And they said to one another, “Did not our heart burn within us while He talked with us on the road, and while He opened the Scriptures to us?”
And they told about the things that had happened on the road, and how He was known to them in the breaking of bread.
Luke 24:30
When we remember Him at the celebration of the covenant meal, all these elements are present, for we are immediately present to Him who loved us, died for us, has risen, and is ascended to the place of ultimate glory.
This Is My Body; This Is My Blood
The early church never argued as to the nature of the bread and wine to which they gathered every week. All of the writings of the first century consistently refer to the meal as partaking of the body and blood of Christ. They did so as the great mystery of the faith, not to be explained but accepted by adoring faith. Trouble began when, centuries later, the theologians attempted to explain the mystery in terms of the science of the day. They took the dancing butterfly from the air and pinned it to a board and dissected it.
In considering the words of Jesus, “This is My body...this is My blood,” I do not approach it as a scientist to dissect and explain but as a believer looking at the great mystery to be embraced by faith.
The word “symbol” comes from a Greek word meaning to throw together with.2 It is taking something in the material world and throwing it together with abstract ideas that would take volumes to explain. When the invisible truth has been thrown together with the physical object, to see the object is to connect with the invisible associated ideas.
We have taken a piece of metal shaped as a circle with a precious stone set in it and thrown it together with love, commitment, and faithfulness. When the young man gives the engagement ring to his wife-to-be, she is overwhelmed with joy; when she wears it to work, the whole office knows without a word being said that a commitment has been given and received. Will anyone stand up and hush the excitement in the office and say, “Now please understand this is only a symbol; it means nothing; it is only a piece of metal twisted into a circle; please do not get excited...”? No! It meant nothing in the store along with a hundred other rings; but it was set aside to become an uncommon ring that conveyed the unique love and commitment of one man to one woman. In taking it and wearing it, the young lady received and responded to that love and commitment and forever changed her life. That kind of symbol does not only announce what it symbolizes but actually conveys what it symbolizes.
Another illustration that may help you understand is the dollar bill in your billfold. I often hold up a dollar bill and ask the congregation what is in my hand. Someone invariably will say, “A dollar,” and my response is “How can that be? A dollar is a weight of precious metal. This is a piece of paper!” There is a little confusion, and I go on: “This is a piece of paper; but if a person says it is a piece of paper he is a fool, for it is a dollar!” I go on to explain that this is, indeed, a piece of paper that is the symbol of a dollar, a symbol that has been invested with the power to convey what it symbolizes. By due authority, it has been set aside from all other pieces of paper to become an uncommon piece of paper that actually becomes to us and conveys the value of precious metal.
My illustrations only point to what a symbol is, and they are far from what we are talking about. The man invests a ring with power to communicate and convey his love commitment to his wife-to-be, and the U.S. government authorizes a piece of paper to convey a dollar’s value. But what we are speaking of here is infinitely more than that. We are speaking of the Lord Jesus’ conveying Himself to us through the bread and the wine, at which point all illustrations fail to the point of becoming worthless. They can only point down the road that disappears into the mist of mystery, where the brain submits and the spirit worships.
Hear how the New Testament believers understood it:
The cup of blessing which we bless, is it not the communion of the blood of Christ? The bread which we break, is it not the communion of the body of Christ?
1 Corinthians 10:16
The key word in the text is “communion,” and it means fellowship, a participation in, a uniting together in partnership.3 He is saying that in eating and drinking the believer participates in, unites with, and has a fellowship and communion in the blood of Christ. We take into ourselves the body and blood of Christ. The next verse points to their unity as the body of Christ, in that eating the bread they eat the Bread who is Christ.
Here is the great mystery of the new covenant. The bread and the wine are set aside from all other pieces of bread and cups of wine; the Spirit makes them uncommon elements by which He will actually convey to us what they symbolize—the body and blood of Christ. A believer eats of the bread and drinks of the wine and, in so doing, partakes of Christ; he or she participates in the greatest mystery of the ages—that in the new covenant He is in us and we are in Him.
Our problems arise when we try to say what happens and how it happens. To the early church the question did not arise and, therefore, neither did the answer. We eat and are fed with Him who is the covenant.
Jesus made reference to this in very strong language that caused many to walk away from Him, but in it all He never addressed how it could be.
And Jesus said to them, “I am the bread of life. He who comes to Me shall never hunger, and he who believes in Me shall never thirst.
I am the living bread which came down from heaven. If anyone eats of this bread, he will live forever; and the bread that I shall give is My flesh, which I shall give for the life of the world.”
Then Jesus said to them, “Most assuredly, I say to you, unless you eat the flesh of the Son of Man and drink His blood, you have no life in you. Whoever eats My flesh and drinks My blood has eternal life, and I will raise him up at the last day. For My flesh is food indeed, and My blood is drink indeed. He who eats My flesh and drinks My blood abides in Me, and I in him. As the living Father sent Me, and I live because of the Father, so he who feeds on Me will live because of Me.
