Mark chapter 14, and in this section of scripture
we've been looking at memorials. Mary is presented to us as a
memorial to faith, to love, to forgiveness, and to the fact that God's children,
through believing, see the glory of God. As the Lord Jesus said
to Mary at the tomb of Lazarus, did I not say to you that if
you would believe, you would see the glory of God? And Mary is a memorial to faith
and faithfulness. Judas is a memorial, as we saw
last week, to how far people can go in religion and how they
can become so familiar with the things of God and nothing has
changed in their heart. It is a memorial to us. And today, at the end of this
passage, In Mark 14, 22 to 26, we have the Lord Jesus instituting
another memorial, the Last Supper, the Passover. He who is the Passover. So let's just read from Mark
14, 12 down to 26. Now on the first day of unleavened
bread, when they killed the Passover lamb, his disciples said to him,
Where do you want us to go and prepare that you may eat the
Passover? And he sent out two of his disciples
and said to them, Go into the city, and a man will meet you
carrying a pitcher of water. Follow him. Wherever he goes
in, say to the master of the house, the teacher says, where
is the guest room in which I made the Passover with my disciples? Then he will show you a large
upper room, furnished and prepared. There make ready for us. So his
disciples went out and came into the city, and found it just as
he had said to them, and they prepared the Passover. In the
evening he came with the twelve. Now as they sat and ate, Jesus
said, Assuredly I say to you, one of you who eats with me will
betray me. And they began to be sorrowful
and say to him one by one, is it I? And another said, is it
I? And he answered and said to them,
it is one of the twelve who dips with me in the dish. The son
of man indeed goes as it is written of him, but woe to that man by
whom the son of man is betrayed. It would have been good for that
man if he had never been born. And as they were eating, Jesus
took bread, blessed it, and broke it, and gave it to them and said,
Take, eat, this is my body. And then he took the cup, and
when he had given thanks, he gave it to them, and they all
drank from it. And he said to them, this is my blood of the
new covenant, which is shed for many. Assuredly I say to you,
I will no longer drink of the fruit of the vine until that
day when I drink it new in the kingdom of God. And when they
had sung a hymn, they went out to the Mount of Olives. There is so much in this passage
of scripture and we may well, in the providence of the Lord,
not get through all of it today. But there are some things here
which are so clear and so good for us that it's good to ponder
them afresh. The first thing is that Jesus
Christ of Nazareth is God. It just needs to be stated again
and again and again, Jesus Christ of Nazareth is God. He is fully
God. He is fully God in human flesh. In fact, in Mark's Gospel, the
question is asked again and again, who is this man? Who can this
be? Who is this man who raises the
dead, who feeds multitudes from just a few fish and a few loaves
of bread? Who is this man who calms the
raging storm? Who is this man who speaks and
it happens? Again and again, God speaks and
it is. is so important, isn't it, that
we actually come to this Word of God knowing that it is a Word
from God. It has all of His power, all
of His authority, and it is essential for us that we come to this Word
expecting to see the glory of God in it. You see, the people who want
to deny Christianity, deny the deity of the Lord Jesus, deny
the inspiration of the Word, would say that he'd pre-arranged
this event. Well, in a sense, he did. Before
the foundation of the world, he pre-arranged this event. But
it wasn't a human, clever thing that happened that day. It's
just another sign that Jesus is God, and when He speaks, it
is always. And as Simon's been taking us
through the New Covenant, it is just wonderful to contemplate
what God says about us, His children. It is just amazing, like Mary
at the tomb of Lazarus, If we believe, we will see the glory
of God. And so these two disciples go
into town, and there they meet this man, exactly as the Lord
Jesus had said they would. And he takes them to a place
where there is a room that is furnished and prepared. It's another sign, isn't it,
that what seem to be to us seemingly insignificant things are all
significant in the eyes of God. He does rule all things. He does speak and it happens. And He speaks about what would
seem like a relatively insignificant thing a man carrying a pitcher
of water. But when they get there, in verse
16, there's just a wonderful word from our God, isn't it?
