that the more money they have, the more ministry they can do, and the less money they have, the less ministry they can do.

But this is not how the Kingdom of God works. In the Kingdom, Jesus provides for people directly. That is why he tells the disciples to bring the food and the crowds to him. As the king, he provides for his people directly:

“Bring them here to me,” he said. And he directed the people to sit down on the grass. Taking the five loaves and the two fish and looking up to heaven, he gave thanks and broke the loaves. Then he gave them to the disciples, and the disciples gave them to the people. They all ate and were satisfied, and the disciples picked up twelve basketfuls of broken pieces that were left over. The number of those who ate was about five thousand men, besides women and children. (Matthew 14:18-21)

If even the disciples are thorny soil, who is the good soil?

That’s the point of one of Jesus’ other parables from Matthew 13: The parable of the wheat and the tares. The point of that parable is: Until the end, the wheat and the tares—or the thorny ground and the good soil—look alike. That’s why the owner of the field says the tares shouldn’t be removed until the harvest: Some of the wheat might be removed by accident.

The same thing is true with the thorny soil: Sometimes, in the end, it proves to be good soil after all. Peter was continually an unfruitful disciple, all the way through Galatians 2! But the one thing he never did was to walk away from Jesus. As he told Jesus in John 6:

“Lord, to whom shall we go? You have the words of eternal life. We believe and know that you are the Holy One of God.” (John 6:68-69)

In the end, the only qualification for good soil is that it ultimately never rejects the seed.

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More Bibles Delivered to North Korea than Ever Before!

Posted on August 12, 2026 by tdillmuth

Before the first Western missionaries set foot in Korea, a network of untrained indigenous Koreans had already spread the gospel widely throughout the country and converted many Koreans to Protestant Christianity. Their successful strategy, unique in Christian history, relied on their covert personal distribution of thousands of copies the first vernacular translation of the Bible into Korean. That translation was created by Korean merchants under the direction of Scottish missionary, John Ross, who was himself an untrained Bible translator.

Missionary John Ross

This was the core of John Ross’s missionary strategy: introduce people to Christ by giving them only the Bible, the word of God, since Christ is fully present in his word. Nothing else was needed.

And this is the core of our ministry today.

Every year, we distribute an average of 40,000 to 50,000 North Korean dialect Bibles to North Koreans, but in 2025 we distributed more Bibles to North Koreans than we have ever done in any single previous year of our history! This is in addition to our daily Bible broadcasts on our 5 shortwave radio stations that broadcast into North Korea.

North Korean defectors, who are a part of our Underground University missionary training program, hold up the NK Full Study Bible.

Why do we distribute so many Bibles? Because Christ is fully present in his word!

Over 20 years ago, North Korean underground Christians asked us to send Bibles into North Korea and we continue to fulfill that request in the spirit of John Ross. In fact, every year, we use a variety of means to distribute Bibles to North Koreans, wherever they are found.

In order to protect the safety and security of the recipients, we keep the exact number of Bibles as well as most of the distribution methods and technology private. But we always look for opportunities to share stories with you that will not compromise the security of the recipients. Below are three of these stories, about North Koreans who received Bibles in a variety of ways.

Border Guard Allows Bible into North Korea

We met a young North Korean man who was newly arrived in South Korea. He had defected shortly after completing his mandatory ten-year military service and then spent time in China.

When the young man was a border guard along the river, a middle-aged North Korean woman came across the river on a raft made of inflatable inner tubes. She had a box that was labeled DVDs, but when he searched it he found six Bibles concealed on the bottom. When he saw these, he froze as if dead. He said all NK border guards are told, “If you see the Bible, you are dead,” which he as an intelligent young man understood to mean that if an NK soldier ever reported having seen Bibles, he himself would be heavily interrogated and watched. So, in his panic he told the woman, “Never mention this in your life, and I will never mention it in my life,” and he let her in to North Korea with the Bibles.

This is a good reminder that God has his ways of moving hearts and arranging for Bibles to enter into North Korea. Human deception is rarely God’s way. God’s way involves transforming hearts in surprising fashion.

Dr. Foley delivers a Bible to a hospitalized NK sex-trafficked woman.

“If I had a gun, I would shoot my NK supervisors . . .”

“If I had a gun,” the North Korean worker said. “I would shoot all my North Korean supervisors and then shoot myself.”

With gnashed teeth, this North Korean (one of the “lucky” few whose application to work abroad in Russia had been approved by the party) recalled the brash and brutal behavior of his supervisors. Since so many North Koreans were eager to work abroad, the supervisors saw this worker, and all workers, as expendable. Supervisors gave them very little food and even less money.

