Table Covenant

Photo: V. Nesdoly

TODAY'S SPECIAL: Matthew 26:1-30

TO CHEW ON: "For this is My blood of the new covenant, which is shed for many for the remission of sins." Matthew 26:28

Here we have the story of Jesus starting something new or, better said, revealing the next chapter of God's plan that lay within something old.

He and His disciples were celebrating the Passover meal. This was the symbolic meal the Israelites had celebrated since the night before their exodus from Egypt. It is explained in Exodus 12. There Moses instructed the people how to celebrate it. He also told them to eat it yearly from then on, using the various rituals of preparation and menu items as prompts in retelling the story to their children of how God had spared the life of each family's firstborn child the night the Death Angel visited Egypt.

Jesus and His disciples were eating this Passover meal when Jesus took parts of it—the bread and the wine—and gave them new significance. Of the bread He said, "Take, eat, this is My body." Of the wine, "Drink from it all of you. For this is My blood of the new convenient which is shed for many for the remission of sins."

A sidebar article in my Bible explains the significance of what He was doing:

"Jesus used the occasion of the Passover meal to inaugurate the New Covenant. The symbolism of the Passover meal under the Old Covenant was about to be fully satisfied through Christ's crucifixion. In this historic moment, Jesus transformed the meaning of the elements of the Passover meal into New Covenant thought.


The bread now represented His body, which would be given, and the cup His blood, which would be shed for the forgiveness of sins The holy requirements of God and the Old Covenant were about to be forever satisfied.


A new and living way into the presence and provision of God was being prepared through Christ, the Lamb of God. A new and eternal bond was being established by the blood of Jesus Christ. God was sovereignly inaugurating the new and ultimate covenant" - Charles Simpson - New Spirit-Filled Life Bible, p. 1339.

Though a covenant between two people or parties is an agreement by both sides, a God-initiated covenant is solely His idea. We have nothing to bring to it—no bargaining power or clout of any kind. This covenant, to give us life when we deserved death because Someone took our place, is entirely His gift to us.

As we approach Easter, the realization, again, of the hugeness of His gift is reason for nothing but thankfulness and worship.

(Read more about covenant at Rebecca Writes - Theological Term of the Week: "covenant")

PRAYER: Dear God, thank You for this new covenant by which I have life when I deserved death. Help me to respect the Lord's Supper, treating it with the solemnity it has as Your initiative, pledge and seal of undeserved favour. Amen.

MORE: "Come to the Table" by Michael Card



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Unless otherwise noted all Scripture quotations are taken from the New King James Version®. Copyright © 1982 by Thomas Nelson, Inc. Used by permission. All rights reserved

Celebrate and pass on your spiritual story

TODAY'S SPECIAL: Exodus 13:1-16

TO CHEW ON: "And you shall tell your son in that day, saying, 'This is done because of what the Lord did for me when I came up from Egypt.' " Exodus 13:8

The Israelites who experienced the first Passover night may have thought they would never forget that amazing, frightening, wonderful night. But even the most vivid experiences have a way of fading over time to the people who experience them—let alone those who weren't alive at the time and didn't live them firsthand. God knew that and gave the Israelites instructions on how to keep the story of the Passover night fresh. They were to:

Celebrate
They were to celebrate Passover on its anniversary every year (Exodus 13:5).

Refrain from certain food
Leavened food (yeast) had no part in the celebration (Exodus 13:6,7).

Tell the story
They were to tell their children their stories of this day as an explanation of what they were doing (Exodus 13:8).

Sacrifice
They were to sacrifice the firstborn males of the flock and redeem the firstborn sons as per God's instructions as a memorial of what had happened in Egypt on that night (Exodus 13:12-15).

Share symbols
They were to wear things that reminded them of that night: "…a sign to you on your hand and as a memorial between your eyes." Through generations Jews followed these instructions literally. My Bible commentary says, "The later Jewish practice of wearing phylacteries while praying is based on these verses" James Carroll Tollett, New Spirit-Filled Life Bible, p. 93.

We can take a page from Israel's book as we live or own ex-Passover-night lives. No, none of us went through the actual Passover night, but if we have accepted Jesus, we have that landmark day of leaving sin's slavery for God's freedom to commemorate.

• If we know the date we could celebrate our spiritual birthday.

• We have a special meal—the Lord's Supper. "Participate regularly in the Lord's Supper. Passover points forward to our ultimate deliverance through Jesus our Messiah" - Leslyn Musch, "Truth-In-Action through Exodus," New Spirit-Filled Life Bible, p. 130.

• We can tell the story of our coming to Jesus to our children and grandchildren.

• We may have symbols we connect with our spiritual history—a golden cross, or prayer shawl perhaps—that remind us of this event. We may also hang significant Bible verses or symbols on our walls (Deuteronomy 6:9).

However we do it, let's remember and pass on our story with God, as the Israelites did.

