Introduction
For the past couple of months we have been in a series called “Foundations for a Strong Family,” led by our pastor, Mark Adams. Each message has centered on one of God’s Ten – or tender – Commandments, which, when followed, leads to healthy individuals and strong families. We have covered seven of these commandments so far, and next week, Pastor Bobby will be reminding us of the eighth commandment with a warning not to steal. So if you just took one of those Redland Baptist Church pens from the seat back and put it in your purse or pocket, you may want to think twice about it, especially next week.
This week, however, is different, because we are celebrating Communion, the Lord’s Supper. You might find this a bit odd, having to time jump 1400 years or so to the New Testament while we are in a very Old Testament series. The Lord’s Supper, however, is much more connected to the Ten Commandments than we might first expect.
Earlier in the week I had the privilege of helping with some math homework at home. I have to admit that my trigonometry and calculus are pretty rusty! It took me several refresher questions, repeated peaking at notes, and more than a few web searches before I was of any remote help whatsoever. Even then I’m not sure I can grasp – let alone graph – y = -2sin (x + π/2). But the experience does help me remember all that I’ve forgotten.
It also reminds me of the question that rattles around in the overwhelmed minds of most high school students taking advanced math: When am I going to use this outside of this class? I’m not sure if I was ever bold enough to ask that question out loud, but I wondered it often. I’m not sure what my teachers ever said or would have said to that question, but I can tell you that in my case trigonometry was not mentioned even once in Bible college or seminary. The next time I ever used that knowledge was as a parent helping a teenager in the same type of class.
We definitely learn facts out of natural curiosity, but to keep learning something difficult day in and day out, we need some sort of practical connection, a reason to learn it. I hope that today you will find a connection between not only the Old and New Testaments but also in God’s plan of redemption overall. The foundation for God’s family is and always has been grace, and that is the grace we get to look at today. This grace manifests itself in covenant terms, where God makes a promise to His people. Hebrews 9 compares the old and new covenants. We will be looking there in chapter 9 at verses 13-20. The author of Hebrews explains to his readers the parallels of the Old Covenant with the New. The Ten Commandments and the laws they represent do relate to the Lord’s Supper and the sacrifice it represents. Follow along in your Bibles or on the screen as I read Hebrews 9:13-20:
The blood of goats and bulls and the ashes of a heifer sprinkled on those who are ceremonially unclean sanctify them so that they are outwardly clean. How much more, then, will the blood of Christ, who through the eternal Spirit offered himself unblemished to God, cleanse our consciences from acts that lead to death, so that we may serve the living God! For this reason Christ is the mediator of a new covenant, that those who are called may receive the promised eternal inheritance–now that he has died as a ransom to set them free from the sins committed under the first covenant. In the case of a will, it is necessary to prove the death of the one who made it, because a will is in force only when somebody has died; it never takes effect while the one who made it is living. This is why even the first covenant was not put into effect without blood. When Moses had proclaimed every command of the law to all the people, he took the blood of calves, together with water, scarlet wool and branches of hyssop, and sprinkled the scroll and all the people. He said, “This is the blood of the covenant, which God has commanded you to keep.”
And this is the Word of the Lord. Thanks be to God.
As you know from our study these past weeks, the Ten Commandments were first recorded in Exodus 20. Further commands from God continue into the next several chapters and even into the next few books – books like Leviticus that deal with much of the law. All of those laws, however, are case laws that find their basis within the Ten Commandments.
Blood is the payment for sin
In Exodus 24 the covenant is ratified by Moses and the people. We find here the truth that blood is the payment for sin. Moses read the commands of the covenant to the people who twice approved and committed themselves to it. The covenant was formally sealed by blood. Cattle were slaughtered and offered as sacrifices to God, and the blood was collected into basins and then sprinkled on all the people. As Exodus 24:8 records, “Moses then took the blood, sprinkled it on the people and said, ‘This is the blood of the covenant that the LORD has made with you in accordance with all these words.’” Herbert Wolf writes, “This was called ‘the blood of the covenant,’ a term that recalls the words of Christ just before He shed His own blood to institute the New Covenant.”
