Section 203. Choice of the Seventy. (Luke, x.)--Import of the Number |Seventy.|

The prospect of the spread of the Gospel among all nations, after his own sufferings should have prepared its way, lay before him as he left Capernaum never to return; and he said to his disciples, in view of so vast a work, in which, as yet, there were so few labourers, "The harvest, truly, is great, but the labourers are few; pray ye, therefore, the Lord of the harvest that he would send forth labourers into his harvest." He then chose a number of his followers as his special and devoted organs for proclaiming the kingdom, and sent them before to announce and explain his coming, and prepare the minds of the people, that the short time of his visits among them might be more successfully employed.

Some definite number of disciples had to be selected, and he chose (as in the selection of the Twelve, p.116) a number at that time in common currency. The round number seventy may have had general reference either to the seventy elders, or to the seventy members of the Great Sanhedrim; or it may have had special reference to the opinion prevalent among the Jewish theologians that there were seventy languages and nations upon the face of the earth. If this last were the case, it was an instance of formal accommodation. Without confirming this opinion, Christ might have employed seventy to indicate symbolically that his organs were not to reach the Jewish people only, but all the nations of the earth. [549]