Pictures in the Passover

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There used to be a tradition in a lot of New England families, and I don’t know if it still goes on today, where they would, at Thanksgiving, set on the side of their plates a number of kernels of dried corn. You know, sometimes it was three, sometimes it was five. And they would do that as a reminder of the hardships that the first settlers that came to Plymouth Bay had encountered.

You’re probably familiar with the story. I don’t know if history is still being taught today, but many in this room will be familiar from the story from when history was being taught of just the horrific conditions that they went through those first couple of winters not being well prepared, especially for being that far north. They thought they were headed toward Virginia, and they ended up further north, a shorter growing season.

On top of that, there were some disastrous experiments with collective farming that just went nowhere, and they ended up being hungry. A lot of people succumbed to starvation over the first winter or so of the time that that colony was in existence. And the legend says that the three or five however many kernels of corner on the plate were there because that was the food But if that was the food ration per day, everybody would have starved to death.

There would have been nobody alive. I think it was just in general a reminder of how scarce the food had been during those early times. So that when these families, when their descendants came together in successive generations for Thanksgiving and would sit down and feast and remember how God had blessed them over the previous year, there were always these kernels of corn as a reminder of how far God had brought them.

and the struggles that he had brought them through. And food, it’s not the only way we can remember these things, but food can be a powerful teaching tool. It can be a powerful picturing tool.

You know, we’ve done this some in our family, not on purpose, but we will, the older two kids were pretty young when my grandfather passed away, and so they don’t remember a lot, but we’ve talked about some of the bizarre foods that he would throw together. And I would describe some of them for you. He was a good cook, but he also made weird combinations.

And I don’t want to describe some of the weird combinations because I want to eat lunch later. But the kids would say, why would he put that in that? Why would he do this?

Why would he do that? And we would explain, you know, if you had lived through the Dust Bowl and the Great Depression, when everything was scarce, you made do with what you had. And, okay, if all you had for breakfast was sardines on toast, then, yeah, you’re going to, sorry.

That’s as far as we’re going to go with that. But just, you know, using this to things that the kids are going, I would never eat that. I would never eat that combination.

You would if you were hungry. And it’s a reminder of where those who came before us have been. It’s a teaching tool.

This is not unique. This has been going on for thousands of years where cultures will use their food to tell a story. And that’s exactly what we’re going to see Jesus do during the Passover, where we are in Mark chapter 14.

If you’re a guest with us today, we’ve been, for over a year now, we’ve been studying through the book of Mark story by story, and we’re up to chapter 14, where we’re getting close to the crucifixion. We’re getting close to the end of the story as far as Mark is concerned. And so we’re up to chapter 14, and we come to this final time that Jesus celebrates the Passover with his disciples.

And the Passover, by its very nature, was designed to tell a story. Everything about it was to draw their attention back, to draw the Israelites’ attention back to what God had done for the people of Israel, how God had led them out of slavery, how it had come so quickly and unexpectedly that they hadn’t had time to let the bread rise. And so there’s the unleavened bread, there’s the bitter herbs dipped in salt water to remind them of the bitterness of slavery and the tears that were crying.

Everything, the lamb that was roasted was to remind them of the lamb that was sacrificed in blood painted over the doorframe so that the angel of death would pass over. Everything about the Passover meal was designed to tell a story. And Jesus is going to take that one step further.

We’ll see that this morning in Mark chapter 14. If you haven’t already turned there, please turn with me in your Bibles to Mark 14. If you don’t have your Bible or can’t find it, it’ll be on the screen for you as well.

And once you find it, if you would stand with me as we read together from God’s word. We’re going to read about four verses this morning, starting in verse 22. It says, and as they were eating, Jesus took bread, blessed and broke it, and gave it to them, and said, take, eat, this is my body.

Then he took the cup, and when he had given thanks, he gave it to them, and they all drank from it. And he said to them, this is my blood of the new covenant, which is shed for many. Assuredly, I say to you, I will no longer drink of the fruit of the vine until that day when I drink it new in the kingdom of God.

And when they had sung a hymn, they went out to the Mount of Olives and you may be seated. And actually that Mount of Olives bit comes later. We’ll talk about that later on because there’s more to the supper that happens.

And by the way, if you saw the grid papers that are out here, I do those each week so we can compare the text in Mark to the other Gospels, sometimes they cover different details. They don’t contradict one another, they complement one another, and we can see that when we line the details out. Now, in our discussion last Sunday night, I realized I might need to go back and research a little more deeply the Passover as they observed it in the first century, and that was a question somebody asked.