This North Korean worker hadn’t been working abroad for long, but he had already seen many people die from the poor and dangerous work conditions. In North Korea, he had hoped that travelling abroad would hold all the answers to his fears and struggles. Now, however, all hope had been snatched away from him.

Instead of the food, money, and security he had hoped for, the worker was left with little other than bone-chilling hatred and hopelessness.

When our partner visited him, however, he was shocked to find a smile on worker’s face. “What happened?” He asked. “Now, I received Jesus,” the worker said.

This North Korean worker, in addition to many others, had received an MP3 player with the North Korean Bible on it and had listened eagerly to each and every word. Jesus had come into the darkest, dangerous, and most destitute of factories and rekindled the dwindling embers of this man’s heart.

And it’s not just this worker, through these MP3 players, God’s word is moving the hearts of North Korean workers all over the world.

A North Korean man receives the audio Bible on an MP3 player.

A Head Stuffed Full of Bible

Recently, we connected with another line of underground Christians in North Korea. As usual, they requested Bibles and as usual we distributed Bibles to them.

We are always impressed by the request for Bibles. Living in a place where being found with a Bible means at least imprisonment if not also death, Bibles would be hard for them to come by and not easy to ask for. But what we were more impressed by was that, even before asking us for Bibles, they were quoting scripture word for word!

When asked how they were able to quote scriptures so well, as if they had a Bible, one person responded as follows:

As we (the people in our underground church group) have lived for decades, half of that time has been spent in church. As we study in church, of course our heads have become stuffed full about the Bible. But there are things which we have written down as well. If you send us Bible books, we will be thankful.

The keen eye will notice two things about what the underground Christian said.

First, the underground Christian said that half of their lives have been spent in church. When we hear this, our first thought may be to wonder how they could have spent that much time living in the church since there are no church buildings! But for the NK underground Christian, the church is not a building, it is the term used to refer collectively to the body of believers.

Second, the underground Christian said that their heads have become “stuffed full about the Bible.” But how could their heads have been stuffed full with the Bible if they do not have Bibles? For the underground Christian, “Bible” refers to the word of God itself, not to the container (be it a in a book, an MP3 player, or one’s own head/heart) which houses the word of God. This is why they specifically ask for “Bible books”.

Even after all of these years of doing North Korean ministry, we are amazed by and continue to learn from underground Christians. And we are humbled when they ask us for help when, in fact, we need theirs.

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The Parable of the Sower

Posted on July 21, 2026 by Pastor Foley

Matthew 13 starts with the words “That same day Jesus went out of the house and sat by the lake.” But what “same day” was it?

It was a day in which the Pharisees started plotting to kill Jesus because he healed somebody on the Sabbath. And when he drove out demons, they accused him of casting out demons by “Beelzebul, the prince of demons.”

Many Christians think Jesus performed miracles to attract people to believe in him—to “prepare the soil.” But when Jesus performed miracles, people hated and persecuted him for it. For Jesus, doing good for others is not a strategy for making people Christians. It is simply the character of God. This is why Jesus often told people not to tell anyone after he healed them.

Jesus warned them not to tell anyone about him. (Matthew 12:16)

As Christians, then, we must do good not as a means of making people Christians, but because it is our identity as Christians.

But love your enemies, do good to them, and lend to them without expecting to get anything back. Then your reward will be great, and you will be children of the Most High, because he is kind to the ungrateful and wicked. (Luke 6:35)

When an impure spirit comes out of a person, it goes through arid places seeking rest and does not find it. Then it says, ‘I will return to the house I left.’ When it arrives, it finds the house unoccupied, swept clean and put in order. Then it goes and takes with it seven other spirits more wicked than itself, and they go in and live there. And the final condition of that person is worse than the first. That is how it will be with this wicked generation. (Matthew 12:45)

Jesus came, healed, spoke in parables, and did everything he did in order to testify to the truth.

“You say that I am a king. In fact, the reason I was born and came into the world is to testify to the truth. Everyone on the side of truth listens to me. (John 18:37)

Many Christians believe Jesus told parables to help people understand truth more easily. But Jesus said he told parables for the opposite reason:

He told them, “The secret of the kingdom of God has been given to you. But to those on the outside everything is said in parables 12 so that, ‘they may be ever seeing but never perceiving, and ever hearing but never understanding; otherwise they might turn and be forgiven!’” (Mark 4:11-12 NIV)

Jesus’ parables are not merely illustrations. They are soil detectors—diagnostic tools that reveal the heart condition of the listener. In other words, Jesus tells parables to reveal whose heart is good soil to receive his word and become his disciple.

