Understanding The
Bread of Passover
Jamie McNab
Good morning to
those of you in
Really, this time
of the year is my favorite time. You see
the daffodils appearing and the crocuses.
The trees’ new leaves appear.
Things start to be nice and bright and lush and green. Springtime is, to me at least, a very
pleasant, much-awaited time. Of course,
it is also the time that brings us into the beginning of God’s sacred
calendar. It brings us into the Passover
season and, believe it or not, Passover is just over three weeks away.
At this time of
the year, at least in my experience, often we can become very distracted
people, very, very busy with many tasks taking up our time and our
attention. I have noticed this over many
years in the Church. At the moment, for
example, we have our attention perhaps on
It would be very
easy in the next three weeks or so to be so busy
that the time would speed right by and all of a sudden we realize, “It’s
Passover tonight! Oh dear! I had better get ready.” Oops.
We turn up at Passover without perhaps doing very much in the way of
preparation, and yet, really, the Passover evening is
far too important, much too
important, to just casually, carelessly turn up on it, and expect to obtain the
benefits that God has in mind for us.
Mr. Armstrong, in
his Passover letter, the one that perhaps many of us use when we actually take
the Passover service at home, says:
“There should be
no visiting, talking, laughing, joking or conversation. You are meeting on the most solemn and
serious occasion of the entire year.”
We are meeting, he
says, on the most solemn and serious occasion of the entire year, and that is
why it is important that we don’t just roll up on Passover night rather
lack-luster, coming at it almost with no preparation, no real thought because
you have been so busy with the previous few weeks.
When I first came
into the Truth, into the
Very specially, I
remember, just how much the minister told us, “Make sure you are there. If you have to make your journey two or three
hours early, do so. Under no circumstances miss Passover night! Get a taxi.
Make sure you are in town, at the hall, hours early, if need be. Do not allow any opportunity of missing out
on the Passover.” All that was to try to
make sure that we all thoroughly understood just how important the Passover
would be to us and to make sure that we were there ready, prepared, and in the
right spiritual attitude to fully benefit from the Passover
So today I would
like to take some time to focus our minds on the upcoming Passover, hopefully
to help us to prepare ourselves to take the Passover in a fully worthy
manner. If you are not eligible to take
Passover, perhaps not yet baptized, keep listening anyway because I will try to
cover at least one other aspect that you still need to know about. So my purpose, as I say, is to just focus our
minds and help us prepare for the Passover, because, believe me, the next three
weeks will speed along and if we don’t start thinking about this now and
preparing now, we may well miss the opportunity.
In looking at the
Passover, this morning, (or for us, this afternoon) I particularly want to dwell
on the meaning of the bread that we take at Passover - the bread. So I have entitled this message,
“Understanding the Bread of Passover.”
Let’s take our
Bibles now and open to Exodus, chapter 11.
Just to put some background together as to where we are, we’ll begin in
verse 1: And the LORD said to Moses,
"I will bring yet one more plague on Pharaoh and on
4 ¶ Then Moses said,
"Thus says the LORD: `About
7 `But against none of the children of
I look around this
room. I was the firstborn in my
family. Maureen was the firstborn in her
family, and Nathan was the first and only born in our family, so that means
that, for example, if we were a typical Egyptian family, this whole room would
be dead after this particular plague. So
this thing is going to be an extraordinary, destructive plague upon
Now on to chapter
12, as we move now into the actual Passover ceremony itself. 1 Now
the LORD spoke to Moses and Aaron in the
2 "This month shall be your beginning of
months; it shall be the first month of the year to you. So
we know that that is month number one because it tells us so, and the month was
named Abib and later named Nisan, and it is about this time of the year. According to the calculated calendar that
most of the Churches of God follow, including, I imagine, most of ourselves,
this year that date would be April 3rd , so that is just twelve days from now that we come to the
beginning of the new Hebrew calendar year.
3 "Speak to all the congregation of
At this time of
the year, I don’t know what it is like where you live, but I drove along the
highway yesterday coming back from the office, and in the fields I could see
newborn lambs. Very cute, very pretty, bouncing and gamboling about. It is a beautiful time of the year,
springtime. When I see the young, new
lambs, it does tend to make me think, at this time of the year, obviously, of
the Passover lamb.
4 `And if the household is too small for the
lamb, let him and his neighbor next to his house take it according to the
number of the persons; according to each man's need you shall make your count
for the lamb So the families may share a lamb if there
is only a small number per family. 5
`Your lamb shall be without blemish... We know why - because the lamb, as we know,
represents Jesus Christ, our Savior.