So the disciples went out, came into the city, and found it just
as he had said to them. How often in our Christian life
when we've struggled and battled and all sorts of things have
happened to us, do we actually find that it is just as He has
said to us. All of the things that happen
in our lives will be just according to His purposes and we will see
them in time. In eternity we will see them
with amazing clarity. We will see the Lord's hand on
every tiny event of our lives. And we will see that it's the
hand of omnipotent love, the hand of omniscient love, that
He sees all things, that He knows all things, that He works all
things. So Jesus is God and His Word
is the Word of God. The other thing that's evident
in these passages is that there is a call on the people of God
to worship God, and despite what people think naturally, God's
worship requires for God's people to be in a place ordained by
God himself. You see, Jesus could not have
the Passover meal in Nazareth. He could not have the Passover
meal in Bethany. Why couldn't he have the Passover
meal in those places? Because his word said that you
can't. You shall sacrifice the Passover,
according to Deuteronomy 6.2, in the place where the Lord chooses
to establish His name. You cannot worship God in spirit
and in truth unless you worship God in a place where He has chosen
to establish His name." Let that sink in. They are not my words,
they are the words of God. You cannot worship God unless
you worship Him in the place where He has chosen to establish
His name. And that's why He's in Jerusalem. He has left Bethany for the last
time and he's in Jerusalem. The worship of God requires a
place and the worship of God requires personal sacrifice. God will not accept our leftovers. He deserves the best. He deserves the efforts of men
to worship Him in His place, in His way, according to His
Word. Just read Malachi chapter 1 to
see how God feels when people bring Him the leftovers, the
leftovers of our lives. Or his worship is something that
we can take or leave. Not according to God's Word can
he be worshipped like that. And so the Lord Jesus, knowing
what's going to happen, again as you go through this passage,
here it is, just the night of his betrayal. And the Lord Jesus
is remarkable in that all of his thoughts are other-centred. Jesus talks and acts for the
glory of his Father. and he brings words of comfort
to his disciples. Here they are going to ask that
question, is it I, is it I? Here they are going to be shocked
in the next few hours by what happens as Judas who sits there
with them pretending to be sincere in his religion, pretending to
be righteous, As Judas sits there as one of them, but in his heart
he's betraying them, the Lord wants them to know, and He wants
us to know, that despite the circumstances around us, He is
sovereignly in control. He controls all things. According to Matthew's Gospel,
Judas was already betraying Him. He had betrayed Him, as we saw
earlier, but in Matthew 26 it says, He is betraying Him. Right now, as He sat there, He
is betraying God. And He even asked the question,
like all of the others, Rabbi, in Matthew's Gospel, is it I
Jesus, in this passage before us, has a solemn, solemn word
in verse 21. The Son of Man indeed goes as
it is written of Him. But woe to that man by whom the
Son of Man is betrayed. It would have been good for that
man if he had never been born. Psalm 41 verse 9 promises from
God that he who ate my bread has lifted up his heel against
me. And he's described in verse 9 as even my own familiar friend
whom I trusted has lifted up his heel against me. As we saw last week, Judas is
in the scriptures as a memorial to us of how far people can go
in religion and yet be hypocrites in their hearts. They can keep up an appearance
of sincerity, an appearance of religion and not be God's child. It is good while we live on this
earth to ask ourselves that question, is it I? See, faith in the Lord Jesus
is neither a proud presumption nor is it despair. The assurance
of faith is neither a fleshly familiarity with God, nor is
it a slavish fear. There is a balance in the scriptures. We hear from many people, and
we want to loudly proclaim, once saved, always saved. But that can come with a carnal
word. from our own hearts rather than
a word from God. And we hear that fatalism which
is so aggravating and so offensive where people say, if I'm one
of the elect, I'll be saved and God's going to do it. I'll just
live as I want now and wait for God to do what He must do. We want to acknowledge the absolute
sovereignty of God in all of salvation. But God hedges his
people in. We have promises. Scriptures
are full of promises to remind us that God's activities are
sound and can be trusted, and salvation is of the Lord. And we see around us, we see
before us, sinners who are kept by the power of the grace of
God, assuring us again and again that God will keep His own. His grace will not be thwarted
by the sins of man. And we have a warning in Judas.
