From A Table of Showbread to Breaking Bread
Before I really dive into what is on my heart, I want to state that I have waited for quite some time, not only for the correct verbiage to describe what I am seeing and feeling, but also to state it in a clear and concise way, free of any offense. It has been something that I have carried and thought about deeply, but in recent weeks it has really come to the front and center in my life.
To first touch on a little history, in the times of the Tabernacle and Solomon’s Temple, one of the pieces that was required by GOD was the Table of Showbread. Just like the Ark of the Covenant, the Table of Showbread was also made of Shittim wood, overlaid in gold and was set across from the Menorah with the Altar of Incense between them. It’s function was to display twelve loaves of bread, made from fine flour, carefully prepared every week. They were believed to be flat and round, pierced in the middle to help them cook thoroughly in the heat, and then were stacked in two rows, each containing six loaves. At the end of seven days, the priests were to replace those loaves with fresh ones and consume the old ones. Each loaf of bread represented one of the twelve tribes of Israel and they were considered, “The Bread of His Presence.”
Today, the Temple no longer exists and the modern day Church has taken a more spiritual approach to this aspect of Temple worship. Rather than having fresh loaves of bread on display, we now look at the bread as a representation of the Word of GOD, based on the scripture from John 6:35 where Jesus declares, “I am the Bread of Life.” We know that every word Jesus spoke is truth.
Last week, a scripture came to mind and sort of just sat on me. In the New Testament, we see a time when five thousand people followed Jesus out into the wilderness where He began to teach them about the Kingdom of GOD and healed their sick. The Bible says, when it was late, His disciples came and asked Him to send the crowds of people away so that they could go into the surrounding towns and buy bread to eat. Jesus said to them, “They need not depart; you give them something to eat.” The disciples were astounded. Their immediate response was, “We don’t have enough money to feed all these people!” Jesus wasn’t the least concerned about their sense of lack. He simply asked them what they had. One disciple, recorded in John 6:9, stepped up and said, “There is a lad here that has five barley loaves and two small fish.” Luke 9:16 states, Jesus took the boy’s loaves of bread and his fish, blessed them giving thanks to the Father, then broke them and gave them to the disciples to give to the multitude of people. Then it says, when they all had eaten and were filled, the fragments that remained filled twelve baskets.
What I really want to point out here is that the Church of today, just like the disciples in Jesus’ time, were only focused on the spiritual bread. To them, it was okay for the multitudes to gather in front of the Table of Showbread in the form of Jesus Christ and receive some spiritual benefit, but they felt like it was the peoples’ responsibility to go and get their own physical bread in their time of need. Jesus completely upended that line of thinking by using a boy’s lunch to feed five thousand people that day. He wasn’t just meeting their spiritual needs, He was meeting their physical needs. As the Church of Jesus Christ, that responsibility still holds true. We are not called to simply house a Table of Showbread, we are called to break bread.
To back that up with a little scripture, we see in Acts 2:46, a very different church model than what we have today. It says, “They continued daily with one accord in the Temple, AND breaking bread from house to house, they did eat their meat with gladness and singleness of heart, praising GOD, and having favor with all the people. And the LORD added to the church daily such as should be saved.”
I believe the Holy Spirit is in the process of doing a course correction in the Church as a whole, for those that will hear. While we need His Presence among us, we also need true fellowship with one another, not just on Sunday, but in our daily lives.
Last night, oddly enough, while on the way to the grocery store to buy a loaf of bread, I spoke with a young lady who was absolutely overflowing with excitement concerning a vision the LORD had laid on her heart after a recent mission trip. She poured out to me how she felt like GOD was calling His people to a table to break bread once again. As I walked the aisles of the store, tears absolutely filled my eyes as she cast the vision. This morning, my attention was called to a post by a fairly well known Prophet that stated: “God is calling a generation of prophets out of the caves of isolation and Old Testament Lone Ranger mindsets into the family rooms and dining room tables of the New Testament where they inherit the relationship and intimacy with others they were created for.”
GOD is doing something marvelous in this hour. It’s time to cast off old mind sets that were never Jesus’ intention, the old ways we have developed of “doing ministry” and return to a Gospel that says, “Love the LORD Your GOD” and “Love Your Neighbor As Yourself”.