2017-07-02 Luke 22:14-20 From Symbol to Substance (2): Fueled by Love

FROM SYMBOL TO SUBSTANCE (2): FUELED BY LOVE (Luke 22:14-20) July 2, 2017 Read Luke 22:14-20 – This passage is unique. It is at once the last official Passover and the first Lord’s Supper. Passover was the annual Jewish feast that commemorated God delivering Israel from Egyptian captivity. But it also looked forward to an ultimate rescue – deliverance from sin not just for Israel but for everyone who would believe. Israel’s deliverance was the world’s greatest object lesson – symbolizing ultimate rescue from sin, guilt and death. But symbol without reality is useless, right? What is promised must eventually be delivered. What is anticipated must be actualized. A few years ago I took Patty to dinner one night at a nice restaurant for our anniversary. With dinner over I slipped her a small box wrapped as a present -- one of my few good nights! Inside the box, she found a keyring, and she immediately knew. It symbolized a new car and I got a lot of mileage out of that gesture both from her and the waitress. Shortly, she picked out that new car. The fact that she drove it 20 years is another story. But that was a good night. But what if I hadn’t delivered on that promise? Would she have treasured that symbol? Stored the keyring in a jewelry box? I don’t think so! The symbol was only good when it was actualized. The promise had to appear. That’s what Jesus is teaching here! What Passover symbolized is about to be realized. So in the middle of the Passover feast Jesus suddenly shifts gears and initiates a new memorial, the Lord’s Supper – which commemorates not deliverance symbolized, but deliverance realized! It’s a profound text showing us 7 truths about deliverance, symbolized in Moses; realized in Jesus. I. The Need for Deliverance – Just as the Israelites were hopelessly enslaved by Pharaoh, so every person ever born is hopeless enslaved to sin. As they could not deliver themselves, we cannot deliver ourselves. II. The Mediator of Deliverance – God sent Moses to deliver Israel. Now He has sent Jesus to be our deliverer. God warned Israel in Exod 33:5, “if for a single moment I should go up among you, I would consume you.” Such is the intensity of God’s holiness. They needed a mediator as do we for Heb 12:29 reminds “for our God is a consuming fire.” Access to God requires a mediator or we would be destroyed instantly. 1 III. The Price of Deliverance Next our object lesson teaches us deliverance comes – but at a price. Sin does not go easily. So God announces a final plague: Exod 11: 4) “About midnight I will go out in the midst of Egypt, 5) 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.” It’s a death sentence for every first born in Egypt. And there’s no way out. Ethnic background won’t help. It’s imposed on Egyptian and Israeli alike. Riches won’t help. It’s from Pharaoh to the lowliest slave. Good works won’t help. The situation looks hopeless. “But”, God says, “there is one way. Take a furry little lamb, kill it, eat it and put its blood on the door. Do that and the angel of justice will “pass over” that house. There’s safety only for those under the blood.” The perfection of that little lamb refigures the perfection of Jesus. So now we have Jesus taking the cup in v. 20: “This cup that is poured out for you is the new covenant in my blood.” Safety is found only in applying very precious blood. That is not a popular message these days. It offends and comes under fire in amazing places. In the early 90’s, Dr. Al Mohler was appointed president of Southern Seminary to recover its message which he did by God’s grace. But he explains why it was necessary by describing his first day as a student there in the mid-70’s. He says that in his first class, first hour there the class was asked to intro themselves and explain why they were taking the class. The line wound around until it came to one young woman who was studying to be a missionary. She said she was taking the class because she wanted to know more about Jesus Christ and his shed blood. The professor exploded. He said, “There will be no more bloody cross religion in this classroom. Is this understood?” He said, “That is not tolerated. It is beneath dignity and selfrespect to believe in a God who had to kill in order to forgive.” But that’s human wisdom exerting itself in direct contradiction to what God Himself has said, right? Eph 2:13: “But now in Christ Jesus you who once were far off have been brought near by the blood of Christ.” No blood; no salvation. In a passage we read last week, Exod 24:8: “And Moses took the blood and threw it on the people and said, “Behold the blood of the covenant that the LORD has made with you in accordance with all these words (the Law).” That couldn’t have been pleasant, but it symbolized the great reality Peter described when he said we’ve been saved by “sprinkling with his blood” (I Pet 1:2). There is symbol turned into reality. No blood; no salvation. 