Christ Selects Seventy to Help Him

Why did the Lord select seventy instead of any other number? I suggest that seventy was the number of descendants of Jacob who went into Egypt, the land of Gentiles. This small number was multiplied into a nation, “Your forefathers who went down into Egypt were seventy in all, and now the Lord your God has made you as numerous as the stars in the sky” (Deut 10:17-22 and see Gen 46: 27; Ex 1:5). When the Lord Jesus sent out the seventy, I suggest he had this in mind, to have a nation of faithful people.

Seventy was the number of bullocks slain and burnt during the feast of tabernacles which Jesus had just attended. This seven-day feast of the seventh month, also called ‘ingathering’, was the final feast of the year and coincided with the end of the harvest. It spoke of the harvest resulting from seven thousand years of labour, when God will gather all nations to himself and is the feast which all nations will keep in the millennium (Num 29:12-40; Ex 23:16; Deut 16:13; Zech 14:16). So, accordingly, in Jesus’ mind, seventy is the number which speaks of God’s purpose to enlighten all nations with His truth. A lesson which had been forgotten by the Pharisees who were claiming to be the torch-bearers of the truth; Israel as a nation had already forgotten this.

God called Israel His ‘firstborn’. This should have been enough to tell Israel that God intended to have a whole family of nations who would recognize Him as their father. But Israel mistook God’s selection of them: to preach the gospel to other nations certainly did not mean that they should keep the gospel to themselves. So by sending out the seventy, Christ was reminding them that they should have been enlightening the other nations with the glory of God’s word. A lesson that we should learn, not to confine the gospel to ourselves but to preach it.

(Note: “Nazareth Revisited” by Robert Roberts, chapter 23, is helpful.)

Bro Moses Dhlakama (Chipinge, Zimbabwe)