Is the way they do it today the same way they did it in the first century? and I still haven’t completely nailed that down. But I did some research from a, I don’t know if he was a rabbi, but an Orthodox Jew turned evangelical Christian whose writings had been recommended to me and realized I had some of the timeline wrong.

I told you last week the timeline here is not absolutely essential because each of the each of the gospel writers put things in a slightly different order at the supper. Not that they were making mistakes, but they were dealing with some things, sometimes in terms of the theme of what they were talking about instead of chronology. And so different people have put that all together in a slightly different timeline.

It’s not absolutely essential that we know what order everything happened in, but I think it helps. So if you have that grid there with you this morning, if it contradicts something that I put out last week, look at what I did this week. okay and if I learn more look at what I did what I do next week as opposed to this week so I’m I’m learning and studying as we’re going through this but we compare the two and we see that there are things that happen before and after this part of the supper but they come to the they come to the supper they come to one of the four cups of wine that are shared during the Passover supper they come to the meal and there are different there are different stages of the ritual in involving the bread, and Jesus adds some symbolism.

They go through the Passover, they do all the things they’re supposed to do, but Jesus adds some symbolism and some significance to the elements of the Passover. And He does that. We see that when we observe the Lord’s Supper together, what we’re doing is a very scaled-back version of the Passover, in keeping with what He did, what’s emphasized in Scripture.

It doesn’t tell us every detail of what they did together that night as far as the Passover. But everything he did was designed to paint a picture. It was designed to point them to a spiritual truth that they needed to understand going forward, not just in the night that they were about to experience over the next 24 hours he was going to be crucified.

He was going to experience this horrendous treatment. But also it points to things that they needed to know going forward as they were going to be called on to serve him for the rest of their lives after this night. And so I want to bring out some things that Jesus was pointing them to through the supper this morning.

First of all, the supper pointed to the crucifixion. And we know they still did not understand that he was about to be crucified. Even up to the last minute when he’s about to be taken into custody, you had Peter draw a sword and attack the crowd that had come to crucify him.

And I think we would probably want to do the same thing, whether we would have the courage to do so or maybe the foolishness to do so. I don’t know, but Peter did. And Jesus said, stop this.

Jesus had been over this with Peter numerous times when Peter said, no, I’m not going to let them do this to you. Jesus was saying, you don’t understand this. You’re looking at it from man’s perspective when God’s perspective says, I need to go to the cross.

And so he’s pointing them to the crucifixion that they still didn’t understand what was going to happen.

in verse 22 it says as they were eating Jesus took bread blessed it and broke it and gave it to them and said take eat this is my body now one of the things that I came across this week is is to understand the the Passover ceremony the way it was the way it was observed then evidently as I said there were multiple rituals with the bread and the bread was nothing like the bread we use today I think if you went and bought matzo bread from somewhere that might give you a better indication it was dry it was flat it was easy to break you know not like the little communion things that that we take that you chew on and they just seem to grow you know or the flat breads that we sometimes use for the living Lord’s Supper where you where it’s more of a tearing and I don’t think that makes it wrong, but it was a very definite breaking of this bread.

And evidently at one step of the Passover, they would break one of the breads, I guess there were three, and they would break one of them in half and set part of it aside for later that symbolized bread that would be eaten by the Messiah later on. And so it’s telling that Jesus takes this part of the bread that was set aside for the Messiah and distributes it to his disciples and said, this is my body. To the point that this Orthodox Jew turned Christian named Dr.

Fruchtenbaum, if you’ve got the grid, you’ll see his information there, points that this is a claim to be the Messiah. Yet again, this is another claim to be the Messiah. And that’s one thing we’ve looked at through the book of Mark.

As I’ve told you. Skeptics will say Mark is the earliest of the gospels written. John is the latest. Mark doesn’t talk about the deity of Christ at all.

John screams about it. And so we can see his earliest followers didn’t think Jesus was God. That’s a belief that evolved over time.

No, as we’ve seen going through here story by story, bit by bit, Mark is making the, that’s all he’s doing, is making the case that Jesus Christ is God’s son. I think it’s just to the point that John, a few decades later maybe, said, wait, y’all are still not getting it? Let me make it clearer for you.

Okay. We could call the, I don’t mean this disrespectful in any way, but we could call John the deity of Christ for dummies because it’s like we’re still not getting it. So he’s going to make it clear for us.