... a male of the first year.
You may take it from the sheep or from the goats.
6 `Now you shall keep it until the fourteenth
day of the same (first)
month. Then the whole assembly of the congregation of
7 `And they shall take some of the blood and
put it on the two doorposts and on the lintel of the houses where they eat it. Of
course, they were in their houses, in their homes, eating the lamb. They were to take the blood, first of all,
and splash it, painting it, up on the door posts and over the top of the door,
which, I have got to say, is a rather strange way of doing things. You would hardly class this with what appears
to be some religious ceremony. You take a young lamb and you slit its
throat. You collect the blood and then
you splash it over the door posts - very strange.
8 `Then they shall eat the flesh on that night;
roasted in fire, with unleavened bread and with bitter herbs they shall eat it. So
there are two things that they have to do.
They have to kill the lamb and splash the blood around, and then they
don’t just throw the body of the lamb into a near-by waste bin. The lamb’s body has to be separately attended
to. It has to be roasted and then they
have to eat a meal and consume the lamb’s body.
So there are two aspects here which I do want to dwell on as we go forward. There is the blood which is used for one
purpose and there is the lamb’s body which serves another purpose.
9 `Do not eat it (the body) raw (thankfully, it
doesn’t say to eat the lamb’s body raw!), nor boiled at all with water, but roasted
in fire--its head with its legs and its entrails.10 `You shall let none of it remain until
morning, and what remains of it until morning you shall burn with fire.11 `And thus you shall eat it: with a belt on
your waist, your sandals on your feet, and your staff in your hand. So you
shall eat it in haste. It is the LORD'S Passover. The Eternal’s Passover. It says to eat it in haste, and some people
will think, “That means that they are about to leave immediately. That is why they are all dressed up.” But, in fact, the Hebrew there more properly
means, “eat it in trepidation, eat it in fear, eat it in grave concern.” I think that if you or I had been there, we
might well do that, because you know there is coming on the entirety of
If you were the
firstborn Israelite in a house, you might just wonder whether you have done
things as per instructions, because if you haven’t, you might well fear that
you will be slain too. Remember, I think
we will see a few weeks later, just how much the Israelites did not believe in their God. How they thought that He bought them into the
desert to slay them, time and time again.
How they murmured and doubted Him time and time again. I suspect that many of these people were
really quite nervous when they ate this meal.
Just suppose they hadn’t taken the right sort of lamb! Just suppose they hadn’t spread the blood far
enough around the door! Perhaps they
hadn’t roasted it all the way through! “If we have done it wrong, I’ll bet this Being
who speaks to Moses will slay me too!”
So I suspect that there was quite a bit of nervousness in the Israelite
camp that night!
12 `For I will pass through the
13 `Now the blood shall be a sign for you on the
houses where you are. And when I see the blood, I will pass over you; and the
plague shall not be on you to destroy you when I strike the
21 ¶ Then Moses called for
all the elders of Israel and said to them, "Pick out and take lambs for
yourselves according to your families, and kill the Passover lamb.22 "And you shall take a bunch of hyssop,
dip it in the blood that is in the basin, and strike the lintel and the two
doorposts with the blood that is in the
basin. And none of you shall go out of the door of his house until morning. So
they couldn’t leave the houses they were in until daybreak, until morning.
23 "For the LORD will pass through to
strike the Egyptians; and when He sees the blood on the lintel and on the two
doorposts, the LORD will pass over the door and not allow the destroyer to come
into your houses to strike you.24
"And you shall observe this thing as an ordinance for you and your
sons forever.
25 "It will come to pass when you come to
the land which the LORD will give you, just as He promised, that you shall keep
this service.26 "And it shall be,
when your children say to you, `What do you mean by this service?'27 "that you shall say, `It is the Passover
sacrifice of the LORD, who passed over the houses of the children of
Of course, that is
a very well-known story, a very interesting story that even the young kids in
the Church can understand. It must have
been an amazing night, which brought enormous grief and devastation to much of
At this stage, of
course, we know that they also ate the lamb’s body. Question - Was the lamb’s body of any
particular effect, or was it just the blood that was important to ancient
Turn now to
Matthew, chapter 26, and let’s see a New Testament fulfillment of the Passover
by Jesus Himself. 17 ¶ Now on the first day of the Feast (Feast is in italics in
the King James and New King James because the word isn’t there. It wasn’t the “Feast” of Unleavened
Bread. It was before that.) Now on the
first day of the Unleavened Bread the disciples came to Jesus, saying to Him,
"Where do You want us to prepare for You to eat the Passover?" That was the question they had. It was now springtime. It was the first month of the year. It was getting pretty close and the question
was, “Whereabouts are we going to get ready to eat the Passover, Jesus?”
