23 For I
received from the Lord what I also passed on to you: The Lord Jesus,
on the night he was betrayed, took bread, 24 and when he had given
thanks, he broke it and said, “This is my body, which is for you; do
this in remembrance of me.” 25 In the same way, after supper he took
the cup, saying, “This cup is the new covenant in my blood; do
this, whenever you drink it, in remembrance of me.” 26 For whenever
you eat this bread and drink this cup, you proclaim the Lord’s death until he comes.
27 So then,
whoever eats the bread or drinks the cup of the Lord in an unworthy manner will
be guilty of sinning against the body and blood of the
Lord. 28 Everyone ought to examine themselves before they eat of
the bread and drink from the cup. 29 For those who eat and drink
without discerning the body of Christ eat and drink judgment on
themselves. 30 That is why many among you are weak and sick, and a
number of you have fallen asleep. 31 But if we were more discerning
with regard to ourselves, we would not come under such
judgment. 32 Nevertheless, when we are judged in this way by the
Lord, we are being disciplined so that we will not be finally condemned
with the world.
33 So then,
my brothers and sisters, when you gather to eat, you should all eat
together. 34 Anyone who is hungry should eat something at
home, so that when you meet together it may not result in judgment.
And when I
come I will give further directions. 1 Corinthians 11:23-34.
DON’T BE A JUDAS!
Introduction
Is
it just me, or did everything change one night when I was sleeping? I feel a
bit like Rip Van Winkle, you know, the bloke that fell asleep and woke up a
couple of decades or more later. In ye olde days people used to say to each
other, “What do you think?” Now it’s, “How do you feel about that?”
It’s
less about I.Q. nowadays and more about E.Q., Emotional Quotient a.k.a. Emotional Intelligence, i.e., E.I. Having
a high I.Q. meant that you were brainy. Having a high E.Q. or E.I. apparently means
that you have a lot of self-awareness, self-regulation, self-motivation,
empathy, and social skills. A high I.Q. means that you know a lot about stuff,
but a high E.Q. means that you know a lot about yourself.
Of
course, some people may have a high I.Q. as well as a high E.Q., and it’s all a
bit more to do with psychology than theology. But the point I make is that
intelligence and thinking seem to have morphed into emotions and feelings. In
the following we’ll be looking at the Lord’s Supper.
What
do you think about the Lord’s Supper?
Or how do you feel about the Lord’s
Supper? Do you have an intelligent understanding of the Supper or do you have
an emotional understanding? Or, preferably, do you have both, i.e., a mind and
a heart understanding? I would like us to look at 1 Corinthians 11:28-29 in
particular:
28 Everyone ought to
examine themselves before they eat of the bread and drink from the
cup. 29 For those who eat and drink without discerning the body of
Christ eat and drink judgment on themselves.
Examining
the Self
Why
should you examine yourself before you partake of the Lord’s Supper? Well,
according to the Apostle Paul who wrote under the inspiration of the Holy
Spirit, “those who eat and drink without discerning the body of Christ eat and
drink judgment on themselves.” Thus, partaking of the Lord’s Supper can be a
dangerous thing. Therefore, examining the self, prior to eating and drinking is
a wise and prudent, an intelligent thing to do.
Now,
we’re not here dealing with those who don’t have or did have but have lost
mental faculties. We’ll leave that one for another day. But for now, does
anyone like exams? There are exams at school. Exams at university. My wife and
I had to sit an exam before becoming Australian citizens.
There’re
all kinds of exams all over the place. There’re even exams in church! There is
an exam to become a Communicant member! And, related to being a Communicant
member, there is an exam before Communion! “Everyone ought to examine
themselves before they eat of the bread and drink from the cup.”
Yes,
school exams, “uni” exams, citizenship exams, church exams, but here we see a self-exam.
You’d think that the self-exam would be the easiest one to cheat on, what, with
no one but yourself doing the grading, unlike other types of exams.
“How
did you go in the self-exam?” “Yeah, I gave myself 10 out of 10, full marks!”
But wait a minute. Are you aware that God knows your every thought? Are you
aware that God knows what motivates you? What you feel? How you feel about
others? Yes, for what it’s worth, E.Q. or E.I. comes to mind, you know, self-awareness,
self-regulation, self-motivation, empathy, and social skills.
In
other words, are you in a good position to partake of the Lord’s Supper with
the Lord and with the Lord’s people? Are you sure? Some people let the bread
and the cup pass them by because they think or feel that things are not quite
right between them and the Lord or maybe one or some of the Lord’s people or both.
That’s fine. That’s normal for a Christian.
