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Scripture Reading
Will you open in your Bibles with me to the book of Mark, chapter 14, Mark 14. We'll be looking this morning, beginning at verse 12. Mark 14, beginning at verse 12. And we'll end at verse 26. Mark chapter 14, beginning at verse 12. Brothers and sisters, this is God's perfect Word.
Now on the first day of unleavened bread, when they killed the Passover lamb, his disciples said to him, where do you want us to go and prepare that you may eat the Passover? And he sent out two of his disciples and said to them, go into the city and a certain man will meet you carrying a pitcher of water. Follow him. Whoever he goes in, say to the master of the house, the teacher says, where is the guest room in which I may eat the Passover with my disciples? Then he will show you a large upper room, furnished and prepared. There, make ready for us. So his disciples went out and came into the city and found it just as he had said to them, and they prepared the Passover. In the evening he came with the twelve.
Now as they sat and ate, Jesus said, Assuredly, I say to you, one of you who eats with me will betray me. And they began to be sorrowful and said to him one by one, Is it I? Another said, Is it I? He answered and said to them, It is one of the twelve who dips with me in the dish. The Son of Man indeed goes just as it is written of Him. But woe to that man by whom the Son of Man is betrayed! It would have been good for that man if he had never been born."
And as they were eating, Jesus took the 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. Thus ends this portion of the reading of God's word.
Prayer for Illumination
Brothers and sisters, the grass withers and the flower fades, but the word of our God endures forever. Let's pray. Father, we thank you for your word and we thank you for giving us this historical and true account. Lord, we pray now that you would please help it to be applied to our lives. That we might not just grasp it intellectually, but that it would change our hearts. In Jesus' name, Amen.
Sermon
Well, I just need to be real blunt with you. We've got a lot of ground to cover, and so we're going to jump into it. This is a sermon on redemption. There's a whole lot of topics we could talk about, a whole lot of things we should talk about. I'm postponing most of that to this afternoon, to a lot of theological conversations. looking at the cultural significance of what's going on here and things like that. All that's going to be in Chalk and Talk. But this sermon this morning is about the redemption that Jesus does and signifies here. The redemption of Jesus Christ. See, we are stepping into Mark chapter 14 and we are entering into an ancient tradition.
Elder Pilling this morning read from Exodus chapter 12, this has been over a thousand years, that every single year on the 14th of Nisan, the people would get together and they would celebrate the Passover, year after year after year, remembering that God had redeemed them out of Egypt, and given them the promised land. Every year they remembered the redemption out of Egypt.
And so as they sat down at the meal, they would talk about the stories of the different plagues that God brought on the Egyptians. As they sat down at this Passover meal, they would have the very last plague, and they would focus on how God had told them He was going to kill all the firstborn of the land of Egypt.
And they would remember the bread, the unleavened bread. The bread that would represent their affliction. They would remember by eating bitter herbs. They would remember God's redemption by eating the Passover lamb. They would remember God's redemption by drinking the wine. They would remember God's redemption like their ancestors had done before.
They would take blood and they would paint it on the doorposts and on the lintels of their house, remembering that it was only by the blood of the lamb that they had been saved from catastrophe. They would remember that they were redeemed out of Egypt every single year. And when we find ourselves in Mark chapter 14 verse 12, it says, Now on the first day of unleavened bread, when they killed the Passover lamb, they're ready for this most significant time in Israelite life. Everybody looked forward to the Passover lamb, whereby faith they would celebrate and remember the redemption that God had purchased for them. The Jewish people had been doing this for centuries. They did it when they first came out of Egypt.
They did it, they remembered God's redemption when they celebrated with Joshua. They remembered God's redemption when they celebrated the Passover with the kings. They remembered God's redemption when they celebrated the Passover right before the Exodus. And during the time of the exile, they longed to celebrate the Passover. When there was no temple and no sacrifices. And they longed for the day they could return back to Jerusalem. and that they could remember once again God's redemption.
The people remembered His redemption year in and year out as they waited for the coming of the Messiah. As they did this remembering during the season of redemption, every household would get together and they would reenact this service. Every year, Dad would get up there, and he would gird up his loins, and he would take up his staff, and he would take the bread, and he would bless it, and he would give it to the family. And then he would have the different cups of wine, and he would speak the blessing over the wine. And they would have the whole sacrificial lamb there. The family had to eat all of it. It started about six o'clock at night, and they had to be done by midnight. No leftovers allowed. And the children would ask, Dad, why are we doing this? Dad, why are we keeping this Passover again this year? And the dad would answer, child, it's because God redeemed His people out of the land of Egypt. He conquered Pharaoh and He destroyed, He showed Himself more powerful than any of the imaginary gods of Egypt.