And in a warning from the people that we meet, the people that
we experience with sadness, who turn away apostates and continue
to turn from the gospel, continue to hear and reject. And they warn us from being sinfully
presumptuous. As we saw last week, God promises
that He is both sovereign in salvation and human beings are
fully responsible for their sins and they dare not blame anyone
else. Read James and see that God tempts
no one. In Romans 6.23, the wages of
sin What you have earned is death,
but the gift of God is eternal life through Jesus Christ our
Lord. And then we come in verse 22
to this remarkable passage of scripture. And as they were eating,
Jesus took the bread, blessed it, and broke it, and gave it
to them, and said, take, eat. This is my body. Now we know where the religious
world takes all of these things so often, don't they? The Roman
Catholics believe that it's really bread, really the body of Jesus. But He's talking figuratively,
our Lord. He's talking in the pictures
that come to us as He, our Passover, talks about His sacrifice for
us. We turn back in our Bibles, you
have it on your notes there, to Exodus chapter 12. And let's
just look at some of the elements of the Passover. We don't have
time to look at it closely, but if you actually read this passage
of scripture in light of who the Lord Jesus is and what's
happened, and what happens as He, according to 1 Corinthians,
is our Passover, as He was sacrificed for us, we'll see picture after
picture of the wonder of redemption. They were to begin a new life
in verse 1, verse 2 of chapter 12. It's the beginning of the
months. Passover marks the beginning
of new things. They were to take a lamb, verse
5, 12 months old, without blemish, a male. And then in verse 6,
they were actually to take it into their house. They were to
keep it. So it was to have firstly to
be set apart from other lambs and it was to be personally your
lamb for four days. You were to take this unblemished
lamb and you were to keep it. And then that lamb was to be
roasted in the fire, verse 8, with unleavened bread and with
bitter herbs they shall eat it. This lamb was a picture in its
roasting of the fire of divine wrath against sin. And it was
to be consumed, verse 10, completely. And what was left over was to
be burnt with the fire. It was completely consumed. It
is, verse 11, the Lord's Passover. The Lord's Passover is a judgment. In verse 12, He will pass through
the land of Egypt on that night and will strike the firstborn
in the land of Egypt, both man and beast. And against all of
the gods of Egypt, I will execute judgment. I am the Lord." So
in the plagues in Egypt we have God demonstrating that He is
God and the gods of Egypt are absolutely nothing. And the final
god in the Egyptian pantheon was Pharaoh himself. And so God
strikes all the gods of the Egyptians and then strikes Pharaoh. And it's God's just judgment. Then in verse 13, we have a remarkable
picture of substitution and redemption by blood. Now the blood shall
be assigned for you on the houses where you are. The blood had
to be applied. The lamb had to be eaten. And
then God says, When I see the blood, I will pass over you. When God sees the blood... See, Simon's been talking about
this eternal covenant. It's the covenant between God
the Father, God the Holy Spirit, and God the Son. It's when God
sees the Son, the blood of His Son, applied. He passes over. And the plague
shall not be on you to destroy you when I strike the land of
Egypt." God holds this world now, according to Romans 1, in
judgment. The wrath The wrath of God is
being revealed right now in this world. The wrath of God is being
revealed as God gives people over, as He lets them go their
own way. Isaac and I were downtown and
it's just amazing this morning all the activities that go on
in Nauru. You can do just about anything
you like. You can do all sorts of sports.
You can go down here next door and watch the dogs go running
around and you can get your dog out there and groom it and pet
it and play with it. You can do all sorts of things.
You can go to 40-something different churches within half an hour's
drive of here. You can do a bucket load of things.
You can go out in the river. You can go to the beach. We need
to see that when God withholds the blood of His Son. God is
acting in judgment and wrath against this world right now. He gives them over. That is judgment. Allowing people to go their own
way is judgment of God. May God not let you go your own
way. Verse 14, This day shall be a
memorial and it will be an everlasting ordinance. We are remembering it here today,
are we not? It's an everlasting ordinance
because it was an ordinance that pictured the Lord Jesus and salvation
in Him. The destroyer, verse 23, will
not come into your houses to strike you. And in verse 27,
at the end of verse 27, the whole purpose of Passover. So the people bowed their heads
and worshipped. Passover is about the worship
of God. And for those like the Egyptians,
and Egypt signifies throughout the scripture as this world and
all its power and all of its possessions, ultimately all of
it serves God's people. Thus they plundered the Egyptians
as God moved the hearts of that nation to give their gold and
their silver and their fine materials to God's children. Verse 38 is
one that I'm really fond of. But not only did the people of
Israel go out that day, but a mixed multitude went up with them. It's a picture of what God had
promised Abraham in Genesis 12, that through him through the
one that's in him, through the Lord Jesus, all the nations on
the earth will be blessed. Verse 41 is a great picture again
of the absolute sovereignty and the precision of our God. Just look how precise he is. He told Abraham that he'd be
down there for 430 years. What does it say? on that very same day. God's slaves are now called the
armies of the Lord. And it's a solemn, verse 42,
a solemn observance. We are to give pause to think
about what God is doing in this world. in saving out of judgment,
in saving injustice out of judgment which is just. But no foreigners