However,
that’s different to thinking that you are simple unworthy to partake of the Lord’s Supper because you are a
sinner. Yes, get right with the Lord
and/or your brother or sister in Christ before partaking, but keep in mind that
the Lord’s Supper is the Gospel in visual form. It is a picture of Christ
shedding His blood to redeem sinners.
Therefore,
the Lord wants to dine with you. He requests that you attend His table. He
wants to spiritually nourish you, to strengthen your spirit. He wants you to
know that your sins have been forgiven because of what He did for you. He
offered His body as a perfect sacrifice to God’s justice for you to propitiate
God’s wrath, and He shed His blood to expiate your sins, to cleanse you of all
your iniquities.
Therefore,
examining the self includes and engages the mind and the heart. “Do I know what
I’m doing here at the Lord’s Table? Do I feel the love of God? Do I love the
Lord, and do I love His people? Do I love God with all my heart, with all my
soul, and with all my mind, and do I love my neighbour as myself? Yes, do I
love myself?”
You
are to love your neighbour as yourself, which certainly includes loving fellow
Christians as yourself. What is it about loving yourself that you don’t
understand? Do you think that God wants you to hate yourself? Is that it?
In
the old hymn, O for a Closer Walk with God, we find the words,
Return, O Holy Dove,
return,
Sweet Messenger of rest!
I hate the sins that made
Thee mourn
And drove Thee from my
breast.
The
author was feeling as if God the Holy Spirit had deserted him. But notice that
he didn’t hate himself for it. No, it’s, “I hate the sins that made Thee
mourn”! It’s his sins that he hates, not self. In other words, he loves God so
much that he knows no rest until he knows that God has forgiven his sins.
Partaking
of the Lord’s Supper is about knowing that God has forgiven all your sins. That
is why you are to examine yourself before partaking. Are you a sinner? Yes!
Have you sought God’s forgiveness for your sins? Yes! Have you sought, if
possible, to make amends with those you’ve sinned against, even fellow
Christians? Yes! Then come and sup with the Lord at His Supper.
Examining
the Sacrament
The
Lord’s Supper, also known as the Eucharist, and Communion, is a sign and it is a seal of God’s Covenant with you. Jesus said, “This cup is the new
covenant in my blood; do this, whenever you drink it, in remembrance
of me.” The new covenant is what we call the Covenant of Grace, which is
another name for the Gospel. Therefore, the Supper is a sign and seal of the
Gospel to you the self-examined believer.
Some
prefer to use the word Ordinance instead of Sacrament to describe the Lord’s
Supper. However, the word sacrament comes
from the Latin meaning sacred as in holy, which in turns derives from a New
Testament Greek word which has to do with “swearing allegiance”.
Most
Christians know that theologians debate the meaning of the Supper. Does the
bread and wine change its physical properties? In what way is the Lord present
at His Table? Are the bread and cup merely symbols? We don’t have much time to
go into any of that. But suffice to say that by sign we mean that the Lord’s Supper is a picture of something,
something that is real.
A
painting of a mountain-lake hanging on your wall is not the real thing. It is a
depiction of the real thing. It is a sign of the real thing. However, the
Lord’s Supper is not just only a sign. It is also a seal. In the old days
letters were sealed with wax, often with the imprint of a signet ring. If you
were to look up the word signet you’d
see that it contains the word sign.
It is a sign and a seal.
The
wax seal on a letter let you know who the letter was from. In our case, the
Lord’s Supper is from the Lord. It has His seal on it. And all this means is
that you are to discern who the Lord’s Supper is from. You are to discern the
Lord’s body in it.
As
the Westminster Confession of Faith. chapter 27, para 2 puts it, “There is in
every sacrament a spiritual relation, or sacramental union, between the sign
and the thing signified…” Have you got it? The bread and the wine do not take
on the physical properties of Christ’s flesh and blood. But rather the bread
and wine during the sacrament are spiritually united to Christ. By partaking of
the elements, we feed on Christ by faith.
It’s
as Paul says earlier in chapter ten, “Is not the cup of thanksgiving for which
we give thanks a participation in the blood of Christ? And is not the bread
that we break a participation in the body of Christ?” 1 Corinthians 10:16.
Therefore,
treating the Lord’s Supper merely as an ordinary meal and not as a sacrament is
akin to seeing Jesus physically, but denying His divinity! Think about it: We
do not worship Jesus’s humanity. We worship Him because He is divine, i.e., God
in the flesh. But to worship His divinity we must see the connection between
His humanity and His divinity. Therefore, likewise, to discern the body of
Christ in the sacrament, we must see the connection between the bread and the
wine and the God/Man Jesus Christ. Otherwise, it’s just another, albeit
strange, but ordinary meal to you.
What
happens if you don’t discern the Lord’s body? “For those who eat and drink
without discerning the body of Christ eat and drink judgment on themselves.”