2 Offensive yes – to ancients as well as moderns. The bloody mess of the cross has always been offensive. It’s meant to be offensive to show us how awful sin is to a holy God and how precarious our position with Him. But when the blinders come off, we begin to see the cross differently. When we realize it was the only way God could maintain His holy and just wrath against sin, and still save the sinner – once we realize that we begin to see the beauty of the cross. When we see it’s the place where He paid the price of His own demands for our deliverance, it becomes previous. So Peter says in I Pet 1:18-19: “knowing that you were ransomed from the futile ways inherited from your forefathers, not with perishable things such as silver or gold, 19) but with the precious blood of Christ, like that of a lamb without blemish or spot.” When we see that He is our lamb without blemish, and His blood is the price of our deliverance, how we cherish it, realizing the price of sin is either our own life, or our life hidden in Christ. Any place where there are a lot of sheep, you’re liable to see a little lamb running around with an extra fleece tied onto its back with little holes for its legs. What’s happened? It’s mother died. And without the protection and nourishment of a substitute mother, it will die as well. But other ewes will reject it because it does not smell like their own. They now it’s not theirs. But if one of those ewes has lost one of her own lambs, the shepherd will skin the dead one and use its fleece to make a cover for the orphaned lamb. The mother will smell her own lamb and accept it as one of her own. Covered by the blood of another; delivered thru the death of a substitute. Even nature teaches this lesson that was symbolized in the OT sacrifices and realized in Jesus Christ who “by a single offering he has perfected for all time those who are being sanctified (delivered)” (Heb 10:14). What a plan! What a God. But also, what a price. It leads us to the next element of deliverance. IV. The Motive for Deliverance Why did God deliver Israel? To show up Pharaoh? To demonstrate His power? To make a point of His sovereignty? Perhaps yes to all of those. But the primary motive? Moses knew in His song of praise after the deliverance was secured. Exod 15:13) “You have led in your steadfast love the people whom you have redeemed.” God’s love saw the need; God’s love sent Moses; God’s love planned and executed the deliverance; and it is God’s love that Passover was intended to commemorate. Love is the reason! 3 And so Jesus tells His disciples: “I have earnestly desired to eat this Passover with you” (15). Why? Because He loves them. He longs to share this last commemoration with them. But He has more on His mind than Passover past! Notice His full statement: “I have earnestly desired to eat this Passover with you before I suffer.” Jesus isn’t just thinking of God’s love demonstrated in the past. He is anticipating the ultimate expression of that love – when He will become the personification of God’s love in the most dreadful and final way. He has known from the beginning where His life is leading. Turn Lu 9. Jesus has taken Peter, James and John to a mountaintop. Awaking from sleep, they find the earthly veil of flesh removed and. He is shining forth in all His glory as God. Amazing picture. Lu 9:30: “And behold, two men were talking with him, Moses and Elijah, 31 who appeared in glory and spoke of his departure, which he was about to accomplish at Jerusalem.” His departure. Only the word isn’t departure. The word is exodus. They’re talking about the exodus. Only it’s not Moses’ exodus. It is the greater exodus of Jesus. It is the exodus where He will not only be the mediator, but also the sacrificial lamb, absorbing in Himself the sin of all who will follow Him. That’s what occupies their full attention as they encourage Him in what they all know will be a horrific but necessary sacrifice. Jesus knows it’s coming. Imagine living with the conscious awareness that the most painful physical, emotional and spiritual devastation of all time is coming your way. And imagine knowing that you could avoid it – that you have the power to call it off – but if you do, every friend you have, every person you know, and in fact, every person who ever lived will be eternally damned to suffer the fate you are escaping. Imagine carrying the weight of that knowledge thru years of preparation. Imagine explaining it and no one understands. You are all alone with your burden. Imagine knowing that in your moment of greatest need, every human friend will abandon you – and so will God the Father Himself. It’s headed your way like a cloud of toxic gas the soldiers in WWI could see coming, knowing its horror but with no escape. Knowing all that, could you say, “My dear friends, I have longed to commemorate this past and coming event with you before I suffer”? Could you do that? Knowing that your friends will shortly cut and run? No, and neither could I. But this is the love of God. Beloved, you have no idea how much God loves you. You have no idea. See, this wasn’t just for the disciples; it was for you, too. This is the motive for deliverance. Jn 13:1: “Now before the Feast of the Passover, when Jesus knew that his hour had come