18 And He said, "Go into the city to a
certain man, and say to him, `The Teacher says, "My time is at hand; I
will keep the Passover at your house with My disciples."' That is in red letters. Jesus said plainly, “I will keep the
Passover.” "19 So the disciples did as Jesus had directed
them; and they prepared the Passover.
They got it all ready for Jesus. 20
When evening had come, He sat down with the twelve. So Passover evening had now arrived. Jesus sits down with the twelve. 26 ¶
And as they were eating (the Passover), Jesus took bread,... Now we are about to see a transfer of the
symbols of Passover. This is the New
Testament version of the Passover. Same
time, same date, same meaning, but rather than just having a lamb’s body, and so
on, we now have some new symbols being introduced.
...Jesus took bread, blessed
and broke it, and gave it to the disciples and said, "Take, eat; this is
My body." Or this represents My body. So here is something new for us to think
about. Jesus, during the Passover
evening, breaks the bread. It would be a
rather large piece of bread, not all sliced up like our modern loaves of
bread. This was one big piece of bread,
and He breaks it up and says, “Eat of this broken bread. This represents My body.” Hmm.
What does that mean?
27 Then He took the cup (of wine), and gave thanks, and gave it to
them, saying, "Drink from it, all of you.28 "For this is My blood (or, this
represents My blood) of
the new covenant, which is shed for many for the remission of sins. So the red wine pictures, represents, Jesus’
blood of the New Covenant and His blood shed for many, for what? For the remission, or forgiveness, of our
sins.
So we have the
broken bread symbolizing Jesus’ body, but, as yet perhaps, no clear picture of
quite what that represents. If the wine
represents His blood, which is the blood of the covenant, a new covenant, that
has to do with the remission of sins. 29 "But I say to you, I will not drink of
this fruit of the vine from now on until that day when I drink it new with you
in My Father's kingdom." So
we have two different symbols, and just before we move on to the bread, let’s
just remind ourselves of the meaning of the wine, the blood, something we
probably do know fairly well, but it is well worth reminding ourselves.
Turn to Hebrews,
chapter 9: 11 But Christ came as High Priest of the good
things to come, with the greater and more perfect tabernacle not made with
hands, that is, not of this creation.
12 Not with the blood... So
here we start looking now at blood. This
is now where Paul’s attention is turning as he writes this letter. 12 Not with the blood of goats and calves
(That’s what you got from the Old Testament sacrifices.), but with His own blood He
entered the Most Holy Place once for all, having obtained eternal redemption. Was it for Himself? Well, no.
He obtained eternal redemption for us. That is what Jesus was doing when He took His
own blood into the
13 For (says Paul) if
the blood of bulls and goats and the ashes of a heifer, sprinkling the unclean,
sanctifies for the purifying of the flesh...
If there is any merit at
all in the blood of an animal, some ashes from a carcass......
14 how much more shall the blood of
Christ (pictured, remember, by the wine on Passover), who
through the eternal Spirit offered Himself without spot to God (just
like the lamb had no blemish), cleanse your conscience from dead works to
serve the living God? 15 ¶ And for this
reason He is the Mediator of the new covenant,... Exactly what Jesus just talked about
on the Passover night, the blood of the New Covenant, and for this reason, it
says, He is the Mediator of the New Covenant. ...by means of death (when He shed
His blood, of course, for the redemption of the transgressions
under the first covenant, that those who are called may receive the promise of
the eternal inheritance.
So we can see
linked in there, the death of Jesus, the blood of Jesus, the transgressions
being forgiven and us redeemed from them, the promise of eternal inheritance, all
tied into Jesus’ very valuable blood, brought in to the Most Holy Place. That was all tied up, of course, with
Passover. But it is important to realize
that the blood of Passover is a symbol of a very special New Covenant of which
Jesus Christ is Mediator.