John 6:35,51,53-37
The Greek word translated “eat” here is a very physical word; it means to chew the food in the mouth.4 It could never be used to describe a mental or spiritual eating only; it is speaking of putting something in the mouth and chewing and swallowing it.
The bread and wine of the covenant meal, through the Spirit, are conveying symbols through which grace comes to us and are therefore called “the means of grace.” That He is in us and we are in Him is made real not only to our minds but also to our physical bodies. The bread and wine are God’s delivery system whereby all the blessings of the covenant come to us. Healing for our entire person is to be found here.
The glorified Lord calls us to the covenant feast; the food He serves us is His body and blood, conveying to us all that He has purchased for us in covenant. Faith reaches out and partakes of the mystery, saying amen, and is nourished with everlasting life.
My Body, Given for You
In saying, “This is My body given for you,” Jesus gave Himself to us with absolute finality. We may give others our best wishes and tell them that we are thinking of them, giving them our thoughts; we may give others service and deeply care; we may give great sums of money but in it all hold back the gift of our true self. But when we willingly present our bodies in total gift, a self-donation to another, we have come to the ultimate concept of covenant, the total gift of one’s entire self to the other; then and only then is union complete.
One’s body is the last to be given over to another; it is not given without first one’s will, thoughts, mind, and soul being totally given. Giving one’s body means the surrender of one’s intimacy, all of the private and most secret things about ourselves; He surrendered the secret of Himself when He gave us His body. He did this ungrudgingly, saying, “With desire I have desired to eat....” He longed for the moment when He would share Himself with us in the gift of His body. In the covenant meal, this surrender of the secret of Himself continues.
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br /> The Emmaus meal hints at this in the words He was know to them in the breaking of bread (Luke 24:35). The words “made known to them” are used throughout the Scripture to describe the intimate, personal knowing of husband and wife. They are never used to describe academic and impersonal knowing about a person.
This must never be thought of as being limited to His sufferings and death. All His life, He had given His body; for in the totality of His being, He is the Word of the Father’s love. He is the incarnation of the joy and delight of God over His people; He is the Word of peace, the Word of life, and the Word of compassion. In giving His body, He thus gave all that He was; and in the covenant meal, He continues to give the totality of His self to us.
This Is My Blood
“The new covenant in My blood” is the validating authority that the covenant union is achieved. To drink is to share in that covenant and all its terms. As we drink down the mystery of His blood, we are celebrating that He as us has accomplished the putting away of our sins and that they will never be remembered again. We declare that the law is written on our hearts and etched in our minds and that we intimately and personally know Him, that He is our God and we are joined to His people. It means that we are partaking of and participating in the life of the ascended Christ. We drink of the life that has passed through death and overcome it, never to die again.
In Scotland some centuries ago, believers were bitterly persecuted by the English. The believers would meet in the mountain crags of the Scottish Highlands and, there, have their secret meetings, which included the Communion, the covenant meal. Many times, these secret gatherings would take place in the night or in the early dawn hours. On one occasion when they were meeting for the covenant meal, the English Redcoats had heard that a meeting was to take place but they did not know where. They watched for anyone moving in the predawn darkness to arrest and torture to find the names of the believers and the place where they met. A young teenage girl was slipping through the mist on her way to the Communion service when the soldiers surrounded her, demanding she tell them where she was going. Being well-educated in the new covenant and what she was about to do, she answered, “My elder Brother has died, and I am going to hear the reading of the will and claim my share in the inheritance!” The ignorant soldiers had no idea that she was referring to the Communion service and patted her head, gave her a quarter, and sent her on her way.
Chapter 12: Sin Is Remembered No More
We have seen that Jesus lived and died as our representative; therefore, the men and women who believe are participators and sharers in all that He suffered, endured, and earned. On the cross, He stood as us not in some monstrous pretend game but in awful, agonizing reality. We were truly there in Him and He as us received pardon, justification, and resurrection. These blessings of covenant were given to Him first as our representative and then to us as we are united with Him and participate with Him through the Spirit.
When God raised Him from the dead, He declared that the penalty for our sins, which Jesus had freely taken, had been paid in full; our sentence placed on Him was fulfilled. Jesus risen from the dead is Jesus no longer carrying our sins that took Him to death. He as our representative was forgiven of all our transgressions; our guilt no longer weighs Him down, and He has been freed from all necessity of further punishment for them. If Jesus is alive from the dead, we are forgiven of all our sin!
The instant a sinner is united to Christ, he or she becomes identified with Him in His representative forgiveness. Forgiveness and all the blessings of covenant do not come to us merely through Christ but in Him. We do not receive them only because He earned them but by our being united together with Him and in Him, members of His body, made dynamically one with Him by the Spirit.
