NATURAL BREAD AND SPIRITUAL BREAD
It is important to recognize that the bread that Jesus fed to the four thousand and the five thousand was “artos” — not “azumos” — bread. The distinction between artos and azumos is the same as between the common manna eaten by the Israelites in the wilderness and hidden manna eaten/heard by New Covenant disciples.
The difference between the two kinds of bread is that artos has leavening in it and that azumos is unleavened. The leavening is the distorting influence of the teaching of Pharisees (i.e. religious leaders) on God’s words.
In the Bible, leaven (i.e. yeast) is most commonly a reference to sin. We find this introduced in the Passover story where the exhortation to eat unleavened bread for seven days is a symbolic reference to the New Covenant where people listen to God’s voice with their hearts. This contrasts with Old/First Covenant religion in which people use their natural, fleshly abilities (i.e. eyes and ears) to listen to the voices of false prophets (i.e. Pharisees, religious leaders) in the context of religion. The symbolism, therefore, is that people must stop feeding on religion that brings death, and instead feed themselves on God’s spoken word which brings life.
The command to listen to God’s voice is reinforced many times in the Old Testament. In the New Testament, however, we do not find God speaking directly to people the way he does in the Old Testament. What we find in the New Testament is God speaking through Jesus, Paul, and a few disciples as True Prophets who speak with life-giving, spiritual words. They are empowered by God to speak for him because they are New Covenant disciples who have God’s spiritual laws written on their hearts. That is what qualifies them to speak for God. Old/First Covenant religionists do not have these qualifications.
The stories of the so-called miracles of feeding the multitudes are not about natural miracles. If they were about natural miracles, they would violate what God has said through Jesus about Signs, Wonders and Miracles. Rather, these stories are parables that symbolically represent how God feeds spiritual food to his people.
When we look at the stories symbolically, we see Jesus as a True Prophet and High Priest who teaches people through spiritual words.
COMMENTARY ON SPIRITUAL WORDS: Pentecostal and Charismatic religions believe that the physical sounds they make with their natural voices are spiritual. Jews and Christians in general believe that recitation of the literal words of the Bible is a spiritual activity. They are all wrong in the belief that literal sounds and literal words are spiritual.
The principle that confirms whether anything (e.g. people, places, things, sounds, words, etc.) is spiritual always rests on whether or not it can be seen with natural eyes, heard with natural ears, tasted with the natural tongue, smelled with natural senses or touched with natural senses. Things that can be seen, heard, tasted, smelled or touched are only physical things. They cannot be spiritual things because spiritual things are always invisible to natural senses.
What makes natural words spiritual is the presence of the holy spirit of God speaking through New Covenant disciples. When Jesus told his disciples that the spirit spoke through him and that the spirit would speak through them, he did not mean that the literal words they spoke were spiritual. He meant that God’s spirit infused natural words spoken by men with God’s spiritual power.
The critical factor that enables human words to become spiritual words is the condition of the human heart. The heart of the speaker must have God’s laws written in it. This is the definition of a New Covenant disciple. Old/First Covenant religionists can say the same words with all sincerity, but those words will lack spiritual power because their hearts are full of religious laws — not God’s God’s spiritual laws. The spiritual principle at work here is that what a person speaks reflects what is in his heart/her heart.
Evidence of spiritual power is found in the way the words are received. Just as the ability to speak spiritual words depends on the condition of the heart, the ability to hear spiritual words depends on the condition of the heart of the hearer. Religious people with hard hearts full of religious laws will only hear natural sounds (i.e. words, noises) that make no spiritual sense. In the Bible, this phenomenon is called speaking in tongues.
Biblical references to tongues are wrongly interpreted by Old/First Covenant religionists. In particular, Pentecostals and charismatics have made speaking in tongues a main feature of their religion because they interpret scriptures literally. Thus they believe that they are filled with the spirit of God because they speak unintelligible noises/words. The right interpretation is that the words are unintelligible because the hearers lack the ability to hear God’s voice when it is spoken directly by God or by one of his true prophets.
True prophets speak with tongues of angels. That means they speak spiritual words that are not understood by religious people who have hardened their hearts so they cannot hear God’s voice.
New Covenant disciples spoke with spiritual power to Old/First Covenant religionists (i.e. the Jews), but what the Jews heard was a foreign language (i.e. tongue). The New Covenant disciples were not confused about what they were saying because God’s laws were written on their hearts, God told them what to say and when to say it in a way that is seamless and not observable to them or those who heard them. What they spoke was a new language for them because they were recent converts, but they understood the spiritual content of their human words because God was speaking through them just like he has always been speaking through true prophets.
The confusion about what they were saying was in the fact that the Jews did not, and could not, understand the spiritual content of the human words. Thus what they heard was like a foreign language.
It is the spirit that gives spiritual meaning to natural words. It is not the spoken words themselves just like it is not the written, literal words of the Bible that have power. It is always the spoken words of God that have power to give life.
This dynamic relationship between the spoken or written natural words of man and the spoken spiritual words of God is evident in the “first the natural and then the spiritual” principle.
Words spoken or written in the power of the spirit have the power to give life. These are clean words spoken by New Covenant disciples (i.e. True Prophets) and they are consistent with symbolic interpretations of the Bible. Unclean words based on literal interpretations of the Bible that are spoken or written by Old/First Covenant religionists have power to produce death. This is evidence of the power of the tongue (i.e. the human organ with which people create words) to yield life or death. It is also evidence of the fact that religious scribes write lies.
The truth of what God says, whether spoken by God directly or through True Prophets registers in the hearts of hearers to whom God had given the ability to hear with spiritual ears.
The fish and loaves of bread, therefore, represent God’s life-giving words spoken through Jesus, and the real miracle in the story is that people who listen to God’s spoken voice, whether directly from God or through a True Prophet or a High Priest, bring spiritual life to the hearer.