OLBGrk;
Ver. 45,46. If this desert where Christ was were, as Luke saith, Luke 9:10, a desert belonging to Bethsaida, those words, eiv to peran prov bhysaidan, are ill translated unto Bethsaida, and the marginal note in our larger Bibles is better, over against Bethsaida. Our Saviour here first sends away his disciples by water, then he dismisses the multitude to go to their own homes. Then he goeth up into a mountain to pray. We find Christ very often in the duty of secret prayer, very often choosing a mountain, as a place of solitude, for the performance of it, and very often making use of the night for it, which is also a time of quietness and solitude: which lets us know that secret prayer is necessary, not only for the bewailing, and confessing, and begging pardon for our secret sins, (for Christ had no such), but for our more free and more near communion with God; for although God filleth all places, yet we shall observe that God, in his more than ordinary communion with his people, hath not admitted of company, of which Abraham, and Moses, and Jacob, and all the prophets are sufficient instances.