18 ‘You have eyes—can’t you see? You have ears—can’t you hear?’Don’t you remember anything at all? 19 When I fed the 5,000 with five loaves of bread, how many baskets of leftovers did you pick up afterward?”
“Twelve,” they said.
20 “And when I fed the 4,000 with seven loaves, how many large baskets of leftovers did you pick up?”
“Seven,” they said.
21 “Don’t you understand yet?” he asked them.
I was just passing by this scripture. I wasn’t really trying to study, I was in fact looking for something else. And then this hit me:
12 disciples picked up 12 baskets of leftovers (broken bread). Jesus in the upper room broke the bread and said I believe the Spirit showed me the twelve baskets of leftovers represent the twelve tribes of Israel. If we recall the gospel went out first to the Jews, then to the Gentiles.
The seven baskets after that were representational of the sevenfold Spirit of God – mentioned in Revelation 3. it is also the number of perfection. The seven baskets represented God’s spirit and completion. A heavenly number of perfection – the bread that is Christ has been readied to be handed out to the world by the disciples.
It occurs to me, we are like the woman requesting that Jesus heal her daughter – Jesus answers I’m not here for you – but she replies the dogs under the table still get the scraps…
We were not God’s chosen people by birth, but instead we are God’s chosen people by God’s promises. We receive (and are still receiving) the scraps from those seven baskets – and those scraps of Jesus (the Bread of Life) are literally feeding the world to this very day.
