Why Twelve?

Today's Gospel passage is Luke 6:13:  "At daybreak he called together all of his disciples and chose twelve of them to be apostles. Here are their names..."

RM: It was not until I learned to see the Covenant view of the Old Testament and the Covenant of Grace as the interpretive key to understand how the new is the fulfillment of the old, and with that then how to interpret the book of Revelation. And in the pictures you get in Revelation, if you understand it in the Amillennial way, the Reformed theological, Covenantal way, that's when you can appreciate the meaning of it in this way, and when you see the symmetry involved of having 12 representatives of people before Christ comes and then 12 continuing representatives of God's people after Christ comes. ...24 in all, which represents the totality of the fullness of the 12 before and the fullness of the 12 after which is the one full and complete story of Redemption.

That being the case, you have here in this recording of this setting and point in history, standing around without much awareness of their significance, 12 unsuspecting individuals who have just been chosen by this mysterious character, not realizing that they are indeed the twelve pillars upon which the rest of human history shall be represented, just as you had the 12 sons of Jacob before.

That's exciting because what it means is that Jesus very fully and totally understood the significance of the number of 12, that these 12 chosen by him were the symbolic 12 pillars and 12 representatives, of all of God's people from this point on until the end of time. Surely at this point they would not have understood the total significance of all that they were representing, in being 12 in number. They could not have fully appreciated that they were the fulfillment of the final age of God's people and the continuation of ALL that Israel was in the past and even more. That they were the headway and beginning of the last and greatest manifestation of Israel, the continuing Israel in the New Covenant era.

​How exciting it could be if we could time travel back to this point knowing what we know now and could have been there with them, knowing the excitement and honor just bestowed on them, that they were the ones replacing the 12 tribes of Israel to become the new 12 tribes of Israel continuing in a more fulfilled, simpler version but a more final and universal version of Israel. How excited they would have been if only they could have known!