Hebrews, chapter
10, 12 But
this Man (still talking of Jesus) , after He had offered one sacrifice for
sins forever, sat down at the right hand of God, 13 from that time waiting till His enemies are
made His footstool. 14 For by one offering
He has perfected forever those who are being sanctified. 15 But the Holy Spirit also witnesses to us; for
after He had said before, 16 "This
is the covenant that I will make with them after those days, says the LORD: I
will put My laws into their hearts, and in their minds I will write them,"
17 then He adds, "Their sins and
their lawless deeds I will remember no more." 18 Now where there is remission of these, there
is no longer an offering for sin.
So the New
Covenant referred to here is a covenant which brings about God writing His laws
in our heart and mind. It is no longer
going to be a struggle to keep God’s laws.
They will actually be part and parcel of our very thinking. That is part of the New Covenant, that God’s
laws are written in our hearts and, as it says here, that our sins are
remitted. 19 ¶ Therefore, brethren (That’s for you; that’s for me; we’re
brethren) , having boldness to enter the Holiest by the blood of Jesus
(The very thing that the Passover wine symbolizes),
20 by a new and living way which
He consecrated for us, through the veil, that is, His flesh,.....So we
should be boldly able, courageously, confidently able, to go right before God’s
very throne, into the very Holiest itself, because we have the blood of Jesus,
the blood of the New Covenant.
21 ... and having a High
Priest over the house of God,22 let us
draw near (to God) with
a true heart in full assurance of faith, having our hearts sprinkled from an
evil conscience and our bodies washed with pure water. So Jesus’ blood is extremely effective. The blood of the New Covenant is vitally
important and it would be a great shame, wouldn’t it, in a sense, to arrive at
Passover and have forgotten, really, or let it slip from our mind, the
importance of what the blood does represent.
Hebrews, chapter
13, 20
Now may the God of peace who brought up our Lord Jesus from the dead (after
He was the Passover lamb sacrifice), that great Shepherd of the sheep, through
the blood of the everlasting covenant,
21 make you complete in every good work to do
His will, working in you what is well pleasing in His sight, through Jesus
Christ, to whom be glory forever and ever. Amen. So, in looking there at verse 20, it is
through the blood of the everlasting covenant that God makes us complete in
every good work to do His will. Through
that blood, through the forgiveness, through the washing clean, that allows us
to boldly go into God’s very company and presence to receive from Him mercy and
help, through that blood of the everlasting covenant, that New Covenant, to
which we have been invited.
So there is no
question at all that the blood covenant pictured by Jesus’ shed blood, pictured
by the wine that we take at Passover, is extremely important. Generally speaking, I would say, that we are
all pretty familiar with that story. We
know about the blood of the lamb being splashed on the door posts which meant
safety from the death penalty, and, of course, we understand, reasonably well,
what that means for you and me.
But, of course, as
I said earlier, there is another part to the Passover. There was the body of the lamb which was
roasted, eaten, consumed, digested by ancient
So let’s now take
a closer look at the bread that we partake of at Passover time to see just
exactly what that does mean, so that we ensure that as we approach Passover and
take Passover, we do deeply appreciate what the whole
Passover ceremony means to us.
Let’s turn to
Psalms 105 and start in verse 26. This
Psalm really is an historical Psalm dealing with the events of the Exodus, of
28 He sent darkness, and made it dark; And they
did not rebel against His word.
29 He turned their waters into blood, And killed
their fish. I think that we recognize some of the other
plagues here.
30 Their land abounded with frogs, Even in the
chambers of their kings. I think that would be pretty unpleasant. Frogs are okay, sort of, and I used a cute
picture of a frog in a recent Bible Bulletin.
A few frogs here and there might be okay, but frogs in your bedroom,
frogs in the toilet, frogs in the kitchen, frogs under your feet, under the
blankets, frogs everywhere, frogs in the fridge. I think that’s too many frogs and ancient
31 He spoke, and there came swarms of flies, And
lice in all their territory. Well I guess that is probably
worse, come to think about it. 32 He
gave them hail for rain, And flaming fire in their land.
33 He struck their vines also, and their fig
trees, And splintered the trees of their territory.
Everything broken, wrecked, ruined.
There was really not much left. 34 He
spoke, and locusts came, Young locusts without number, And I guess with a pretty big appetite.
35 And ate up all the vegetation in their land,
And devoured the fruit of their ground. So really, this country was utterly
devastated. Plants gobbled up; trees
smashed, splintered and broken down; fire; hailstones; plagues of all sorts. Anything left, the locusts scoffed.
