House of Bread

Bread. Mmmmmm! Just the thought of hot, fresh bread makes me a little hungry. How about you? I cut bread out of my diet during the recent low-carb craze. It’s nice to know that the nutritional pendulum is now swinging back to recognize that bread can be part of a healthy diet! The hunt is on for a good bakery!

“House of Bread” sounds like a well-stocked gourmet bakery, doesn’t it? I imagine loaves of all sorts: rye, pumpernickel, asiago and rosemary, sourdough, white, wheat. It’s all good and it all has one thing in common. It’s all bread, no matter how you slice it.

Here’s the thing. House of Bread isn’t a new Charlotte bakery. It is the actual meaning of the word, “Bethlehem”.

You know, Bethlehem, birthplace of Jesus. Isn’t that interesting?

Jesus, Bread of Life, was born in Bethlehem, House of Bread. How amazing is that? God is such a master of detail! Can you see Him sitting there, waiting for us to find these little morsels of linguistic treasure?

Jesus was the in the lineage of David. David’s great-grandmother was Ruth. Ruth came to Bethlehem and gleaned wheat (which is used to make bread) from the fields of Boaz, who became her kinsman-redeemer and married her. Boaz owned a threshing floor.

David built an altar near Bethlehem on a threshing floor (where grain is threshed to separate kernel from chaff). That floor became a site of worship: Solomon’s temple. It is the same location, the same place where Abraham had prepared to sacrifice his son Isaac.

It all points in the same direction: Jesus is the Bread of Life, our Kinsman-Redeemer, God’s Son who was sacrificed for us, whom we now worship.

It makes me want to get out my Bible dictionary and look up some more town names!

Hmmm…. Jerusalem…