We might find the sprinkling of blood on people to be gruesome and the idea of drinking blood to be repulsive. We might also think people felt differently about it way back when this was first established, but even in their markedly different cultural setting they probably felt about the same way we do. The plain fact is that just to enter into covenant relationship with God, something or someone had to die. Blood had to be shed – innocent blood for guilty people. Important covenants came with sacrifices. These sacrifices were testaments to the fact that an important commitment had been made. It is fitting then that the most important covenant – the one that offers us forgiveness from sin, peace with God, and the ability to live for Him – this covenant came with the most costly sacrifice – the Son of God. Blood still pays for sins.
I read a news story this week about missionary doctor Ken Brantley. Dr. Brantley is one of the missionaries for Samaritan’s Purse who was in Liberia treating Ebola-stricken patients when he himself contracted the deadly disease. As you surely know, Dr. Brantley recovered and on Tuesday donated his plasma to Nina Pham, the first nurse to contract Ebola here in the U.S. He also gave blood to two other Ebola-infected individuals who have since shown signs of improvement. The antibodies in the blood of a person who has overcome any disease remain on the lookout for that disease in the future. If it appears, they surround the disease and prevent it from doing any harm to the body. This is what medical personnel hope will happen with Nina Pham and the others, that their blood will use Dr. Brantley’s antibodies to attack the Ebola virus raging within them. All of these antibodies actually come from a different source. That source is the 14-year-old patient in Liberia who overcame Ebola and gave his blood to Dr. Brantley. In the same way, we have a Savior who overcame sin, the same sin that rages within the bodies of everyone on our planet. This sin is the worst pandemic in the universe, carrying with it a one hundred percent mortality rate – unless the blood of the one who overcame is applied. Blood is the payment for sin, the cure for it. Knowing this puts Hebrews 9:13-14 in even greater perspective:
“The blood of goats and bulls and the ashes of a heifer sprinkled on those who are ceremonially unclean sanctify them so that they are outwardly clean. How much more, then, will the blood of Christ, who through the eternal Spirit offered himself unblemished to God, cleanse our consciences from acts that lead to death, so that we may serve the living God!”
Jesus became a much better sacrifice
These verses also point us to another truth about the covenants: Jesus became a much better sacrifice. In Exodus 20, the Israelites in their fear asked Moses to be the mediator of the covenant between them and God. They said, “Speak to us yourself and we will listen. But do not have God speak to us or we will die” (Exodus 20:19). Hebrews 9:15 calls Jesus the “Mediator of a new covenant.” Throughout the passage comparisons were made between the old and new covenants, and as we look at the two covenants we can find several parallels ourselves. Both the giving of the commandments and the sacrifice of Christ were accompanied by an earthquake and darkness. In both cases, the mediator ascended the mountain. Sacrifice had to be made in each case, too. Both involved a fellowship meal (cf. Ex. 24:11) and even celebration. Israel celebrated their covenant with God and the law He gave them. The commandments were not a burden to Israel. They were a badge of honor. All of the surrounding peoples and nations had their own gods that were the guesswork of the people. Those made up powerless gods came with even more made up ineffectual rituals in hopes that their gods might be appeased and give them good things. For Israel, there was no guesswork, because the one, true, living God had revealed Himself to them, along with His plan for them to live in a covenant relationship with Him. Their salvation came by grace just as ours does.
But there are major differences between the covenants as well. As much as Israel embraced the covenant, they were simply unable to keep up with its demands. Galatians 3 makes this plain and shows that the law was designed to lead us to Christ. Without the law the sinfulness of humanity would not be sufficiently revealed. Paul writes, “So the law was our guardian until Christ came that we might be justified by faith” (Gal. 3:24). Through Christ, he writes, we become children of God. We move from the law to adoption, from slaves of sin to sons of God. Furthermore, Israel had to sacrifice continually to keep their covenant. Once a year, blood had to be shed for all the people, who themselves had several sacrifices to make to maintain their purity and right standing before God as His people. Christ’s sacrifice was once for all. Hebrews 9:26 tells us that Jesus “has appeared once for all at the culmination of the ages to do away with sin by the sacrifice of himself.”
