Batteries

Then the Lord said to Moses, “Gather before me seventy men who are recognized as elders and leaders of Israel.  Bring them to the Tabernacle to stand there with you.  I will come down and talk to you there.  I will take some of the Spirit that is upon you, and I will put the Spirit upon them also.  They will bear the burden of the people along with you, so you will not have to carry it alone. [Numbers 11.16-17]

Now here is an interesting idea.  God told Moses that He would take some of the Spirit that was upon Moses (evidently it was a quantifiable amount??) and measure it out among seventy other leaders.  And, the LORD equates that 'power' as the ability to bear the burden of the people.  The context of the passage seems to imply that the Spirit upon Moses was in fact proportionate to the burden of the people and that God removed some of His Spirit from Moses and uniformly divided it among those seventy.

Think of it like this: Moses originally had a seventy-one volt 'battery' of the Spirit of God.  This 'battery' was evidently of sufficient voltage to bear the burden of all Israel.  But when Moses complained, God took his single seventy-one volt battery and divided it into seventy-one individual one-volt batteries - still sufficient to bear the seventy-one volt burden requirement of the people.

Is my analogy here correct?  Probably not.  However, the context and wording (in the New Living Translation anyway) seem to imply something at least similar to this analogy.

The real interesting thing about this idea however is that it very much reveals a picture of Christ and His Body, the Church!  Jesus told His followers that the what He had, He gave to them...  In other words, God's power remains sufficient and is distributed among Jesus' followers sufficiently to 'bear the burden of the people'.  This picture also confirms the need for the Body to work together because no individual or faction possesses enough 'battery' to bear the burden of the people alone!

If, in fact, we adopt this idea, and combine with it the knowledge that Jesus indicated that a single fractional believer could 'move a mountain', then how much power does the 'Body' possess and what are the possibilities of that 'Body' as a whole?

Could this have some bearing on Jesus' prayer in John 17 for His followers to be untied as one?  I think so.

Father, help us to see the necessity of combining our faith with the Body of Christ in order to not only bear our own burdens, but those of the people as a whole!