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Tuesday, April 17, 2018

The Hidden Message


There is a lad here who has five barley loaves and two small fish, but what are they among so many?  John 6:9 NKJV

When my friend, Anne, asked me to coauthor her children’s sermon on the topic of unleavened bread, I started to read about barley because I knew it to be the grain of the common (poor) people in the Bible. It was purely an economic decision on their part because wheat was three times the price of barley. 

The number of stories in the OT having barley at the heart of them was surprising to me. I read several of them and found that the destruction of the barley fields was part of the 7th plague (Ex. 9:31-32); Ruth met Boaz because she and Naomi returned to Bethlehem during barley harvest (Ruth 1:22); and it made me smile when I read that Gideon interpreted the dream of a man who told of seeing a loaf of barley bread roll down a hill and flatten a tent to mean that he would have victory in battle against the Midianites (Judges 7:13).

But how does one find the hidden message in the miracle of Jesus’ feeding of the 5,000?  According to one bible scholar you have to compare Elijah’s feeding of the poor widow and her son by keeping her flour bin full after she had used her last handful of flour to feed Elijah (1Kings 7:15-16) and Elisha’s feeding 100 men with 20 loaves of barley bread (2 Kings 4:42-44) to Jesus’ feeding of the 5,000 with 5 loaves. The people that Jesus was teaching thought Jesus to be a prophet. They would have known both Elijah’s and Elisha’s stories. By comparison, when Jesus fed the 5,000 with 5 loaves, He was showing Himself to be greater than the prophets. 

Without the prompting to make this comparison, I would have completely missed that hidden message! Did you miss it, too? 

Prayer: Thank You, Father, for the scriptures which reveal the glory of Your Son, Jesus’, miracles and for showing us that sometimes we just need to read between the lines to get Your message. In Jesus’ name we pray. Amen

Judy Welch

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