They would remember Their fathers doing these things and they would remember the songs they sang. Every single time they had the Passover, they would sing Psalm 113 through Psalm 118, the great Halal Psalms. And they would sing these Psalms together, these hymns together that God had inspired for them to sing.
And so they have this memory in their mind of this is the ancient tradition that they do every single year to remember God's redemption. And here as a highlight, as again, more and more towards the climax, towards the cross, Jesus enters into this tradition. And there's hope in this tradition. Every year they would put a cup on the table And they would fill that cup of wine and they would invite Elijah to come. Every year, on the same day, on the 14th of Nisan, they would remember to pray that the Messiah should come someday. Every year at the Passover, they would remember the suffering servant of Isaiah chapter 53, that someday God would bear their sins. They longed for the day that Jeremiah's words would come true, that God would establish a new covenant with his people.
He had redeemed them, but the work was not done. So this old tradition Jesus steps into, but he does something remarkable. Jesus tells his disciples, two of them, go into the city. You're going to find a guy there, he's going to be carrying water. That's not normal. Normally that's ladies' work. But you're going to find a guy there, and he's going to have this water jar, follow him, go into whatever house he goes in, and just tell the master of the house, we're going to eat dinner here, and the guy is going to say, okay. And you're going to go, you're going to find a furnished upper room, the full Passover meal is going to be ready. Everything is there to celebrate.
And they go into town, and can you believe it? It's like Jesus knew what He was talking about. I wonder how that happened. But Jesus enters into that upper room with His disciples, And they sing, no doubt, the Hillel Psalms in Psalm 113 through 117. And it comes time when the father of the family would typically hold up the bread and bless the bread, and hold up the wine and bless the wine, and say the traditional words that would be said, but Jesus does something amazing.
He takes the bread, He blesses it, and then He doesn't say what their fathers would say. He didn't say, bless thee, O Lord, who brought this bread from the earth. He didn't say what the rabbis would say. He didn't say what the fathers would typically say. We're so used to communion that we don't understand that this would have jarred the disciples. Never had they heard these words before.
Jesus changes the script. Jesus changes the script. Instead of thanking the Lord for the bread that God has given from the earth, Jesus tells them that this bread is His body. They must have been scratching their heads. Well, that was a little weird. Never heard that before. And then he takes the wine, and as they would be used to their father saying a special blessing over the wine, Jesus changes the script a second time. Jesus takes the cup, he holds it up, he gives thanks, and then he departs from the script again.
He says, this is my blood of the new covenant which is shed for many. Redemption was about to be purchased, greater than the exodus event ever pointed to. Jesus was instituting for them a new redemptive meal. Greater than them remembering back to the time they walked through the Red Sea, greater than the time that they walked through an affliction in the desert. That as they ate the lamb, those disciples, I don't think they understood that at that Passover when the Lamb was there, it was always there from the first Passover to point to the Lamb who would be slain for the forgiveness of the sins of the world. But here Jesus is. This new covenant meal of the new redemption of celebration for Jesus' disciples. See this?
There's a continuity and similarity between the redemption that the Israelites celebrated in the Passover, and what we celebrate in the Lord's table. God had redeemed the Israelites from the affliction of Egypt. He had, and they've celebrated that with Passover.
But God has redeemed us from the wages of sin and death. And we celebrate that at His table. God had spared the lives of the firstborn sons of the children of Israel when they came out of Egypt. But God Himself did not spare His only begotten Son when He redeemed us out of slavery to sin. God redeemed us while we were yet sinners by offering up His only begotten Son as our true Passover Lamb.
God gave the Passover as a celebration of redemption that they may be His people. And likewise, the Lord's Supper, as a celebration of redemption that we are His people. So we come to the point now where we think about this redemption as it is accomplished by Jesus and applied by His Holy Spirit. What does it mean for us? We're not Jewish people. We're not Jews. So what right do we have in partaking of the Passover lamb? As 1 Corinthians 5 talks of Jesus being that Passover lamb, well, all of us Gentiles are sinful in our flesh.
Under the tyranny of sin and death, But there's an interesting thing Paul points out in Romans chapter 2. It's not just Gentiles who are under the slavery of sin and death and need to be redeemed, but it was also Jewish people as well. Romans chapter 1 talks about Gentile people being under that slavery of sin and death. Romans chapter 2 talking about Jews being under that same slavery under sin and death. And then lumps us all together in Romans chapter 3 saying we are all sinners. None of us are perfect. We have each and every one of us fallen short of that standard of glory.
Yet, God has made a way for us to be made right by Him by faith. This is what Abraham believed when he walked up Mount Moriah and was to offer up his own son Isaac. And God stopped him and provided a ram to be slaughtered instead. But it was at that same mountain that the Lord would one day not hold his own hand from slaughtering his own son, Jesus Christ. By faith Abraham believed and it was imputed to him as righteous and it's the same with us.
