Experience TRUTH - #35

Speaking of hangry, we got something going on at the Truth Network that's going to help the world not be so hangry. Yeah, he's talking about just needing God's Word. He said, please help the Truth Network send Bibles to Africa.

And we know that they need God's Word. We have until the end of the month, just $5 gets a Bible in the hands of a poor, impoverished believer all over the African continent with the help of the Bible League. Just $5.

Just think about that, Robbie. Just $5. So please give. If you can give more than $5, man, we'd love for you to do it. And the number to call is 1-800-YES-WORD. 1-800-YES-WORD.

1-800-YES-WORD. Hello, this is Matt Slick from the Matt Slick Live Podcast, where I defend the Christian faith and lay out our foundations of the truth of God's Word. Your chosen Truth Network Podcast is starting in just a few seconds.

Enjoy it, share it, but most of all, thank you for listening and for choosing the Truth Podcast Network. You are what you eat. Have you heard that expression?

I'm sure you have. And for 2,000 years, believers in Christ have been defined by a certain meal. In fact, it's the most important meal ever instituted by the Lord Jesus Christ Himself. It was given to us, and we commonly refer to this sacred meal as the Lord's Supper, the Lord's Table, Communion, or even some call it the Eucharist. For the Hebrew people, centuries prior to Christ, they were also defined by a meal. This meal graphically illustrated and joyously celebrated their emancipation from 400 years of brutal slavery and oppression in the land of Egypt. This meal was known as the Passover Feast in Exodus 12, verses 1-14. Welcome to Experience Truth.

I'm Stu Epperson. This week, the Passover Feast meets the Lord's Supper, and it is the last Passover, and it is brilliant, it's powerful. The hero of the feast is distributing and breaking the bread. The one that will be broken is breaking the bread. The one that will be spilled out, his blood spilled out for us, is distributing and pouring the wine. We're going to get into that today.

With me is Robbie Dilmore. He's back again, and he loves the talk about leavened and unleavened bread. He's been studying this recently in his study of Hebrew, so we're going to get into that, Robbie. But read the passage and take us in, if you will, to the Upper Room of Self, Luke 22, verses 14-23. When the hour had come, he sat down and the 12 apostles with him, and he said to them, with fervent desire, have desired to eat this Passover with you before I suffer. For I say to you, I will no longer eat of it until it is fulfilled in the kingdom of God. Then he took the cup and gave thanks and said, take this and divide it amongst yourselves. For I say to you, I will not drink of the fruit of the vine until the kingdom of God comes. And he took bread and he gave thanks and he broke it, and he gave to them, saying, this is my body which is given for you.

Do this in remembrance of me. Likewise, he also took the cup after supper, saying, this cup is the new covenant in my blood which is shed for you. But behold, the hand of my betrayer is with me on the table. And truly the Son of Man goes as it has been determined by woe that that man of whom he is betrayed.

Then they began to question among themselves which one of them it was who would do this thing. Amen. That is the word of our God.

Robbie, ask that first question to get us right into this, will you? So why was Jesus looking forward to this meal so much? In verse 14, the opening statement, when the hour had come. You see that statement all throughout Scripture, very frequent in the Gospels. It's a statement of God's perfect timing. And several times prior to this, Jesus said, my hour has not yet come.

Remember when his mom wanted him to do a wine and water transformation there? You know, at that first miracle early in John chapter 2, at the wedding at Cana? But he had said that over and over again, my hour has not yet come.

Well, guess what? His hour has come. So all the buildup, not just in the earthly ministry of Jesus from the moment he was born, but all the prophetic buildup thousands of years before when he was prophesied about the very first time, the seat of the woman crushing the head of the serpent, the serpent crusher in Genesis 3.15. The picture of Christ all throughout Exodus as the Passover lamb, the picture of Christ all throughout the prophets, as the one who would restore, the one who would come with healing in his wings, the one who Job said, I know that my Redeemer liveth and that I shall stand in that last day. The one that was told about, the one that would be the fulfillment of all the ages was here, and this was his moment to close the deal.

So when he said, my hour has come, there was some anticipation, and those statements were quite literally deep and profound. What's going to happen here, Robbie, is the communication of the culmination of his earthly ministry is going to be visibly manifested in a sacred meal. A lot of cool things happen over meals, by the way. When you get together with people and it's an important meeting, you have lunch. And if it's someone really important, or if they're having lunch with you, it's a power lunch, right?

Because you're a power player. But so many big things happen over a meal, and God, in his providence, in his perfect plan, he said, I'm going to create a meal. And this goes way back in history, before history, with the Passover meal, all the feasts. Israel, you have all these feasts in Israel. You have the Passover feast. You have the Feast of Tents. You have the Feast of Weeks. You have the Feast of Pentecost. You have all these great feasts, right? And first fruits. Well, God, these are moments where God gets his people together to look to him.

So this is a big one. So here you have Christ, you have the timing, and then here's the next question, because this gets us even into it more. So how does the lamb at the Old Covenant Passover point to Jesus in the New Covenant's Supper? So there had to be a lamb slain. And in Exodus 12, we see the specific particulars of that lamb.

You can go read that yourself with your family. It had to be a lamb firstborn, it had to be a lamb unblemished, it had to be a male lamb. I mean, there were some qualifications of this lamb.

It had to be right. And that lamb was slain. And its blood was put right there over the door, and so when the angel of death passed over, no blood, then the blood would be shed and the firstborn would be killed.

This was the worst of all the plagues. This is what put Pharaoh over the top. This is what gave a final closure to the appeal of God through Moses to let my people go.