Verse 36, as we
read earlier, He also destroyed all the
firstborn in their land, The first of all their strength. So that pretty much put paid to
Now notice,
...And there was none feeble among His tribes. Among the tribes of
The word feeble
means “weak,” so weak as to cause you to stumble, and turn your ankle, and so
on. But here are a people where everybody
appears to be, frankly, healthy! Yet you
take two million people anywhere, in any city, any combination of towns,
anywhere across the
So here there is
something rather mysterious when you take ancient
Let’s turn to
Isaiah, chapter 53 and we will read the entire chapter. 1 ¶ Who has believed our report? And to whom
has the arm of the LORD been revealed?
2 For He (talking of Jesus, the Messiah)
shall grow up before Him as a tender plant, And as a root out of dry ground. He
has no form or comeliness; And when we see Him, There is no beauty (in
appearance) that we should desire Him. Jesus
looked, apparently, just like an ordinary Jew of the day, nothing special. He didn’t have beautiful
3 He is despised and rejected by men,...Nothing, frankly, has changed there! Even
today, Jesus is pretty much rejected by men and women. His name is most often used as just a swear
word today, so I guess nothing has changed. ...A Man of sorrows and
acquainted with grief. And we hid, as it were, our faces from Him; He was
despised, and we did not esteem Him.
That’s a pretty clear comment. 4 ¶ Surely (That means certainly,
definitely, for sure.) He
has borne our griefs And carried our sorrows; Which is an appalling
translation, obviously done by individuals who are, I’m sure, sincere, but
didn’t understand or grasp what God was trying to achieve.
“Surely He has
borne our griefs and carried our sorrows” is not
what it says in the Hebrew. I’ll give
you the Young’s Literal translation.
Young is the guy who did the Young’s Analytical Concordance, which is
similar to the Strong’s Concordance.
Young did another concordance which is pretty good as well. I prefer it slightly over the Strong’s. Young was a real scholar of the Hebrew and
Greek. His translation and his Bible
which he also translated, apart from doing a concordance, says, “Surely our sicknesses He hath borne and our pains He hath carried them.”
Also, I will give
you another translation, which is the Jay P. Green’s Interlinear. That is quite popular these days. It translates this verse as, “Surely He has
borne our sicknesses and our pains.”
Surely He has borne our sicknesses and our pains. So we’re not talking of grief and sorrow,
we’re talking of sickness and pain. The
word for “griefs”, for example, in the Hebrew is translated disease and
sickness nearly twenty times. That’s the
vast majority of times in the Bible it is translated as disease and sickness,
and that is actually what it means. And
“sorrows” is translated commonly as “pain,” so a more proper translation of
that verse, and it will be backed up by some other things that we will look at
later, shows that it is talking about how surely, definitely, Jesus Christ, the
Messiah, has borne, and that means borne away, taken away, carried off, our
sicknesses and He has carried, taken upon Himself, our pains.
Yet we esteemed Him stricken,
Smitten by God, and afflicted.
5 But He was wounded for our transgressions, He
was bruised for our iniquities; The chastisement for our peace... One version says “well-being.
...was upon Him, And by His stripes we are healed. By His stripes we are healed. We might ask the question, “When did this all
take place? When did Jesus Christ carry
off our sicknesses and our diseases and pains?
What stripes was it which brought about our healing?” We obviously know the answer, but it would be
good to remind us of these things. “By
His stripes,” or some versions say “by His wounds,” and the New American
Standard Bible says “by His scourging” we are healed. So Jesus did something to bring about our
healing. He gave His body up to be
scourged, wounded, beaten, and striped, that we might be healed. By His stripes we are healed.
6 All we like sheep have gone astray;...Amen to that, I would say. ... We have turned, every one, to his own
way;... No argument with
that. ... And the LORD has laid on Him
the iniquity of us all. I think
that we can all say, “Thank God He did!”
The LORD has laid on Jesus the iniquity of you and me and that is
something to be very, very grateful for as we approach Passover.
7 He was oppressed and He was afflicted, Yet He
opened not His mouth; He was led as a lamb to the slaughter, And as a sheep
before its shearers is silent, So He opened not His mouth. It was rather a lot for Jesus to pay the penalty that
you and I have earned by our sins and wayward way of life. We should never belittle the enormous
courage, endurance, and, frankly, just incredible compassion and love that
Jesus showed toward us, and, for that matter, His Father, too. It must have taken a huge amount for the
Father to give up His only Son, and we will see the scriptures on that shortly.