In Matthew 13:3-9, Jesus tells a parable:

Then he told them many things in parables, saying: “A farmer went out to sow his seed. As he was scattering the seed, some fell along the path, and the birds came and ate it up. Some fell on rocky places, where it did not have much soil. It sprang up quickly, because the soil was shallow. But when the sun came up, the plants were scorched, and they withered because they had no root. Other seed fell among thorns, which grew up and choked the plants. Still other seed fell on good soil, where it produced a crop—a hundred, sixty or thirty times what was sown. Whoever has ears, let them hear. (Matthew 13:3-9 NIV)

Jesus is not only telling this parable; he is enacting it—and has been enacting it since Genesis—as the one who has sown the word of God in the world from the beginning. In Genesis, Satan snatched up the word of God from Adam and Eve like birds snatching seed, telling them they could be like God and self-sufficient instead of depending on God.

God could have given Adam and Eve over to death immediately. But in his mercy, he made a way for humans to receive his care. He created temporary mediators—kings, priests, laws, tribes, families, and others—to mediate his care to humanity. These were temporary life-support gifts through which God cared for us after humans rejected him and became enslaved to sin. But humans became accustomed to relying on these mediators and pushed God even further away.

It is almost like this quote from the character Morpheus in the 1999 movie The Matrix:

The Matrix is everywhere. It is all around us. Even now, in this very room. You can see it when you look out your window or when you turn on your television. You can feel it when you go to work… when you go to church… when you pay your taxes. It is the world that has been pulled over your eyes to blind you from the truth…that you are a slave…like everyone else you were born into bondage. Into a prison that you cannot taste or see or touch. A prison for your mind.

Jesus does not use the tools of the Matrix to make people more receptive. He does not “till the soil.” He sows the seed as it is, regardless of the condition of the ground. This is the way Jesus chooses to sow.

Those like the “rocky places” are people who cannot withstand persecution. And those like the seed that fell among the thorns are described this way:

The seed falling among the thorns refers to someone who hears the word, but the worries of this life and the deceitfulness of wealth choke the word, making it unfruitful. (Matthew 13:22)

These are people who look to Jesus to fix their worldly problems in the way they want. When he does not, they return to relying on the mediators of the world rather than on God.

Those who are good soil are people who want to live in the real world of God’s truth, which they access through the word of God.

The disciples are confused by Jesus’ evangelism strategy. Why does he speak in parables instead of simply stating the truth? But for Jesus, the parables do tell the truth—only in a way that reveals the receptiveness of a person’s heart.

Telling the truth does not always mean explaining everything plainly. The parables are designed to plant a small, uncomfortable sense in people’s minds that the world we know is not the real world—like a splinter. Some people dig at it until they remove the splinter, the seed. But in good soil, the seed is not removed; it goes deeper.

This is why Jesus says:

Whoever has will be given more, and they will have an abundance. Whoever does not have, even what they have will be taken from them. (Matthew 13:12)

In this way, there is a significant difference between modern evangelists and Jesus. Jesus does not say, “Whoever does not have, you must prepare their soil so that they may eventually receive the seed.” A person either desires to leave the Matrix, or they do not. You cannot make a person more inclined to leave the false world of the Matrix for the real world of the kingdom of God. What counts as good soil for the Matrix and what counts as good soil for the kingdom of God are entirely different.

Good soil for the Matrix is what Jesus describes as “the path”. Perhaps Jesus refers to it as “the path” because it is, in a sense, smooth and easy for mediators to walk on. It gives no resistance to the Matrix. It shows no openness to the seed sown by Jesus.

The stony ground and thorny ground are also good soil for the Matrix. These soils may show initial openness to the seed, but the persecution and prosperity of the Matrix prevent the seed from taking root.

When a missionary or evangelist tries to “prepare the soil,” they are only preparing people to receive the world, because they are using the tools of the world. People who are of the world have no use for the seed.

When Jesus tells the disciples to find a “person of peace,” it will probably not be the mayor. It will probably be the woman who has had five husbands and is currently living with a man who is not her husband. A “person of peace” is not someone who is at peace with the Matrix. It is someone who has realized that the things of the world can provide nothing of lasting value and who therefore has no peace in this world.

This is why the disciples of Jesus look so shabby. They have no value to the Matrix or to the mediators. They are tax collectors, prostitutes, drug addicts, divorcees, fishermen, and zealots. The Matrix calls such people losers. But Jesus calls them “good soil.” And the way he finds them is by speaking in parables. When they hear Jesus’ parables, they recognize that what he offers is completely foreign to this world. So they follow him to learn more, and they keep following him all the way out of the Matrix.

The only way out of the Matrix is through the waters of baptism. After we pass through those waters, we keep following him.

As Morpheus said,

If you take the red pill, you stay in Wonderland, and I show you how deep the rabbit hole goes.

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