He as our representative returns to the Father with His blood of the new covenant, and the Father declares to Him and to us, the ones He represents, that the slate has been wiped clean: "For I will forgive their iniquity, and their sin I will remember no more" (Jeremiah 31:34). In Him, humanity for the first time is declared not guilty and free from punishment.
The First of New Covenant Blessings
There is no other religion on earth that announces the forgiveness of all our sins. It is the complete forgiveness of our sin that is the foundation of everything else that is ours in the covenant. Before we could enter the new covenant, the judgment hanging over our heads since Eden had to be totally and forever removed, as well as the curse of the broken law. Free from sin and the curse, we are now in Christ the candidates for the blessings He delights to richly pour on us.
In instituting the covenant meal, Jesus spoke of the remission or forgiveness of sin; for when that is accomplished, the covenant blessings are released upon us in abundance.
Then He took the cup, and gave thanks, and gave it to them, saying, “Drink from it, all of you. For this is My blood of the new covenant, which is shed for many for the remission of sins.”
Matthew 26:27,28
We have seen the blessings Jeremiah announced that would come in the new covenant, but let us read them again with the necessity of forgiveness in mind.
“But this is the covenant that I will make with the house of Israel after those days, says the LORD: I will put My law in their minds, and write it on their hearts; and I will be their God, and they shall be My people. No more shall every man teach his neighbor, and every man his brother, saying, ‘Know the LORD,’ for they all shall know Me, from the least of them to the greatest of them, says the LORD...”
Jeremiah 31:33,34
All this will take place, he says, because sin, the foundation problem, has been dealt with: “...For I will forgive their iniquity, and their sin I will remember no more” (Jeremiah 31:34).
Dealing with the sin question is basic to the covenant; it is the foundation upon which all the promises are based. Jesus has put away sin, and we now stand forgiven and only then are we ...blessed...with every spiritual blessing in the heavenly places in Christ (Ephesians 1:3).
Our assurance that our sins have been forgiven and we have been accepted by God is the first of covenant blessings and the most important in our experience. Without this, we cannot imagine any of the other blessings. This is the kindergarten of the new covenant, yet for multitudes of church members such a joy has not been even sighted.
Knowing this truth is the beginning of the victory in spiritual warfare, for while we are under the condemnation of our sin we are paralyzed before the powers of darkness by our own sense of unworthiness. Until we know the oath of God that He removes sin from us through the covenant blood of Jesus, when we are confronted by our sin, we cannot believe that we are welcome in the presence of God; we may even believe that He has cast us aside. Believing we are unworthy, we are unable to pray, we have no expectancy of being heard, we cannot believe that the promises of God are for us. We cringe under the sense of guilt, and our hands are paralyzed to take the blessings that are ours under covenant. If we begin to feel any sense of acceptance, we are hurled to the ground by Satan, “the accuser of the brethren”; and instead of resisting him with the truth, we agree with him!
I was raised in a poor family in England. I was born at the end of the Depression, and my introduction to life on the planet was the Second World War. In those days, we knew real poverty.
The English were very aware of class and where everyone belonged in society. The right family, the right school, and wearing the right school tie after graduation, joining the right club, made way for a person not only in the position one held in a job but also the restaurants one could eat in and the pursuits one could follow. There was no sign outside the door of a restaurant to say we couldn’t enter; it was simply understood that every Englishman had his place according to his wealth and position, and only gentlemen of the higher class could enter.
All of my aunts were servants in the mansions of the rich and were congratulated for having found such good employment. There was no thought of advancement; being servants
was their place in society.
When I said that I wanted to drive a car when I was older, my mother looked horrified: “No, mate. That’s not for the likes of us, you’ll ’ave a bicycle just like your father.” It seemed to me growing up that the places I wanted to go, the things I wanted to do, and the restaurants I wanted to eat in were “not for the likes of us.” I was reared in an atmosphere of shame, of the belief that our status in life made us unworthy of anything but the leftovers.
I wrestled with the voice of my mother inside my head for a number of years after I left home and was in ministry. I found that in my mind the English class system spilled over into my walk with God. The favor of God, the rich gifts of the Spirit, and answers to prayer fell in my mind into the category of “not for the likes of us.” The “likes of me” was not worthy to be so blessed. The basic problem was that I did not truly see with the eyes of my spirit that my sin had been taken away and I was no longer doomed to dwell in the slums of heaven! It took a major revelation of the Spirit that swept my mind clean, followed by much renewing and renovation of my thought patterns, that brought me to see myself as totally forgiven, accepted, and, in Christ, a member of the aristocracy of heaven. All covenant blessings were for the likes of me, for I was in Christ.
Power of the Blood Covenant: Uncover the Secret Strength of God's Eternal Oath Page 17