But with Mark, it’s still in there. He’s claiming to be the Messiah by taking this piece of bread that this man says was set aside for the Messiah and says, this is my body. And so this is just another place where he’s claiming to be the one that God has promised for thousands of years, that they’ve been waiting for for thousands of years.

But not only that, it points to the fact that his body would be broken at the cross. Now there’s also a prophecy in, I believe, Psalm 22 that says that the Messiah’s bones would not be broken. And so people have said, well, how is this possible?

And he talks about the this is my body that is broken for you, and yet there’s this prophecy that not a bone would be broken. And John records that they didn’t break his legs like the other thieves on the cross because he was already dead. Listen, your body can be broken and your bones not be broken.

You can do a lot of injury to the soft tissue and not have to break a bone. And when we read the descriptions of what crucifixion looks like, not only crucifixion, but the scourging that he would have gone through beforehand, and I think possibly even multiple times, what his body went through. I don’t think you could look at that and say, no, it’s not broken.

See, we’re wanting to nitpick about the language. Not a bone of his was broken, which by the way, the Psalm says that about the Messiah. Exodus says that about the Passover lamb, which is something else that points to Jesus.

And John makes that. Mark implies it. John shouts about it.

He says that his body would be broken. And to illustrate that, he breaks the bread right in front of them. That’s why here over the last year, as we take the Lord’s Supper together, I’ve added something that I’ve never done before, making sure I have some bread to break and to tear.

Because just like the wine is a picture of blood being poured out, it’s something that we can look at and see and it’s a reminder. Just passing out little pieces of bread is not enough. Does that mean it doesn’t count?

No, I’m not saying it doesn’t count. But part of the picture is the brokenness of it, the act of breaking it. And so I’ve started doing that as a reminder to us, Jesus said his body would be broken.

He was going to go to the cross and his body was going to be broken and mangled and injured in every conceivable way. And the way he broke the bread and not just broke the loaf, but he continued to break it into pieces and distributed it to the disciples. This ongoing breaking, it’s supposed to be a graphic picture.

It’s supposed to be a reminder to them of what he was about to go through. But something even more incredible. Luke includes this detail of not just saying this is my body, but he says it’s given for you.

His body is not just being broken. His body is being broken for us. It’s being given for us.

His body is not just being broken as an accident of history. As I’ve heard some people say that Jesus mouthed off to the wrong people and got himself killed for it. No, this was, as we’ve been talking about over the last several weeks and the preparations he’s been making, this was the plan of God from before the foundation of the world, that Jesus Christ would not only go to the cross and be crucified, but that he would be crucified for us, for me and for you.

He says that his body was given for us. And so when they sat down to eat the Passover, on top of all the symbolism it already had, Jesus added the symbolism of saying this bread that is being broken represents what’s about to happen to me for you. And then we see in verses 23 and 24 that the supper pointed to a new covenant.

It says, Then he took the cup, and when he had given thanks, he gave it to them, and they drank from it. And he said to them, This is my blood of the new covenant, which is shed for many. And it fits right in with the Old Testament, this idea of a covenant being affirmed in blood.

What we’re looking at goes back to the earliest pages of Scripture. There were sacrifices all throughout the Old Testament as an offering for sin, as a peace offering with God, as a reaffirmation of the covenant, where God said, I will walk with you and I will be your God and you will be my people. These sacrifices over and over and over, the spilling of blood was a reminder of the covenant.

On top of everything else, it was a reminder of the covenant. And here Jesus is saying, This wine represents my blood that is about to be spilled. And when he went to the cross, it wasn’t just the fulfillment of the old covenant, which it was.

It was the fulfillment of the demands of the law for us, but it also ushered in a new covenant. That’s what Jesus said. This is the new covenant in my blood.

See, there’s a new way of doing things. If you’re not familiar with the idea of covenants in Scripture, It’s basically, if I can oversimplify it a little bit, it’s basically the way God and man relate to each other. This is not a great analogy, but it’s almost like a contract outlining the relationship.

Under the old covenant, there were these laws and regulations and rituals that we were supposed to go through in order to come to God. Part of the problem with the old covenant for us is that it was never designed to accomplish that. The Apostle Paul points out that that covenant, one of the most important aspects of that covenant was to show us how far we fall short of God’s holiness.

The law was to be a schoolmaster to show us our need for Christ. And so we look at all the laws of the Old Testament and how impossible it is to keep that perfectly. And it just shows us what God already knows to be true, that we are sinners and have fallen short. And so in this old covenant, there’s this list of all the things that we’re supposed to do.