PRAYER: Dear God, thank You for Your amazing plan that threads through history. Thank You for capturing my life in its stitches. Help me to remember my history with You and to pass it on to my children and grandchildren. Amen.

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Unless otherwise noted all Scripture quotations are taken from the New King James Version®. Copyright © 1982 by Thomas Nelson, Inc. Used by permission. All rights reserved.

The power of story

TODAY'S SPECIAL: Exodus 12:29-51


TO CHEW ON: "And it shall be, when your children say to you, 'What do you mean by this service?' that you shall say, 'It is the Passover sacrifice to the Lord who passed over the houses of the children of Israel in Egypt when He struck the Egyptians and delivered our households.'" Exodus 12:26-27

In our home it was Mom who told the stories and we would beg — Tell us about the time you dyed the wedding gloves. Tell us about being a nurse in Winnipeg. Tell us about when you and Daddy met.

These stories gave us kids a sense of who we were and where we had come from. In a small way they located us in history and gave us a context for some of our own tendencies.

Moses encouraged—no commanded— the Israelites to tell their children the story of the death angel passing over their homes. They were to retell it every time they ate the Passover meal. In this way God's working to preserve them would be engrained on their psyches individually and as a nation.

When times were good, the story would remind them of how God had brought them out of something very bad. When times were bad, it would remind them to call on God with a faith bolstered by how He had come through for them in the past. Of course since Jesus' death the Passover meal and story takes on additional meaning for believers who celebrate it.

Luci Shaw in her book Breath for the Bones says,

"Story has the power to grasp bits of the past and carry them into the imaginative present, rescuing us from the pitfalls of abstraction. It is not insignificant that much of the Bible ... is narrative in form and that the characters and plots revealed on the sacred pages are not so different from those that surround and involve us today" Breath for the Bones, Kindle Location 966.

We need to carry on that tradition of telling stories to our children. We should tell them the embarrassing, humorous, triumphant, and love stories of our lives. We must tell them the stories of our spiritual journeys. Above all, they should hear from us the Bible stories which are, after all, the stories of our spiritual great-great-great-great.... grandparents.


PRAYER: Dear God, thank You for the rich stories of the Bible that help colour the mundanities of life with spiritual meaning and significance. Help me to faithfully pass on this history to my descendants. Amen.

MORE: The power of story

"Story isn't imposed on our lives; it invites us into its life. As we enter and imaginatively participate, we find ourselves in a more spacious, freer, and more coherent world. We didn't know all this was going on! We had never noticed all this significance... Story brings us into more reality, not less, expands horizons, sharpens both sight and insight. Story is the primary means we have for learning what the world is, and what it means to be a human being in it. No wonder that from the time we acquire the rudiments of language, we demand stories" - Eugene Peterson (from Leap Over a Wall), quoted by Luci Shaw in Breath for the Bones, Kindle Location 967.

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Unless otherwise noted all Scripture quotations are taken from the New King James Version®. Copyright © 1982 by Thomas Nelson, Inc. Used by permission. All rights reserved.

Blood

"Blood of the Passover"
by Ted Larson

TODAY'S SPECIAL: Exodus 12:1-14

TO CHEW ON: "Now the blood shall be a sign for you on the houses where you are. And when I see the blood, I will pass over you; and the plague shall not be on you to destroy you when I strike the land of Egypt." Exodus 12:13

If you ever do house renovations or watch them on TV, you will know that all walls are not created equal. People who look at a fixer-upper with an eye to knocking down walls must do at least one thing before they get busy with the sledge hammer—check to see whether or not the wall they're planning to remove is load-bearing. If it is (i.e. supports parts of the house's basic structure) they know they can't remove it without compromising the soundness of the whole house.

Blood is that kind of load-bearing wall in Christianity. In today's reading we see the beginning of its importance in the Passover. It plays a key role in this ritual which God instituted through Moses just before the exodus of the Israelites from Egypt after 400 years of slavery.

The instruction about how it was to be used was particular. The blood of each household's sacrificed animal was to be painted on the sides and top of their entryway. God promised it would act as a barrier to "the plague" and "the destroyer."  When the death angel saw the blood, he would pass over that doorway, as he was not allowed to enter that household to do his deadly task (Exodus 12:13,23).

The blood "wall" doesn't only provide a protection, but it does much more. Some of the things it supports, as seen through the Bible:

• Atonement - Exodus 30:10; Leviticus 17:11

• Liberation - Zechariah 9:11

• Pardon - Hebrews 9:7

• Cleansing - Hebrews 9:22.

Centuries later Christ came and offered Himself as our Passover lamb. He shed His blood for each one of us.

We must never let the criticism that Christianity is too bloody cause us to look for ways we can remove that supporting "blood wall" from our faith.

PRAYER: Dear God, thank You for the rich images resident in the Passover story and especially the blood. Thank You for being my Passover lamb. Amen.

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Unless otherwise noted all Scripture quotations are taken from the New King James Version®. Copyright © 1982 by Thomas Nelson, Inc. Used by permission. All rights reserved.