And this is what did it. And so this lamb was so picturesque of that. And what did John the Baptist say when he saw Jesus? Behold, the Lamb of God, which did what no other lamb could do, takes away the sins of the world. Hebrews says it all over and over again. Over and over again he says, what the blood of lambs and bulls could not do, Jesus did. And you have this statement in Hebrews, once for all. So there's a climactic closure that Jesus Christ accomplishes with his blood. And Jesus says this, verse 15, he said to them, With fervent desire I have desired to eat this Passover with you before I suffer.

He's looked forward to this. Verse 16, For I say to you, I will no longer eat of it until it is fulfilled in the kingdom of God. And then he took the cup, which is the first part of this, the cup of his blood. And so here you have Jesus, this period, this is also called the upper room discourse, with him and his disciples in the upper room. Peter and John have found the room, they followed the water jar carrier, the unknown hero, and they're in the upper room, and you have the upper room discourse, some of the richest teachings of Christ. He's been preaching on the mount, in the temple in the morning and then on the temple mount, or on the Mount of Olives at night, giving these rich parables and prophecies and beautiful apocalyptic teaching of Christ.

He has these confrontations and run-ins with the religious leaders, and now he's in the upper room with his intimate group, and now it's getting real, Robbie. It's getting intimate, and now we're going to start talking about the blood. So what's the symbolic significance of the blood? So, we know from Leviticus, without the shedding of blood, there's no remission of sins.

We know that, and that's fulfilled in the New Testament. So there's so much talk about the blood, and that really, by the way, people that are foreign to Christianity, they're weirded out. They're like, hey, if you're trying to be an evangelistic preacher, don't talk about being washed in the blood. People think we're cannibals, right? And people to this day, in that day, knowing what that symbolized, they were weirded out about the Christians. They were drinking blood.

These people are weird, something's wrong with these guys. But there's a deep, rich institution going on here of these sacraments that he is passing on to his church. But Jesus, verse 16 and 18 tell us, he abstains from the final cup of the Passover. So he partakes of the cup of the suffering, but the final cup is the cup of joy at the end of the Passover.

And we'll read it here in a little bit. That's the cup of joy, and he abstains from that, because he's not yet fulfilled. Yeah, well, if you go to a Passover seder, there's actually five cups, right?

And they speak to the passage in Exodus that, you know, I'm going to essentially buy you, I'm going to redeem you, and the last one is, I'm going to take you to be with me. Well, he ain't with him. He knows he's going to heaven, and he's going to take the fifth cup at the end, but the other cups, you know, are clearly in that.

And what they speak to is freedom, right? And to my point of view, what he is so excited about this is that he knows now, he's never been able to really have a relationship with Peter. I mean, he has a relationship with Peter in his fallen state, but he's never had a relationship with Peter without the mask on.

He's never had a relationship with John, really, without the mask on. All these events are going to help them get saved. And when they get saved, for the first time ever, it's like, I don't know if you've ever had a friend that you've walked with for years and years and years, and they weren't saved, they didn't have real freedom, but then all of a sudden they got that way, and all of a sudden you had a relationship with them that really was just like, whoa, way deeper than ever.

And this is, from my standpoint, Jesus is pumped, because I've been walking with you guys, you posers. Well, and I don't know that, I wouldn't say they weren't necessarily saved, I would say the way we characterize the way we look at it, they followed Jesus, they believed in him, but they didn't have the Holy Spirit, their faith wavered, they struggled. Well, they didn't have the blood at that point, he hadn't died. Well, but Abraham was saved, okay? Hebrews 11, he believed God, it accounted for his righteousness, so you're darn right they had the blood, they just were looking forward to it like Abraham was in salvation. Judas wasn't saved. Now, I can say that de facto about him, but to your point, they were struggling, they were weak, they were fighting amongst themselves, who's going to be the greatest, I mean, all this is happening when their Lord is about to die for them. So, you're absolutely right in that, they hadn't quite connected on the relationship part in a consummating kind of way. And that's the point of this feast!

This feast is to bring them together into that unity with Christ in a real sense of safety. Yeah, I know exactly what you're saying. You're right. But they still don't get it, though.

It's not for us to judge that one way or the other, it's for us to say, well, we know one thing, he knows that this is going to make his relationship with them better than ever, and his relationship with us. Yeah, so just in the thought of going back there and looking through their eyes, now you've got to ask this last question, and then we're going to have to answer this next time, because we're totally out of time. This one right here. So what four things did Jesus do to the bread in verse 19? And how did he experience these things? How do we? So we're going to get into that.

I mean, it's just unbelievable. He takes it, he blesses it, he breaks it, and he gives it. And there's a very real sense to which he does that with our lives. I don't want to jump to that application by leaving the upper room too soon in the Lord's Supper, but we'll do that next time on Experience Truth. We'll try to wrap up the Lord's Supper. The most powerful meal ever instituted by God Almighty himself that every church should be practicing this regularly. Jesus said, do this as often as you meet, in remembrance of me, to lift up me, to exalt me.

And it's not just to beat yourself up, and it's not just some morbid funeral, because Jesus is all out of the grave, but it is to recognize the gravity of what he did for you, and how that is what saves you, not by works of righteousness, which I have done. And it's so beautifully pictured in this bread, and it's beautifully pictured in this cup. And we're going to have to tackle that next time on Experience Truth. We'll get back into Luke 22, 14-23. But you heard the conversation. This is what's beautiful about this. This is the Gospel, and the Lord's Supper is a tremendous proclamation of the Gospel, and it's a tangible proclamation, because you're actually chewing and swallowing stuff, and you're drinking stuff right down the hatch. Next time, we'll get deeper into it here on Experience Truth.