Word of Salvation – Vol. 47 No.16 – April 2002

 

The Lord’s Supper

 

Sermon by Rev MP Geluk

on Lord’s Day 28 & 29 (Q&A 75-79 Heid Cat)

Scripture Readings: Exodus 12:1-13; Matthew 26:17-30

Suggested Hymns: BOW 153:1,2; 224:1,2; 228:1,2; 178:1,2,3; 531

 

Congregation of our Lord Jesus Christ.

 In our sermons on Christian doctrines we are still dealing with the sacraments.  With the help of the Heidelberg Catechism we have looked at baptism, and now we turn our attention to the Lord’s Supper.  Remember that the purpose of the sacraments is to strengthen faith.  Faith is born through the Word but once faith is there in our hearts, then both the Word and the sacraments feed and strengthen it.  And the Holy Spirit is, of course, the agent of God working through these means.

Because the Lord’s Supper was such a controversial issue in the 16th century, the authors of the Heidelberg Catechism went into much detail to explain how the Reformation understood the biblical teaching on the Lord’s Supper over against the beliefs of the Roman Catholic church of that time.  These differences are still there but they do not occupy our minds as much.  In our time the debate has shifted to other things.  Like, is it right to celebrate Lord’s Suppers at retreats and private home gatherings of believers?  And, are the children of the church allowed to partake of the Lord’s Supper?

What we want to do first is to show how the Lord’s Supper is a memorial of a past event as well as a present sharing of Christ, and then next time we will speak about the proper celebration of the Lord’s Supper and who may partake of it.

1.  The Lord’s Supper is a memorial of a past event

What was this past event?  Well, it was the death of Christ on the cross, of course.  But Christ’s death was also a fulfilment of the Passover feast of Old Testament times.  Just like baptism in the New Testament replaced the circumcision practice of the Old Testament, so also did the Lord’s Supper replace the Passover.

What actually was the Passover?  Our Scripture reading from Exodus 12 gives us that information.  The people of Israel were slaves in Egypt and in the time of Moses God delivered them from this slavery and led them out of Egypt into the desert, after which they eventually came to the Promised Land.  Israel’s time in Egypt is often referred to in the Bible as the time of their bondage.  The exodus from this bondage is referred to again and again in the Old Testament as THE big salvation event.  Just like the New Testament repeatedly refers back to the death of Christ as the big salvation event.

The Ten Commandments, for example, were prefaced by these words: “I am the Lord your God, who brought you out of Egypt, out of the land of slavery” (Ex.20:1).  Whenever the law of God was read, Israel was reminded of that fact – and also on many other important occasions after the exodus, when God thought it necessary to remind His people Israel that they stood in special relationship to Him.  He used these words: “Remember that you were slaves in Egypt and that the Lord your God brought you out of there with a mighty hand and an outstretched arm” (Deut.5:15).

The Passover feast was the annual celebration for the Jews reminding them of this exodus.  The equivalent to a country today would be, I suppose, their day of independence, or their foundation day, or the day they were liberated.  However, the difference with the Jewish Passover is that it was a day that God became their Redeemer.  It was really their day of salvation.

You are probably familiar with what took place.  God was about to inflict His final and most destructive plague upon the Egyptians for their continual refusal to let His people go.  It was the killing of all the firstborn of both man and beast.  God’s angel of death would come past every home and bring this terrible judgment.  To save His covenant people from this death, God commanded Moses and Aaron to tell the Israelites to kill a lamb (it could also be a goat) and smear its blood on the door frames of their houses.

It was a sign for God’s angel of death to pass over that house and not kill the firstborn living there.  In addition the Israelites were to prepare and eat the lamb that was slain.  Moreover, they were to eat hastily and do it whilst standing and ready to depart, their cloak tucked into their belt, sandals on their feet, and their staff in their hand.

We may well wonder that God, who was bringing the judgment of death on the Egyptians, could have spared His own people by simply not have His angel go to their homes.  Instead, God instructed them to kill the lamb and put its blood on their door frames and said, “When I see the blood, I will pass over you.  No destructive plague will touch you when I strike Egypt” (Ex.12:13).

