Bible Study 101: What Do Numbers Mean in the Bible? Hearing Jesus, Devotional
This episode is part of Bible Study 101, a series teaching a method
Rachael calls the color method. You take one short passage and read it several times, marking something different in each color, and by the end you can see things on the page you'd never catch reading at normal speed. This week the passage is John 6:1-15, the feeding of the five thousand.
Today's color is orange, and orange marks numbers and quantities. Numbers
matter in Scripture, and this is also the place where people go off a cliff, so
Rachael spends real time on the guardrail before she ever picks up a pencil.
What gematria is, why 11:11 is not a message from God, and why the Bible was never written as a code to crack. Then the marking, which turns out to tell the whole story on its own. And at the end, the question of why there were leftovers at all, and who had to carry them.
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Chapters
0:00 The last color of the week
0:37 What orange marks
1:18 Why numbers matter in Scripture
1:46 Verse numbers are not inspired
2:40 A caution about 11:11 and chasing numbers
4:35 What numbers tell you about scale
5:57 What gematria is, and where it goes wrong
7:49 Scripture was not written as a puzzle
9:13 The guardrail
10:11 A listener in a country where following Jesus costs something
11:29 Reading John 6:1-15
13:25 Marking the numbers
17:20 Line the numbers up in order
18:39 What John is actually doing
19:08 Twelve baskets and twelve disciples
20:35 What does this mean, not what does this mean to me
21:05 Why there were leftovers at all
22:23 Who had to carry the baskets
22:55 Prayer
23:49 Homework
What is the color method?
It's a way of studying Scripture that Rachael developed while teaching
sixth and seventh graders who had never been shown how to read the Bible for themselves. She published it in her first book, She Hears.
You take a short passage, ten to fifteen verses, and mark it with colored
pencils or highlighters. Each color answers one question. Green marks the who. Blue marks the supernatural. Red marks the action words. Purple marks timing. Orange marks numbers.
The colors aren't the point. You can't put a color on a word without
making a decision about that word, and you can't make a decision without
slowing down enough to actually read.
What does orange mark?
Numbers and quantities that appear in the text itself. Five loaves, two
fish, 200 denarii, 5,000 men, twelve baskets.
It also covers quantity words that aren't digits. Every, none, both, few,
plenty, enough, nothing, all, as much as they wanted. Anything that counts or
measures.
Are verse numbers part of the Bible?
No, and this matters. Chapter and verse numbers were added centuries
later by scribes and scholars so people could find and reference passages.
Rachael's kids in children's ministry called them the addresses, which is a
good way to think about them. They're a filing system, not Scripture.
So John 6:6 doesn't get marked. The number six in that reference isn't
inspired and it isn't pointing at anything.
Is 11:11 a message from God?
No. And this is where Rachael spends real time, because numbers in
Scripture is the area where people most often go wrong.
Some people treat repeating numbers like 11:11 as a personal signal, and
then go looking up every 11:11 reference in the Bible as if it were a mandate.
But a chapter and verse address carries no more divine weight than the image printed on the cover of your Bible. God can use anything. That doesn't make it a message.
What is gematria, and should Christians use it?
Gematria is a Jewish practice of assigning number values to Hebrew
letters, which means every Hebrew word also carries a numeric value. People
began hunting for hidden codes in those values, convinced that cracking the
pattern would unlock a secret message.
Rachael's caution has three parts. We aren't reading Hebrew, so applying
that logic to English doesn't hold. It isn't something Scripture instructs
anyone to do, it's a practice people developed. And we follow God, not the
practices of the people around Him.
She learned about it in seminary, and points out that seminary also
teaches you about sin and witchcraft. Learning that something existed in a time period doesn't make it biblical.
Was the Bible written as a code to crack?
No. Scripture wasn't written as a puzzle. It was written to be
understood.