to depart out of this world to the Father (by means of His exodus), having loved his 4 own who were in the world, he loved them to the end.” Warts and all, He loved them. “To the end”. All the way to the cross. No shortcuts. No abandoning them as they would abandon Him. No turning back. Knowing full well what was coming, He loved them – all the way to the end. Listen, if it is the infinite character of God’s holiness that places our eternal existence in jeopardy because we “fall short” of His glory – and it is; it is the infinite character of God’s love that provides the only means of deliverance. Before you shake your fist at God at the thought that He would condemn you for your shortcomings, you better take a look at the cross where at the expense of a rupture in His own triune Person – He paid the price for your rescue. You’d better look there because what His holiness demanded of you, His love delivered for you. And it wasn’t because you were so lovable – any more than His disciples. He didn’t find them so irresistibly attractive and intelligent and wise that He was driven to die for them. Paul tells us in Ro 5:8, “ but God shows his love for us in that while we were still sinners, Christ died for us.” “While we were still sinners” – we glibly read over that phrase with little thought of its implications. Remember Hab 1:13? No! “You [God] who are of purer eyes than to see evil and cannot look at wrong.” That doesn’t mean God’s not aware. It means His character is so holy He could never overlook the least sin. Our least offensive thought, word or deed is so offensive to Him that He cannot stand to look at it or us. Yet, Paul’s point is, while you and I were still like that – still in our sin – God loved us and Christ died for us. We will never understand the love of God. We love for what we find in others. So we love the good and beautiful and hate the ugly. God loves not for what He finds in us but for what He finds in Himself or we would all be doomed. We are not naturally beautiful to Him. His love is the most priceless gift we have; it is why God sent a mediator to deliver. The motive – is love. Some of us have a hard time accepting how great God’s love is because we’ve never had love like that. Garrison Keiller of Lake Wobegon fame told of the pain he endured in choosing up baseball teams. "The captains are down to their last grudging choices – the slow kid for catcher – someone to stick out in right field where no one ever hits it. The scrubs, the remaining kids they treat as handicaps. If I take him, you have to take him. Sometimes I go as high as sixth – usually lower. But just once – just once – I'd like Darrell to pick me first and say, ‘I want him – the skinny kid with the glasses and the black shoes. You. I want you.’ But I've never been chosen with much enthusiasm.” I've never been chosen with much enthusiasm. Is that you? Perhaps in this life you’ve never been chosen with much enthusiasm. But I tell 5 you that in spite of yourself, by God you have been loved and chosen with great enthusiasm. “Having loved His own . . . He loved them to the end.” Conc – C. S. Lewis gives a beautiful picture of all this in The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe. One of the four children, Edmund, is enticed by the wicked witch with Turkish Delight candy and soon finds himself enslaved. When the great lion, Aslan, comes to his rescue, the wicked witch contends that every traitor belongs to her and she has a right to the blood of every sinner. But to the amazement of all, after a private conversation with Aslan, she lets the boy go. But later that night, Aslan surrenders himself to the witch’s camp – allows himself to be shaved of his magnificent beard, ridiculed, beaten, spat upon and tied to the Table of Stone. There the witch draws near with a razor sharp knife plunges it into his heart, killing him as the children watch from a distance. Next morning, Lucy and Susan return to get Aslan’s body, but they find the Stone Table broken and Aslan’s body nowhere to be found, until suddenly, they turn around – and there he is, larger than they had ever seen him, shaking his great mane, fully alive and well. They begin to weep with joy and hug and kiss him, but then they ask, “What does it all mean?” Aslan replies, “It means that though the witch knew the Deep Magic, there is a greater power still which she did not know. Her knowledge goes back only to the dawn of Time. But if she could have looked a little further back, into the stillness and darkness before Time dawned, she would have read there a different seen a bigger picture. She would have known that when a willing victim who had committed no treachery was killed in a traitor’s stead, the Table would crack and Death itself would start working backwards.” This is what it means for the price and motivation for deliverance symbolized in Passover to come alive in Jesus. “Because the sinless Savior died / My sinful soul is counted free; / For God, the Just, is satisfied / To look on Him – and pardon me.” That’s the gospel. That’s how God’s love can trump God’s holiness -- if you let it. Let’s pray. 6