When I was growing up, my family had at least two meals together every day. Unless Dad had yet another part-time job that meant he had to be away from the family at breakfast, generally speaking, we ate breakfast and dinner together every single day.
There are happy memories of us eating dinner together. We talked about our day. We laughed. We poked fun at each other. We talked about the Bible. Sometimes we would get a board game and play it. Dinner time was family time. It was fun time. Never did any of the children, even when we became teenagers, ever try to skip out on spending our time together at the dinner table. And Rachel and I tried to do the same thing with the girls as they were growing up.
The event we are going to study today is the event that brings us together every Lord’s Day… The “family dinner” Jesus begins with His apostles; and we will be studying from Matthew’s account – 26:26-30.
The time has come for Jesus to go to the cross. Everything Jesus did, He did it on His Father’s time schedule. The prior Saturday, Jesus stays with some friends in Bethany. It is the Sabbath so Jews were not supposed to do any normal work on that day. In Numbers 28-29, God gave Israel a list of all the animals which were to be sacrificed every day, every week, every month, and every holiday for every year.
Every day, Israel was sacrificing two one-year-old male lambs which were perfect specimens. The last week of Jesus on earth, let’s say from Sabbath to Sabbath (8 days), Israel offered sixteen lambs that week.
But, on the Sabbath days, Israel was to offer two more one-year-old male lambs, perfect male lambs. So that’s four more lambs that were sacrificed that week, for a total of twenty lambs.
The Passover, of course, was the celebration which commemorated the exodus out of Egypt, commanded by God in Exodus 12. In addition to the Passover, there was also a week-long celebration known as the Feast of Unleavened Bread. So, during this specific week, since it was the week of the Feast of Unleavened Bread and Passover, each day of the celebration, Israel was to sacrifice: a burnt offering of two bulls, one ram, and seven one-year-old perfect lambs. They were also to offer a goat for a sin offering. That’s an additional 14 bulls, 7 rams, 7 goats, and 49 lambs. That’s a total of 69 lambs that were sacrificed that week that Jesus went to the cross.
THE FAMIILY DINNER – 26:26-31:
We know that Jesus did not mean this in a literal sense and His Jewish disciples would not have understood this in a literal sense because it was against the Law of Moses to eat raw flesh with its blood in it. Out of the 311 times then word “blood” is found in the OT, Leviticus is the most blood-saturated book. “Blood” is found in this book 86 times, or once every other page (in my Bible)! And seven times in the book of Leviticus, God told Israel that they could not eat blood: 3:17; 7:26-27; 17:10, 12, 14; 19:26.
So it is safe to understand that Jesus meant the bread symbolizes His body – the Lamb that would be sacrificed the following day for the sins of the world.
Similarly, Jesus took the cup (probably the third cup of the meal), and giving thanks (which gives us the word “eucharist”), He gave it to them, commanded each of them to drink from it. As the bread pictured to them the body of Jesus, so the wine in the cup would picture for them the blood “of the covenant,” which would be poured out for the forgiveness of sins.
The Hebrew word “covenant” meant a “treaty” between two nations. God uses the word 284 times in the OT, mostly to refer to His treaty or covenant which He made with the nation of Israel. The Greek word is found 33 times in the NT and this is the first time the NT uses the word. In fact, this context is the only times Jesus uses the word “covenant” in His ministry.
Moses used the phrase “the blood of the covenant” in Exodus 24:8 as a part of the sacrificial service. What Moses meant was that the blood sprinkled on the people made atonement for them (covered their sins) so they could be in this “covenant relationship” with God.
Almost 1,000 years after Moses lived, the prophet Jeremiah (31:31-34) told Israel that God was going to establish a new covenant with Israel but the new covenant would be different. In the New Covenant, non-Jews would be able to be a part of that relationship and there would be complete forgiveness of sins. Sins were forgiven the Jews when they offered their animal sacrifices, but they had to offer their animal sacrifices constantly. That would not be true once the Messiah comes.
WEEKLY DINNER:
The Lord’s Supper is clearly one of the central points of Christian worship. The early church observed the memorial under the guidance of the apostles (Acts 2:42) and the missionaries taught it in the newly-formed churches (Acts 20:7). Paul gave more explicit instructions in his letter to the Corinthians (11:19-17-32; 16:1-2).
Dine with Jesus weekly; it anticipates our supper with Him in heaven!
Paul Holland