We are justified by faith in Jesus and have peace with God only through the redemption of Jesus Christ. And so we are given strength. We are given strength because we remember not that we are good enough ourselves, but when we look to that same Lord's table, when we remember that it's Jesus who paid the price of redemption. We know that it was God who in due time sent Jesus Christ to die for the ungodly. And so what Jesus is instituting here in Mark chapter 14 is a regular meal for us to partake in. To remember that God demonstrated His own love. He demonstrates His own love for us. In that wall, we were still sinners. Christ died for us. If you have faith in Jesus, you have been redeemed from the curse and reconciled with God.
You are no longer, this is very important, you are no longer a slave to sin. When we look at the Exodus event and what the Passover was pointing about was that they were no longer slaves to Pharaoh. He couldn't lay claim on them. Pharaoh couldn't say, no, no, no, no, you're still my slaves, I don't care where you live. No, they had been redeemed by God, they had been purchased by Him. Sin has no claim over you. You are not a slave to sin anymore or to death. Your Passover lamb has been sacrificed.
They were led out of slavery by Moses, and we are led out of slavery by Jesus. They ate the bread of affliction, and when we come together to the Lord's table, we eat the bread of freedom. They drank the cup of future hope, but we drink the cup of the present reality that our Redeemer lives. They were baptized by walking through the Red Sea, but we are baptized into Christ Jesus. They partook of the Passover, longing for the day God would bring the new covenant. We partake of the Lord's Supper, knowing that that covenant is real and realized.
You can live your life free from the curse of the law. You no longer have to serve the cruel taskmaster, the slave driver of sin. You no longer have to serve that slave master of sin, who is always promising and never delivering. The slave master of sin always is enticing you, but never actually fulfilling you. But Jesus Christ is your master. Now, you are not a slave to sin and death. Your life is hidden in Christ. And you're going to fight against that old man who keeps pulling you towards that slave-driving sin master, but you don't have to go there.
You fight from a position of freedom and strength. You are free to love and serve God. And you know this is true because His Holy Spirit is in you. Even when you fail, you cry out, O wretched man that I am, I don't want to do these sinful things and yet I do them. What hope do I have? Our hope is Jesus Christ and the Holy Spirit that He has poured out into your hearts. God did not redeem you and then leave you alone. But our God redeemed us by the blood of Jesus Christ and poured out in our hearts His Spirit that cries out, Abba, Father.
This is what Jesus was instituting in this meal. No matter what's going on in your life, you can stop and remember the redemption accomplished by Jesus Christ and applied to you in your life. No matter what suffering you may be enduring, you can lift up your eyes See Jesus and know that He is alive today. And be comforted by the Holy Spirit. You can know that this new covenant, God has paid the price to adopt you as His beloved child. Not to be filled with pride, but to marvel at His grace. God redeemed you. By the sacrifice of His Son, so you may now live your life as a living sacrifice.
Jesus has redeemed you, so you may love others without hypocrisy. Jesus, in His body, being broken for you, is broken that you may abhor evil. Jesus, in pouring out His blood for you was that you might cling to what is good. Jesus, in redeeming you and instituting the new covenant was that you might have the fruit of kindness in your life.
Jesus redeemed you that you might look around at the table. You might even look around you this morning at those in the pews near you and you can show brotherly love. Jesus redeemed you that you can honor others. Jesus redeemed you that you may be diligent in your faith. Jesus redeemed you that you may rejoice in hope. You are redeemed, brothers and sisters, by the blood of Jesus Christ, that you may be patient when there are times of tribulation. Jesus redeemed you that you may be steadfast in prayer.
Jesus poured out His Holy Spirit into your heart that you may care for others who have needs. Jesus redeemed you to institute that new covenant that you may be given over to showing hospitality, love to strangers. Jesus redeemed you that you might bless those who persecute you. Jesus redeemed you. that you may show empathy with others, rejoicing with those who rejoice, and weeping with those who weep.
Jesus' new covenant has been established in His blood, that you may set your mind on the things above and not on the things below. Jesus has redeemed us, that we may walk in humility and gratitude. Because our King laid down His life for us, that Prince of Peace. He knew what He was doing.
And as we come to the very end of this sermon, Jesus and His disciples, after eating this meal, they sang a hymn with one another. They would sing Psalm 118. And the culmination of this last of the Halal Psalms is that stone. That stone which the builders rejected had become the chief cornerstone, and it is marvelous in our eyes. We sing together Psalm 118 now because our Redeemer lives, and we have hope because we know we have freedom in Him. Let's stand together and we'll sing Psalm 118, Selection