The Lord's Table

Intro

Good morning

We are a memorializing people. Have you ever noticed that? I believe it is in our nature to take moments in our lives or important events and memorialize them in some form or fashion.

Take birthdays, for example. We mark our birthdays each year with some sort of celebration or special something to celebrate our moment of birth. This past Friday was Veteran’s Day, a day we memorialize the tremendous sacrifice of our present and past service members.

And this memorializing isn’t anything new.

Setting the Scene

If you have your Bible’s with you, feel free to open them up and turn to Mark 14 and we will begin by taking a quick look at verses 12-15.

Mark 14:12 “And on the first day of Unleavened Bread, when they sacrificed the Passover lamb, his disciples said to him, “Where will you have us go and prepare for you to eat the Passover?”

Now, if you were here last week, you might remember that the Feast of the Unleavened Bread was instituted as a reminder of centuries and centuries in the past when God rescued Israel from slavery in Egypt.

God’s servant Moses told the Israelites that their liberation could come at any moment and when it did, it would happen quickly! And so because of this, the Israelites were told not to put any leaven in their bread because they would not have the time to allow the leaven to work in the dough in the dough and cause it to rise.

It was like saying, “Hey, sometime very soon we are going to have to book it out of St. Albans! So do not put anything in the crock pot!” They were going to be leaving soon and they would be leaving quickly, so there was no time to add the leaven to the bread!

So as a memorial to that time, over the course of a long weekend, beginning on Thursday evening, they would celebrate with the Feast of Unleavened Bread.

Now, this was not only the day that the Feast of Unleavened Bread began, but it was also the day that Passover was celebrated with the Passover meal.

Now, as we said last week, Passover is a week long celebration where Jews from all over came to Jerusalem to celebrate the great exodus that God lead them on out of Egypt! Exodus 7-11 tells us the account of Moses and Aaron going before Pharoah and telling him that God has commanded Pharoah to let His people go!

But again and again Pharoah refused to let the Israelites go. So God sent plague after plague, nine plagues, yet the Pharoah still refused. But then, God tells Moses in Exodus chapter 11, that He would be sending one more plague, and this plague would not be like the rest. This plague would be one where the wrath of God would be poured out on the unrighteous Egypt.

God would send the angel of death, and every first born son in Egypt would die. Moses, telling the Pharoah of this plague in Exodus 11:4-6 “So Moses said, “Thus says the Lord: ‘About midnight I will go out in the midst of Egypt, and every firstborn in the land of Egypt shall die, from the firstborn of Pharaoh who sits on his throne, even to the firstborn of the slave girl who is behind the handmill, and all the firstborn of the cattle. There shall be a great cry throughout all the land of Egypt, such as there has never been, nor ever will be again.”

Then in chapter 12 of Exodus, God tells Moses that each household of the Israelites are to sacrifice a lamb that is without spots or blemishes. They are to take the blood of that lamb and put it on the two door posts and the lintel of their homes.

And in verse 13 God says to Moses that, “When I see the blood, I will pass over you, and no plague will befall you to destroy you, when I strike the land of Egypt.” And so friends, I hope you can see clearly what is going on here. The blood on the doorposts and lentils of the homes of the Israelites was a sign of deliverance! Not only from the clutches of Egypt, but it was a sign of deliverance because it meant that they would escape the wrath of God!

They were saved by the provision of God from the wrath of God! And do not think for a moment that if the Israelites were disobedient that God would have given them a pass! You see the Egyptians were idolators, they worshipped a multitude of gods! They rejected the one true God who sovereignly directs the universe and invented over 1,400 gods to fit whatever need arose!

But do you think that the Israelites were free from sin? Free from deserving the judgement of God for committing, as R.C. Sproul puts it, cosmic treason? I don’t think so.

But in His grace and mercy, God told Moses that He would provide a way for the Israelites to escape His coming wrath on the inhabitants of Israel. The blood of the spotless lamb would save them, deliver them, from exposure to God’s just wrath.

You may know how the rest of the story goes. Pharoah finally let’s God’s people go and Moses leads them to the Red Sea which God miraculously parts, and the Israelites pass safely through. But Pharoah changes his mind yet again and pursues the Israelites into the Red Sea, but God ceases to hold back to walls of water and Pharoah and his army are swept away.

And God tells Moses, again in chapter 12, that every year that great deliverance is to be celebrated. And in remembrance of the sacrificial lamb in Exodus, each Jewish family is to sacrifice a lamb, which provided the meat for the Passover meal.

And it was this Passover meal that the disciples were asking Jesus about in verse 12. They had already sacrificed the lamb and all they needed was a place to prepare it and sit down and have the meal. But as we see in verses 13-15, Jesus has it all taken care of!

Mark 14:13-15 “And he sent two of his disciples and said to them, “Go into the city, and a man carrying a jar of water will meet you (Now at first this may sound like, “look for a man with a shirt and he will meet you.” But it was very rare during this time for a man to be carrying a jug of water, that was something that almost exclusively women did. So a man carrying a water jug would have stuck out like a sore thumb which would be very helpful, because remember, Jerusalem would have been packed with people). Follow him, and wherever he enters, say to the master of the house, ‘The Teacher says, Where is my guest room, where I may eat the Passover with my disciples?’ And he will show you a large upper room furnished and ready; there prepare for us.””

Then verse 16 tells us the disciples obeyed Jesus’ directions and amazingly but unsurprisingly, found everything just as Jesus had said.