The reason for God doing it this way must lie with the fact that the Israelites were not sinless.  They had not sinned like the Egyptians but they, as a people, had over the four hundred odd years of their stay in Egypt, forgotten God and no longer served Him.  They had even become angry with Moses when Pharaoh in his defiance of God made their lives more miserable (Ex.5:21).  Their discouragement and cruel bondage caused them to not believe that the Lord would deliver them (Ex.6:9).

All this means that Israel had to be redeemed, not only from Pharaoh, but also from their own sinfulness in which they had forgotten who God was.  And because they did not know God well enough, they did not have enough faith to trust in His power to set them free.

So God could also have judged His own people, yet, in His mercy and love, wanted to save them from judgment.  And He did it by passing them over when He saw the blood of the lamb that was sacrificed.

The lamb’s blood did not, of course, save Israel.  No Old Testament animal sacrifice ever saved anybody.  That night in Egypt when sin was punished by death, God saved His people because of Christ.  The Saviour was still to come at some point in the future but when He came eventually then His death on the cross would redeem all believers whenever they lived.

To help His Old Testament people understand that and believe that salvation comes from God, the Lord at the time of the exodus gave these detailed instructions about the killing of the lamb and how its blood could make the angel of death pass over them.  The Lord also told them to celebrate this Passover every year.  It was to be a wonderful memorial to the mighty act of salvation God had done for them in the past.

And now the Lord’s Supper is for us also a wonderful memorial of God saving us when Christ died on the cross.  The Lord told His New Testament church to celebrate Christ’s death often, whenever we break the bread and drink the wine in the Lord’s Supper.  It began when Jesus celebrated the Passover with His disciples on the night He was betrayed and made it the first Lord’s Supper.

And it is not hard for us to see how Christ’s blood shed on the cross is the better sacrifice than the Passover lamb of the exodus.  That lamb and its blood was only a pointer, a shadow of things to come.  The real thing is Christ.  But what happened with that lamb helps us wonderfully to understand how Christ’s blood saves us.  God in His judgment on sin will one day come to the world to cut her off from Him, the One holy and pure, but wherever He sees that the blood of Christ has taken away the sinner’s sin and guilt, then He passes over that believer with His judgment.

In fact, it has already happened to all who believe Christ to be their Saviour.  The angel of death will not touch you, not now and not ever.  For the holy and pure God no longer sees your sin and lack of faith but the payment for your sins which is Christ’s death on the cross.  Because of His love and grace for you, God has struck His own Son with the death you deserved.  God Himself has provided the sacrifice so that you could live and enter the promised land, the new Canaan, the new earth.  As that Old Testament Passover lamb gave its blood to allow the Israelites to live, so also has Christ given His blood to have us live and not die.

Now all these words you have just heard are so familiar that there is a constant danger that we are no longer moved by them.  When the Jews of later years celebrated the Passover each year, they were faced with the same danger.  How different it all was with the first Passover.  Nine plagues had devastated Egypt and its people.  Still Pharaoh refused to let them go.

Then they heard from Moses and Aaron that God would not tolerate such stubbornness any longer.  The Lord would punish Egypt so badly that Pharaoh would beg them to go.  So they had to get ready, dressed to leave, stick in the one hand, and with the other to quickly eat the meat of the lamb.  That very night God would strike Pharaoh.  They had to believe that.  As they killed the lamb, as they smeared its blood on their door frames, as they dressed, as they gathered their few possessions that they could carry, as they ate, then they just had to trust and believe that it would all happen that very night.  And with the same trust and faith they had to follow Moses out into the desert, believing that God would look after them.

How can we now partake of our Lord’s Suppers and have that same trust and faith that Christ has indeed saved us from God’s judgment which also is as real as was His judgment on Egypt?  Well, we see the bread being broken.  The one who serves must hold it up for all to see as he quotes the very words of Jesus: “This is my body which is for you, do this in remembrance of me.”  In the same way the cup is to be lifted up, and again quoting Jesus’ words, the one who serves says: “This cup is the new covenant in my blood: do this whenever you drink it, in remembrance of me.”  Yes, said the Lord: “Whenever you eat this bread and drink this cup, you proclaim the Lord’s death until He comes” (1Cor.11:23-26).

As we do all that whenever we do it, then let us remember that God’s judgment is as real now as it was then in Pharaoh’s day, and that being saved from it through Christ is also as real as the exodus was.  But do not stop with Israel and its first Passover at the time of the exodus.  We are of the New Testament and so we remember most of all Christ’s death on the cross.  It really took place, there on Golgotha.  And in the three hours of darkness God’s judgment fell on Christ so that we might live.  His body was offered up to death and His blood shed.  Yes, the bread and the wine make it for us the Supper of the Lord.