One of the recent fund raising trends on the internet is called crowd funding. With crowd funding, individuals or startup companies make a request from friends, family, and even strangers to fund their project or need. Youcaring.com showed a testimonial from the Steendahl family for their project, “Bringing Igor Home – Forever.” Christine Steendahl writes, “Meet Igor! He is a 15 year old orphan from Ukraine, who stole our hearts when we invited him into our home as part of the Christmas New Horizons for Children Hosting Program…God has called us to become Igor’s ‘Forever Family.’” Over $32,000 was given to the Steendahl family, prompting them to thankfully respond, “Our sweet boy arrives in about 26 ½ hours and I am beyond ecstatic to share that through many many many caring friends, our adoption is now fully funded as of a couple hours ago! This was such an amazing blessing to share with our children. Tears were shed. There is just no way we could fund this project without the loving support we have received from so many people.” How amazing it is to have a burdensome debt forgiven through the efforts of so many. We all had an even more burdensome debt that was forgiven through one. Under the law, continual sacrifice had to be made, much like unending loan payments. In Christ, the sin debt is completely paid. Jesus is a much better sacrifice.
Following God’s “Foundations” is only possible because of Christ’s death
When we recognize that Israel could not keep up with the covenant, we understand that following God’s “Foundations” is only possible because of Christ’s death. The law looked to a new covenant. This is what Jeremiah states when he writes,
“‘The days are coming,’ declares the LORD, ‘when I will make a new covenant with the people of Israel and with the people of Judah. It will not be like the covenant I made with their ancestors when I took them by the hand to lead them out of Egypt, because they broke my covenant, though I was a husband to them,’ declares the LORD. ‘This is the covenant I will make with the people of Israel after that time,’ declares the LORD. ‘I will put my law in their minds and write it on their hearts. I will be their God, and they will be my people.”
The law – the foundation for the strong family – doesn’t change, but it becomes something that can actually be followed under the new covenant, under Christ.
In his book Serving God, Ben Patterson tells this story:
Once upon a time a woman was married to a perfectionist husband. No matter what his wife did for him, it was never enough. At the beginning of each day, he would make out his list of chores for her to do, and at the end of each day, he would scrutinize it to make sure she had done all that she was supposed to do. The best compliment she ever received was a disinterested grunt if she finished everything. She grew to hate her husband. When he died unexpectedly, she was embarrassed to admit to herself that she was relieved. Within a year of her husband’s death, she met a warm and loving man who was everything her former husband was not. They fell deeply in love with each other and were married. Every day they spent together seemed better than the day before. One afternoon, as she was cleaning out boxes in the attic, a crumpled piece of paper caught her eye. It was one of the old chore lists that her first husband used to make out for her. In spite of her chagrin, she couldn’t help reading it again. To her shock and amazement she discovered that, without even thinking about it, she was now doing for her new husband all the things she used to hate to do for her old husband. Her new husband never once suggested that she do any of these things. But she was doing them anyway-because she loved him.
When we are placed under the shed blood of Christ, under the new covenant, heart transformation occurs. The old demands that we could never seem to live up to become ingrained into our very hearts and minds so that we begin to naturally obey the laws that once seemed so unnatural.
Conclusion
When we partake of the Lord’s Supper, we do it with the realization that Christ is the fulfillment of the law we could never obey. We make that connection and realize that the foundation for God’s family was and has always been grace. So we come in grateful obedience to Christ’s command. Jesus said, “Do this in remembrance of Me.” We partake and remember the sacrifice of Jesus, whose body was broken and whose blood was shed on our behalf. We do exactly what He said. We proclaim His death until He returns.
The Lord’s Supper is open to anyone present who has placed their faith in Christ for the salvation of their sins, whether they are a member of this church or not. If you belong to the New Covenant – if you are His – this is yours.
[1] (Wolf 1991, 154)
[2] http://www.youcaring.com/adoption-fundraiser/bringing-igor-home-forever/39937#sthash.NaBEcfJF.dpuf