Bread

The Bible often speaks of bread, but what does bread have to do with our lives and God?

God wants us to benefit from supplying our daily physical bread but more importantly, our daily spiritual bread from the One known as The Bread of Life.

Life flows around bread. For 6,000 years humanity has survived on bread. It was and is the stuff which supports life.

Every year the cycles or ebb of life was consumed with the grains that would be ground into flour to make bread. People did not have grocery stores, or even bakers from which to go to pick up their ready made loaves of bread for thousands of years. They also did not have commercial yeast or milled flour from which to make their bread for most of those years. They had to plant the grain, dry the grain, grind the grain into flour either by hand, or with large mill stones turned with oxen, to have the flour to begin the bread making process. Most breads were raised by use of a sourdough starter which took time to ferment. Historically there was no commercialized yeast to speed up the process.

All this took many days and months, so you can understand that people for many thousands of years thought a lot about bread. I have started making my own bread again after many years. I began by making my own sourdough starter. This is by itself a long process to bring it to the stage where it is bubbly and can make the bread rise. It takes at least a week for this to be achieved and then a whole day making bread because the starter works so slowly. This caused me to reflect more about bread and its role in people's lives.

A woman's life in a fairly large family would have been concentrated on providing that bread daily. Most people ate bread three times a day with a little meat or vegetables added to the diet.

When David was sent to provide food for his brothers during the battles that Saul’s army was involved in, he was sent with grain and 10 loaves of bread (1 Samuel:17:17). This family was also able to send some cheese which must have been a real treat, but this went to the captains and may not have even reached the men under them.

At this time there were no government rations, cans of some kind of meat, or dried packages of ready made meals for the men to eat.

We live in a very different world today in America and most developed nations. Not only do we buy most of our breads from stores, we are totally removed from the process and consuming time it takes to make a loaf of bread. The sprouted flour I have been buying allows you to click on an App so you can see where that grain was grown, but most people don’t even think about where the grain grew, let alone how it was made into a loaf. Many don’t even look at what goes into their bread. It’s just a loaf of bread, okay? Well, there might be more to it than that.

Christ said something profound in Matthew:4:4 “Man shall not live by bread alone, but by every word that proceeds from the mouth of God.” At that time over 2,000 years ago, bread was the average person’s main sustenance.In the story of Matthew:14:13,Christ fed the 5,000 bread and some fish. Occasionally people consumed meat and some vegetable to go with it, but mostly bread. It was dunked into a broth or sour wine as a meal.

If man’s focus is always on getting bread and all that is involved in bringing it about,growing, harvesting, drying, grinding, and then making a loaf to eat, it might be hard to understand eternal life. Just surviving this life consumes you. Yet understanding some of the parables of Christ might have been easier for people who lived for their daily bread.

God wants something more from us who have been called and given His Spirit. He wants to offer us something more precious than this physical life. Christ admonished the people who came to Him by saying “I say to you, you seek Me, not because you saw the signs, but because you ate of the loaves and were filled.” (John:6:26) He then goes on to say in John6:35, “I am the bread of life. He who comes to me shall never hunger.”

Bread is symbolic in the New Testement of Christ and eternal life through Him. We are told not to worry about what we eat or how we are able to sustain our physical lives. (Matthew:6:25) We are also told to seek God and His Kingdom and our daily physical bread will be supplied.

Very few down through the 6,000 years of mankind have understood the need to seek the true bread through faith in Jesus Christ, but at least they could understand the analogies of bread in God’s word and how valuable it was to life. It is interesting that in this day we don’t have to spend very much of our time and thoughts on how to supply our daily bread. Not only is this unique to the history of man, but with people developing special intolerances to grain and gluten that make up so many of the loaves of bread in the stores, it is almost becoming a negative factor in many people's lives. We may now lose the unique understanding of what daily bread pictures in the scriptures.

Christ is that perfect bread that we are told to partake of. God’s word requires time to ingest. We are to pray and ask God to give us this day our daily bread (Matthew:6:11) and this is so much more than physical food. Let us not lose the valuable lesson of bread in our daily lives as the world tries to remove it from us in every possible way.