To fully understand The Lord’s Supper, we must understand it’s history. Contrary to popular belief, the Lord’s Supper is not 2,000 years old, it is 6,000 years old and is rooted in the Passover of God’s people in the Exodus. In fact, we should notice the following similarities between the first Passover and how we celebrate the Lord’s Supper today: blood, unleavened bread, judgment and salvation (Exodus 12:7-14). At the time of the first Passover, God’s people needed rescuing and God planned to judge both the Egyptians and the Israelites. God would be the Judge and the Savior. In Exodus 12:1-6, God specifies in detail how His salvation would come. Each Israelite family was to sacrifice a perfect and spotless lamb with no blemishes. Then, they were to place marks of blood from this perfect lamb on the doorposts of the home to spare them from the coming judgment. Notice the following sequence:  The Creator → Revealer. The Revealer → Judge. The Judge → Savior. To this day, Jewish families celebrate Passover every year with a dinner called the Seder.  And, with each Seder, they follow a meticulous order that mirrors the very first Passover:

  • They ate their bread quickly. No leaven in the bread; no time to rise.
  • They ate bitter herbs, symbolizing the bitterness of slavery.
  • They drank saltwater, symbolizing the tears of the slaves.
  • They ate a sweet paste (fruit, nuts) symbolizing the mortar of the great pyramids.

In summary, the Passover, observed annually, celebrates the deliverance of God’s people (the Israelites), the provision to escape God’s judgment and God’s faithfulness to protect and to preserve  God’s promise that He would be their God and they would be His people.

In Luke 22:7-23, we see the transformation of the Lord’s Supper as Jesus eats with his disciples.  Here, using this same meal, Jesus institutes a new covenant. This new covenant is not restricted to Jewish people. It is deeper and actually prophesied in the Old Testament in the following verses:

Deuteronomy 30:6: “And the LORD your God will circumcise your heart and the heart of your offspring, so that you will love the LORD your God with all your heart and with all your soul, that you may live.”

Ezekiel 36:26-28: “And I will give you a new heart, and a new spirit I will put within you. And I will remove the heart of stone from your flesh and give you a heart of flesh. And I will put my Spirit within you, and cause you to walk in my statutes and be careful to obey my rules. You shall dwell in the land that I gave to your fathers, and you shall be my people, and I will be your God.”

While the old covenant sign was restricted to the Jews, God’s new covenant sign includes Gentile men and women and the mark would be spiritual circumcision of the heart with the evidence of this work being the Holy Spirit’s residence in the lives of His people. How do we know that this covenant sign includes gentiles? We need to look no further then the book of Acts where both Jews and Gentiles are getting saved in large numbers and experiencing the Holy Spirit dwelling within them. Christian, when we partake in the Lord’s Supper, we are remembering our deliverance from God’s judgment. We are celebrating our rescue as slaves of sin. We are memorializing our release from the bondage of this world. We are commemorating that God exchanged our hearts of stone for a heart of flesh, submissive before the Word of Living God. We are worshiping the spotless Lamb of God, Jesus of Nazareth, who came to die on a Roman cross to take away the sins of the world. We are acknowledging that it takes the blood of God’s son to cover and to forgive our rebellion against God.

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