shall eat it, verse 43, but there is a way for them to come and
eat. They'll be circumcised. They must bear the sign of the
covenant. There'll be one law, verse 49,
for the native born and the stranger who dwells among you. Thus all
the children of Israel did, verse 50, as the Lord commanded Moses
and Aaron, so they did. And it came to pass on that very
same day, the Lord brought the children of Israel out of the
land of Egypt according to their armies. And so there are many
things that we need to see. The first one, of course, is
that for the people of Israel it's about substitution. As you
walked out of your house that morning, that house that was
protected by the blood of a spotless lamb, As you walked out and you
saw your eldest son, you knew that your son was alive. While your Egyptian neighbours
were burying their son, your son was alive because of substitution. Your
son was alive because a lamb had died. As you took your cattle
out that morning, and your sheep out that morning, and your donkeys
out that morning, and you looked at your herd, you knew that they
who were burying cattle and sheep all around you, just imagine
what it is like for every household in Nowra to be burying the firstborn
son. For cattle and flocks, the firstborn,
thousands, tens of thousands of them, dead, killed by God,
and you protected safe in your house, sheltering under
the blood of an innocent lamb. Is that not a picture of us in
this world? As we shelter under the blood
of an innocent lamb. As the wrath of God is being
revealed, we shelter under a substitute. It's a picture of deliverance. They went from slavery to worship. They went from bondage to freedom. They went from fear in their
bondage to being called the armies of the Lord. There's a picture of judgment. There's a judgment of sin in
the Passover. In his body he bore the wrath. That lamb bore in a sense the
wrath of God as he passed over those houses and then destroyed
in the houses of the Egyptians. There's a judgment of all the
gods. of this world, there is judgment
in the Passover. He took the cup. When he had
given thanks, he gave it to them and they all drank from it. And he said to them, this is
the blood of the new covenant which is shared for many. The Passover is a declaration
of particular redemption. It's one of the most significant
doctrines that separates us from many other people. And here are
two words in verse 24 but make it really clear that the idea
of universal redemption is a blasphemous idea and it is not supported
by the Word of God. The word for there means on behalf
of and the word many means many. The blood of Jesus was not shed
for all people. The Egyptians were not even told
about this destroying angel. They were told nothing about
the first Passover. The Passover was for the people
of Israel and it was applied to them. By faith, it says, Moses
kept the Passover. By faith the people of Israel
trusted God because He was their God. This blood was shed on behalf
of many. It was not shed on behalf of
all. It's precious blood. It will
not be wasted, not a single drop of the blood of the Lord Jesus
is shed in vain ever. We must stand opposed to those
who want to take from the glory of God, to take from the deity
of the Lord Jesus, to take from the worship of God, by proclaiming
that he tried to do something and he failed. Was Israel rescued
out of Egypt? There was deliverance, wasn't
there? Was there deliverance in the midst of judgment? There
was. So the Passover was to be kept
as an everlasting memorial. The Passover looks back, looks
back to what God had done to rescue His people as the judgment
of God was absorbed by the death of a lamb. And the Passover looks
forward. It marks a new beginning When
the people of Israel finally, after 40 years of wandering,
get to cross over the Jordan, then on the desert plains outside
Jericho, they observed the Passover. And the day after the Passover,
they no longer had manna. They ate some of the produce
of the land. It marks a new beginning. Passover
for us marks new birth and a new beginning. The Lord's Supper
that we participate in each week, it looks back to what Jesus has
done, fulfilling promises, absorbing the wrath of God, a spotless
lamb who had worked out perfect righteousness before God. And
it looks forward. Just read it there in verse 25. Assuredly I say to you, I will
no longer drink of the fruit of the vine until that day when
I drink it new in the kingdom of God. He's talking about that
marriage supper of the lamb. new beginnings. He'll drink it
anew and God's children will drink it anew. And we come back to the statement
in verse 16 again and again that these men made. Have we found
it just as he has said to us? Have we found in our Passover,
sacrificed for us? Have we found deliverance? Have
we seen the judgment of God and seen it averted from us? Have
we experienced something of what those Israelites experienced
that night in Egypt? When in all the houses and the
barns around them they heard the wailing of mothers who had
lost their eldest son. They heard the wailing of people
who saw their cattle and animals destroyed. From the house of
Pharaoh to the smallest house of the slave in Egypt, there
was death. In the houses of God's people,
there was life, because a lamb had been slain for us. Have we
found it just as he said to us that it would be? I have, and
I trust that you keep going back to our Passover has been sacrificed
for us. And we find it just as he had
said. In Luke 22, 15, the Lord said that with fervent
desire, almost says with passionate passion, I have desire to eat
this Passover with you before I suffer. See the Lord approached
this with a love for his bride. He went to that cross with the
joy set before him. He went to that cross knowing
that Isaiah 53 was right, that he will see the suffering of
his soul. He will be satisfied. As you shelter under the Passover,
as you shelter under our Passover, do you find that He is satisfied
with you? Are you satisfied with Him? Have you found it just as He
said it would be? Let's pray.