2.  The Lord’s Supper is a present sharing of Christ

The eating of the bread and the drinking of the cup is more than an act of remembrance.  Like the Passover, it is a meal.  All the members of the household were to share in the Passover meal.  It was a meal of communion, of fellowship, for they were bonded together in God delivering them from the power of Pharaoh and bringing them into freedom in which they could freely worship God.

So also are our Lord’s Suppers a fellowship meal.  Together we share in the benefits that Christ’s death has brought us.  Together we rejoice in God saving us from the consequences of sin.  Together we know that Christ has made us one with God.  This knowledge comes to us through the work of the Holy Spirit.  The Spirit who dwells in Christ, yes, who is the Spirit of Christ, also lives in us who are the members of Christ.

In John 6 we have the teaching of Jesus where He says that we must eat His body and drink His blood.  This teaching confused the unbelieving Pharisees at that time to no end.  Similarly, it must sound all very strange to unbelievers today.  But to those whom the Father has given to know the secrets of the kingdom, they understand that as the physical body needs food and drink in order to live, so also do we know that we must feed on Jesus in order to keep the faith and go on serving Him.  To feed on Jesus can only be done by staying in close contact with Him: to take in His Word and to partake of His supper.  It’s to have fellowship with Him.  The same rule applies to any tie of friendship or marriage.  You must work on it or else it will die.  Thus the expression in John 6: we must eat Jesus’ body and drink His blood, otherwise we waste away spiritually.

But this fellowship with Christ extends to fellow believers.  As each Israelite household moved out, then others joined them.  Together they became a people walking to freedom, all having done the same things that night, all sharing the same future that lay in front of them.

So also with us.  The Lord has saved each of us but as He had saved us, so also has He saved others.  More than anything else, the Lord’s Supper gives Christian believers a visible unity.  What is true of Christ in you is true of me also, and what is true of Christ in me is true of you also, provided we both believe Christ to be our Lord and Saviour.

We who are many are essentially one body and outwardly and visibly this is expressed in the eating of the bread that comes from the one loaf.

All believers of every Christian church should join in their church’s Lord’s suppers.  It is painful to have believers of a congregation missing who can be there but for some invalid reason choose not to be there.  Empty places at the Lord’s table for the wrong reasons mean that some kind of spiritual trouble is preventing those fellow believers from participating with other believers the body and blood of Christ.  It’s like having a circle with gaps in it.

I am given to understand that in the ancient church the elders or deacons used to carry the bread and the wine to the sick in their homes.  It meant to say, you too belong to the body.  But the practice came to be associated with superstition.  People began to believe that the Lord’s Supper had magical powers of its own.  The focus shifted from Christ on the practice itself.  However, superstitions can be challenged and overcome and so we may still bring the bread and wine to those members whose circumstances prevent them from coming to church for considerable lengths of time.

There is then a communion with Christ and a communion with fellow believers.  We are one with Christ and one with each other.  That’s how it should be for Scripture speaks of one faith, one baptism and one Lord Jesus Christ.  It is an amazing thing, really.  Here we are with different characters, different backgrounds, different cultures maybe, and different experiences in life.  We have different interests and different tastes.  Sometimes we are so different that we can’t stay in each other’s company for too long.  But the things we have in common in Christ bring us together.  We see each other in the celebration of the Lord’s Supper and we note with thanks to God that we are here – all these different people – because of Christ.  If Christ is the same scriptural Christ to us, then our faith is the same.  By God’s grace and mercy that man and that woman belongs to Christ in the same way as I belong to Him.  As I am forgiven of my sin, so he or she is also forgiven.  That makes us brothers and sisters in the faith.

And about those other differences, well, some are simply there because God has made us different.  Other differences are there because we are not yet perfect.  We can know from God’s Word which differences are harmless and which are sinful.  But when the Lord comes back then all believers will be made perfect and we will then experience unity in every way as we have moved on from our temporary Lord’s Suppers here to the eternal supper with Christ on the new earth.  Then those gaps in the circle that now gives us pain will have been closed.  The missing ones will be there, too, and we will all rejoice.

Amen.