A Twilight Musing

One of my fondest boyhood memories is of going with my father to the bakery that employed him to pick up his load of bread and cakes to deliver that day.  The hot ovens inside were baking many loaves to supply the stores in the area, and the smell was divine!  Sometimes an indulgent worker would give me a piece of hot bread to eat, and that was a real treat, simple as it was.  As I look back on this experience, I realize that I would have had no access to this privileged space had I not been with my father.  Thanks to him, I could enjoy “Mead’s Fine Bread, the staff of life” (as the advertising called it) freshly baked. 

That put me to thinking about a comparison between the highly restricted Bread of the Presence (or Showbread) in the Old Testament and the bread of the Lord’s Supper to which Christians have open and regular access under the New Covenant.  Only Aaron and his sons were allowed access to the Showbread in the Holy Place, but through our Heavenly Father, we are ushered repeatedly into the Holy Place where the Lord’s Supper is served.  Perhaps we can gain insight to the Lord’s Supper through consideration of the details of God’s instructions in the Law of Moses concerning the Bread of the Presence (Lev. 24:5-9). 

To appreciate these instructions, we need to picture the layout of the Tabernacle (and later of the Temple in Jerusalem).  There was a forecourt containing the various tables and altars for animal sacrifice, at the back of which was a small tent housing two areas, the Holy Place at the front and the Most Holy Place (or Holy of Holies) at the back, separated by a curtain.  The Holy of Holies housed the Ark of the Covenant, the most sacred object in the Tabernacle, and it was entered only once a year, by the High Priest on the Day of Atonement.  Thus, the Holy Place served as a vestibule to the Most Holy Place, and in it were placed the twelve loaves of the Bread of the Presence, to be maintained perpetually.  It was specified that these be placed in two stacks of six each on a table made specially to hold them.  Each Sabbath, the loaves of Showbread were to be replaced and the old loaves to be eaten by the High Priest and his sons.

Here, then, are some helpful points of comparison between the rituals of the  Showbread and the Lord’s Supper.     

· The designation of twelve loaves of the Showbread is symbolic of the twelve tribes of Israel, the people of His Covenant, and so our partaking of the Lord’s Supper regularly reaffirms that we are also the people of God under the New Covenant through Jesus Christ.   

· Just as the loaves were replaced every Sabbath, so we may appropriately renew our experience with the Bread of Heaven each first day of the week; in the process we are reminded of God’s providing for us with the same faithfulness that He showed in the supply of manna to the Children of Israel. 

· The division of the bread into two piles of six each, with the burning of frankincense on each one, is a daily physical reminder of God’s being constantly with His people.  God’s Presence is as real on weekdays as on the Sabbath, and in the same way, our one-day observance of the Lord’s Supper is to sustain us on the other six days of the week as well.

· The eating of the sacred Bread of the Presence by the High Priest and his sons is a type of the ingestion of the common objects of bread and wine in the Lord’s Supper, made holy through God’s spiritual Presence in them.  We are eligible to partake because the people of the New Covenant are a “holy priesthood” (I Pet. 2:5). 

 · As the Bread of the Presence was to be eaten “in a holy place,” so when we take the elements of the Eucharist within us, the whole assembly becomes a Holy Place, indwelt by the Holy Spirit. 

 · As a “perpetual due” to the priests, the eating of the Showbread anticipates our continual observance of the Communion “until the Lord comes.”

There is one more instructive reference to the Showbread, an incident in the Old Testament (I Sam. 21:1-6) referred to by Jesus in the Gospels (see Matt. 12:1-10).  At one point, David was fleeing from King Saul, who was out to kill him.  In desperation for food for him and his little band of militia, he appealed to the High Priest Ahimelech.  The only food the priest had was the bread that had been taken from the table in the Holy Place, but he gave that to David and his men.  Jesus, when responding to the criticism of the Pharisees that His disciples were picking grain to eat on the Sabbath, refers to this exception to the rule that the Bread of the Presence be eaten only by the priests.  The Master took advantage of the situation to establish the principle that God administers His rules with mercy and is not so inflexible as those who wish to act as His enforcers to underline their own power.  We would do well to remember this teaching of Jesus when we participate in the Lord’s Supper, noting that God is more interested in the state of our hearts when we partake than in the technical correctness of the manner in which we do it.

So let us eat of the Holy Feast as those privileged under the Covenant of Christ to have our needy souls nourished and delivered from evil.  We serve a God who clears the way for us to dine at His table, and we rejoice in being served by the Lord of the Sabbath Himself.

Dr. Elton Higgs was a faculty member in the English department of the University of Michigan-Dearborn from 1965-2001. Having retired from UM-D as Prof. of English in 2001, he now lives with his wife in Jackson, MI. He has published scholarly articles on Chaucer, Langland, the Pearl Poet, Shakespeare, and Milton. Recently, Dr. Higgs has self-published a collection of his poetry called Probing Eyes: Poems of a Lifetime, 1959-2019, as well as a book inspired by The Screwtape Letters, called The Ichabod Letters, available as an e-book from Moral Apologetics. (Ed.: Dr. Higgs was the most important mentor during undergrad for the creator of this website, and his influence was inestimable.