And by the way, just because the old covenant has been fulfilled does not mean that there are not things in there that we can learn from and apply. The moral law that’s in the old covenant still reveals the character of God. And if you and I want to honor Him and glorify Him, then we live according to what He says is right and wrong.

But the old covenant was never going to be a way to salvation because we could never keep it perfectly. We look at the demands of the law and we see how high they are. And who could do that?

Even if we just distill it down to the Ten Commandments, nobody can do that perfectly. Especially when you consider what Jesus taught, that a lot of it deals with the condition of the heart. Yeah, I’ve never gone out and murdered somebody.

It’s really easy to not murder somebody. You don’t even have to get out of your chair to not violate that commandment. You can just sit around and do nothing your whole life and fulfill that commandment.

As far as the outward interpretation of it, the outward application of it. But Jesus said it deals with the condition of the heart. And if you’ve ever been angry with somebody without a cause, it’s the same thing.

And suddenly I realize how far short I fall of that standard. You and I could never do that well enough to earn our place with God. But Jesus, with his shed blood, ushered in a new covenant where our sins were paid for, where we would go through the temporary atonement of offerings and sacrifices and blood being spilled from animals is that we would go through this constant cycle and never be completely right with God.

Jesus, in one offering, satisfied the demands of God’s justice. His holiness was put in our account and our sin was wiped clean so that now we come to God not through our works, not through our rituals, but through Jesus Christ. Where in the old covenant there were animals for sacrifice, In the new covenant, Jesus is the sacrifice. Where in the old covenant, there were priests that we had to go through in order to have a relationship with God, in the new covenant, Jesus Christ is the priest. Whereas in the old covenant, there were all these rituals and all these things that we had to live up to, in the new covenant, Jesus has fulfilled those for us.

It’s a new day. And the supper pointed to that. There’s a new covenant for those who believe.

That if we want to be right with God, the way to do that is to believe in Jesus, to put our trust in him alone and accept that he did for us what we could never do for ourselves. The supper, excuse me, also pointed to a final sacrifice. And I want to be very careful about trying to read between the lines and tell you things that are not black and white, and I usually preface those with, this is what I think, but study it out for yourself in scripture.

This one for me, though, is so glaringly obvious, even though I can’t point you to a verse that teaches this. This to me is so glaringly obvious I couldn’t not bring it up this morning because as I read this and I read what Jesus was doing through the Lord’s Supper or through the last supper, there’s a picture that to me seems so obvious that he could have used that I keep going back in my mind and questioning why didn’t he use it. The most prominent feature of the Passover Supper is the Lamb and it’s such an obvious picture of what Jesus Christ did for us and yet it’s never mentioned in this supper.

It’s not part of our Lord’s Supper. Even the Bible calls Jesus our Passover lamb when the Apostle Paul said in 1 Corinthians 5, 7, indeed Christ our Passover was sacrificed for us. The Bible makes this parallel.

So why was it not mentioned here? Think about it this way. If we were to commemorate the lamb, if we were to commemorate the death of Jesus using a lamb, what has to happen to that lamb?

Has to die. Basically has to be sacrificed, just like these Passover lambs were sacrificed for thousands of years leading up to that point. It means to remember the death of Jesus, to remember his sacrifice for us, we’d need another sacrifice.

We’d have to sacrifice something else every time. And yet with Jesus, there’s no further need for sacrifice. The Bible tells us in Hebrews chapter 9 that the animal sacrifices were just shadows of heavenly things that required fulfillment.

The only reason the animal sacrifices had any value is because they pointed ahead to what Jesus was going to do. And it says in Hebrews 9. 26 that now at the end of the ages, he has appeared to put away sin by the sacrifice of himself.

Jesus in his sacrifice accomplished what all these other sacrifices could not. And he only needed to do it one time. Hebrews 7.

27 says he made a sacrifice for sins once for all when he offered up himself. The book of Hebrews is challenging to get through, but if you can ever sit down and read it and study it and dig into it, we’ll understand why they didn’t need to sacrifice something else to remember his sacrifice. It would have actually worked against the message he was trying to proclaim.

And that’s why he goes instead of to the obvious picture of the lamb, he goes to the picture of the broken bread and the poured wine. As pictures of the body that was broken and the blood that was spilled that didn’t require something else to give its life because there was one final sacrifice and no other sacrifice is needed. No one else has to die for our sins.

Nobody else even has to die as a reminder of the covenant. So study that out for yourself. See what you think.