In
other words, if you don’t judge yourself first, God will judge you! The Lord’s
Supper is God swearing His allegiance to you, and, in turn, it is you swearing
your allegiance to the Lord. That’s what we mean by a seal. He is
sealing His covenant agreement with you, and you with Him. You are swearing
allegiance to Christ.
The
sign is the bread and the cup, and the seal is you partaking of it knowing that
your sins have been forgiven because of Christ’s sacrificed body and shed
blood. It’s the Gospel visualized. “For whenever you eat this bread and drink
this cup, you proclaim the Lord’s death until He comes.”
So,
we see then, that you eating and drinking at the Lord’s Table is a visual
proclamation of the Lord’s death on the cross, with everything that the message
of cross entails. Therefore, is it any wonder that the Lord through His Apostle
wants you to get it right? You are to examine yourself. And you are to discern
the body of Christ while you’re eating and drinking at the Lord’s Table.
As
we begin to wrap things up, where exactly does Judas Iscariot fit into all of
this? Someone once said that when you read the Bible you ought to keep three
things in mind: context, context, and context.
The
context of what we’re looking at is found where Paul, by way of introduction to
his instructions about the Lord’s Supper, says in 1 Corinthians 11:23, “For I
received from the Lord what I also passed on to you: The Lord Jesus,
on the night he was betrayed…” Betrayed by whom? Judas. Therefore, don’t
be a Judas! Learn to discern.
What
did Judas do at the Lord’s Table, when the Lord transformed Old Testament or
Old Covenant Passover into New Testament or New Covenant Lord’s Supper? He
dipped his hand into the bowl at the same time as Jesus. And Jesus said, “The
one who has dipped his hand in the bowl with Me will betray Me. The Son of Man
will go just as it is written about Him. But woe to the man who betrays the Son
of Man! It would be better for him if he had not been born” Matthew 26:23.
Therefore,
you must treat the meal as a sacred meal. It is a sacrament. It is not about
betrayal. It is about allegiance.
Judas
partook of the Lord’s Supper not discerning the body of Christ therein.
Therefore, Judas ate and drank judgement upon himself. Examine yourself before
you eat of the bread and drink from the cup, lest you too betray the Lord.
Like
Judas, some of the Corinthians were failing to discern the body of Christ in
the Supper. However, we don’t necessarily need to write off everyone who fails
to see Christ’s body in the Supper as non-Christian. It says in Hebrews, “My
son, do not make light of the Lord’s discipline, and do not lose heart when he
rebukes you, because the Lord disciplines the one he loves, and he chastens
everyone he accepts as son” Hebrews 12:5b-6.
If
we keep in mind that chastening and punishing, like repentance and remorse, are
similar but not identical, then it will help us to understand the difference
between God rebuking you and rejecting you. As the Apostle says, “Nevertheless,
when we are judged in this way by the Lord, we are being disciplined so
that we will not be finally condemned with the world” 1 Corinthians 11:32.
Judas
felt remorse for what he did, but apparently he didn’t have true repentance.
Therefore, intelligent tears of repentance trump emotional feelings of remorse.
It’s the difference between discerning the body of Christ beforehand, and
eating and drinking judgment on yourself. Judas ate and drank in an unworthy
manner. Therefore, he was guilty of sinning against the body and blood of the
Lord, and he, therefore, paid the price, the ultimate price.
Some
of the Corinthians were in danger of doing the same. That is why Paul wrote his
Lord’s Supper directive. You Corinthian? Don’t be a Judas! Don’t betray the
Lord. Don’t betray the Lord at the very place where He is showing you a sign
and giving you a seal.
Conclusion
The
bread and the cup are set apart from a common to a holy use for the duration of
the sacrament. At the beginning they are bread and wine. In the middle they are
bread and wine. And at the end they are still bread and wine. However, during
the sacrament the bread and wine are being used in a spiritual exercise whereby
by faith we are able to have our faith nourished and strengthened by spiritually
feeding on the body and the blood of Christ.
Judas
ignored the sign and the seal of the Covenant in the Lord’s Supper, He trampled
the blood of the covenant beneath his feet and paid the price. Judas clearly
was a covenant-breaker. Unlike those Disciples who had fallen asleep later on
the night Jesus was betrayed and then arrested, Judas went on to sleep the
sleep of death. He ate and drank judgment on himself.
We
started off by talking about I.Q.s and E.Q.s, Intellectual Quotients and
Emotional Quotients or intelligence. What do you now think about the Lord’s Supper? Or how do you now feel about the Lord’s Supper? Do you
have an intelligent or an emotional understanding of the Supper? Preferably you
have both, i.e., a mind and a heart understanding. Examine yourself. Don’t be a
Judas.