The plain meaning of the text, what the words say in their context,
carries far more weight than any value you could calculate by adding letters
together. When people go down the numerology road, it usually ends in a
prediction, which is how you get someone announcing the world will end on a specific date every few years. Jesus said nobody except the Father knows when that will happen, so those predictions are already ignoring the actual Bible. Here's the guardrail. Mark the number. See what it helps you
understand. Ask whether the writer seems to be pointing at something. Then stop, unless the text itself makes the connection for you.
How many people did Jesus actually feed?
More than five thousand. Probably closer to fifteen thousand.
Verse 10 says about 5,000 men were there. In that culture, counting the
men meant the women and children with them weren't included in the number. So John isn't giving you a ceiling. He's giving you the floor.
It's one thing to say Jesus fed people. It's another to hold five loaves
next to five thousand men and feel the size of the gap. That gap is the entire
point of the story.
What are the numbers in John 6:1-15?
Verse 2: a great crowd. Vague on purpose.
Verse 5: a great crowd again. John says it twice. Repetition is
usually significant.
Verse 7: half a year's wages, which some translations render as
200 denarii. A denarius was roughly a day's pay for a laborer, so that's 200
days of work. Also each one and a bite. Philip is measuring in
two directions at once, this much money spread across this many people equals about a mouthful each. That verse is entirely math.
Verse 9: five loaves, two fish, so many. And notice
the word small appears twice. Small loaves, small fish.
Verse 10: plenty of grass, about five thousand men.
Verse 11: as much as they wanted.
Verse 12: all, enough, nothing wasted.
Verse 13: twelve baskets, five barley loaves.
What happens when you line the numbers up?
Something deliberate.
You start with a vague crowd. Philip converts it to money, and 200 days
of wages still isn't enough for one bite each. Andrew brings the resources, and they're five and two, and twice they're called small. Then the crowd gets a hard floor of five thousand.
Then the miracle, and John refuses to quantify it. As much as they
wanted.
Then he counts again on the other side. Twelve baskets.
John establishes how impossible the math is in two directions through two
different disciples, refuses to measure what Jesus did, and then counts the
leftovers precisely. So you know it wasn't barely enough. There's an entire layer of this passage told in nothing but the numbers.
What do the twelve baskets mean?
It's hard to read twelve in a gospel and not think of the twelve
disciples, especially in a passage already pointing back to Israel and the
exodus and the twelve tribes. This is a thread woven into the same fabric as
the Passover, the wilderness, the mountain, and the prophet like Moses.
But here's the question worth sitting with. The miracle was complete when
everyone ate. Everybody had as much as they wanted. The point was already made. There didn't have to be anything left over.
And yet Jesus stops and tells them to gather it so nothing is wasted, and
it fills twelve baskets from five small loaves.
Who picks them up? The disciples. The same men who had been running the
numbers a few minutes earlier and reporting that this was impossible. Philip
with his 200 denarii, Andrew with his what good is this. And now each of them is holding a basket of what was left after thousands of people ate as much as they wanted.
Jesus made sure they had to handle the evidence with their own hands. Rachael's read is that this miracle
may have been more for them than it was for the crowd.
FAQ
Do I need to have heard the earlier episodes? No. This one explains what it needs
to as it goes, and they're evergreen if you want to catch up later.
What do I need to follow along? A Bible or a printed copy of John 6:1-15 that you're comfortable
marking, and something orange. You can print the passage free at Bible Gateway.
What if a passage has no numbers in it? That happens, and sometimes more than one color goes
unused. Do the read-through anyway. The repetition is what builds the
observation.
Is it okay to write in my Bible? Yes. There's an episode earlier in this series that deals with that
directly if it makes you uneasy, or use a printout instead.
What's the homework? Write two numbers in the margin next to verse 10. Five and five
thousand. Sit with those, and pray about them.
What's next? Yellow, the last color, and the most important day of the week. Rachael
explains why it comes at the end instead of the beginning.
Where can I go deeper on the color method? She Hears, on Amazon, teaches it over six weeks through the stories of six women in the Gospels. All the Scripture is printed in the workbook, so you don't have to write in your Bible if you'd rather not.
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