That’s my reading of it. As I said, it’s not clearly delineated there in the text. But I couldn’t let go of that.

Why is the lamb not there? Why didn’t they mention the lamb? Because they had a lamb.

We have a lamb. We don’t need other lambs to die. He was able to make the picture just fine without it.

And then finally, we see that the supper pointed to our future hope. It’s not just about what was about to happen. He also prepares them for what’s going to happen on the other side of it.

Because notice he says in verse 25, Assuredly, I say to you, I will no longer drink of the fruit of the vine, which is a way they would refer to the wine at the Passover, the fruit of the vine. I will no longer drink of the fruit of the vine until that day I drink it new in the kingdom of God. Now, I believe this points to things that are discussed in the book of Revelation, the marriage supper of the Lamb.

There’s a celebration in heaven because the Lamb has overcome. But here Matthew gives us an additional detail when it says in Matthew 26, 29, I will not drink of this fruit of the vine from now until that day when I drink it new with you in my Father’s kingdom. Now that’s not a contradiction.

Mark doesn’t record that Jesus said when I drink it by myself. He says I’m going to drink it with you. And Matthew records that part of it, that with you.

But I think those two words with you are very important. Because it’s not just talking about the Lamb overcoming. It’s talking about him overcoming and bringing us along with him.

The future sharing of the cup in heaven points to a celebration that’s going to take place there. And it points to the fulfillment of what Jesus is about to tell them when they leave this supper and they head out to Gethsemane for him to be crucified. When John records that he says, Let not your heart be troubled.

You believe in God. Believe also in me. In my Father’s house are many mansions.

If it were not so, I would have told you. I go to prepare a place for you. And if I go and prepare a place for you, I will come again and receive you to myself, that where I am, there you may be also.

For him to say, I’m going to drink the fruit of the vine again one day, he’s telling them, this is my, number one, he’s telling them, this is my last Passover on earth. But he’s also reminding them, don’t fear, because one day you and I are going to celebrate anew in the Father’s kingdom. My promises are true.

One day you’re going to be with me, and I’m going to be with you, and we’re going to be reunited in the Father’s house, in this place that I’m going to prepare for you, that I may receive you to myself. He’s pointing here to the future hope that we have because of the blood that he spilled and because of the body that was broken. It’s the reassurance that those who believe in him, those who belong to him, are going to be with him one day.

And they were about to need that reassurance because as soon as they leave here, they’re going to walk and he’s going to talk to them along the way and he’s going to teach and he’s going to pray and then they’re going to go to the garden to pray, and after that, he’s going to be arrested. And events just start moving like that. And from their perspective, nothing good happens after that.

And yet everything that was done was according to the plan of God. So as tragic as it was, these things had to be done, these things had to be fulfilled so that we could have that hope. And Jesus was fully aware of that.

Jesus understood that without that body being broken and without that blood being spilled, there was no new covenant. There was no hope of eternity in the kingdom for us. And so Jesus sat them down and used this meal to teach and to prepare them so that they would understand and so that we would understand.

And the more we understand that, the more it ought to affect us. The more I study this just from a historical standpoint and what this would have looked like, what they would have done, what they would have understood, the more real it becomes to me, the more emotional it becomes when we observe the Lord’s Supper together. Because I realize that this bread that we’re breaking, it is just bread.

But what it symbolizes, what it means is so much more than bread. And this fruit of the vine, we bought it at Walmart, but it means so much more than the actual liquid. It’s a reminder to us that he allowed, he even chose for his body to be broken and his blood to be spilled so that we could be made right with the Father.

I’m going to ask our musicians to come forward and we’re going to have a time of invitation. And when I talk about being right with the Father, it’s very simple. You and I have all sinned.

The Bible says that. It says we’ve all disobeyed God. We’ve all done things that disappoint Him.

And that sin separates us from Him. And sometimes people say, well, why can’t God just get over it? Well, because if God just let sin go and ignored it, He wouldn’t be holy, and He wouldn’t be God, and He can’t just stop being God because it suits us.

And so that sin has to be paid for. It has to be punished. And we could either incur the punishment and the consequences of remaining separated from God for eternity in hell apart from his love, or we could understand that Jesus Christ came and took every bit of our punishment.

When he was nailed to that cross and shed his blood and died, he took every bit of our punishment so that our slate could be wiped clean, so that we could have his righteousness instead. And three days later, he rose again to prove that he was capable of doing everything he promised. And now all that’s left for us to do is simply believe that that’s true.

Believe what he said and ask God for the forgiveness that he offers.