8 He was taken from prison (or confinement, or arrest) and
from judgment, And who will declare His generation? For He was cut off from the
land of the living;...That is almost incredible to perceive that Jesus
Christ, the Creator, Who made the universe and every living thing on it, was
Himself, after Eternity, cut off from being alive! How much did Jesus have to do, in a sense?
...For the transgressions of
My people He was stricken. 9 And they
made His grave with the wicked (with some robbers)--But with the rich at His death (He
was buried in the tomb of a rich man.), Because He had done no violence, Nor was
any deceit in His mouth. Pretty
high standards, aren’t they? 10 ¶
Yet it pleased the LORD to bruise Him; He has put Him to grief.... The Jay P. Green Interlinear says, “It
pleased God to make Him sick,” or suffer pain and agony. You think, “Why! How could it please God to bruise and beat
upon His own Son? How could God take any
pleasure in the violent, horrible, painful, agonizing ten to twelve hours
leading up to Jesus’ death? How could
that please God?”
The answer is that
it pleases God because it means He is then able to heal you and me, again and
again and again and again. It opens up
healing for all of us. That is what gave
God the great pleasure. He could see
that this horrific event that Jesus was going to go through would purchase for
us not only forgiveness of our sins, but it meant that God could heal over and
over and over again, as many as would come to Him for healing. That is what the great pleasure was, and Jesus
Himself was satisfied to present His body to be horrendously beaten and
scourged to make that healing available.
It is an incredible and impressive message
When You make His soul an
offering for sin, He shall see His seed, He shall prolong His days, And the
pleasure of the LORD shall prosper in His hand. 11 He shall see the labor of His soul, and be
satisfied. By His knowledge My righteous Servant shall justify many, For He
shall bear their iniquities. And again, thank God for
that! 12 Therefore I will divide Him a portion with
the great, And He shall divide the spoil with the strong, Because He poured out
His soul unto death,...And Jesus did pour His soul out unto death. His blood seeped out for a number of hours,
bit by bit, as He grew weaker and weaker, and finally that spear jammed into
His side and the last bit of His life seeped out into the ground and He poured
out His soul unto death.
...And He was numbered with
the transgressors
(utterly disgraceful), And He bore the sin of many, And made
intercession for the transgressors (for you and me, because we are the
transgressors). So it is an absolutely marvelous event, incredible,
unbelievable in a sense, to be able to understand just what Jesus went through,
what the Father was willing to allow Him to go through, for you and me. A fantastic thing!
Now turn to
Matthew, chapter 8, just in case there is any doubts about some of those words
that I translated, or Young translated, or Jay P. Green translated. We will see how God translates that passage. 14 ¶ Now when Jesus had come into Peter's
house, He saw his wife's mother lying sick with a fever. That’s Peter’s mother-in-law.
15 So He touched her hand, and the fever
left her. And she arose and served them.16
When evening had come,..
This probably was a Sabbath day, so people waited until sunset. ...
they brought to Him many who were demon-possessed. And He cast out the spirits
with a word, and healed all who were sick..., In fact, that is what Jesus always did; He always healed all, every sickness, every disease, no
exceptions. He healed all who were sick 17 ... that it might be fulfilled which was
spoken by Isaiah the prophet, saying...: And this is the inspired translation, shall
we say, of Isaiah 53, inspired by the Holy Spirit to Matthew, as recorded here:
..."He
Himself took our infirmities And bore our sicknesses."
So it doesn’t
refer to griefs and sorrows, although, of course, there is grief and sorrow
when you are sick. But the actual
meaning of the words, as
clearly identified here by
Matthew is, “He Himself,” talking of Jesus, “took our infirmities, bore our
sicknesses, carried off our diseases.”
That is what Jesus did when He healed all, but the way He did it was to
become a Passover sacrifice and pay the penalty not just for our spiritual
sins, but also for our physical sins and transgressions.
If we turn to I
Peter, chapter 2, we can see this emphasized yet again. It is not just one scripture being privately
interpreted, but it is throughout the Bible.
21 For to this you were called,
because Christ also suffered for us (and that is what we are talking
about, rather a lot), leaving us an example, that you should follow His steps:22 "Who committed no sin, Nor was deceit (guile)
found in His mouth";...
That would be a pretty good example if we could follow that
consistently. 23 who, when He was reviled, did not revile in
return (and again that is also something we could think about doing);
when He suffered, He did not threaten, but committed Himself to Him who judges
righteously; (namely, the Father)
24 who Himself bore our sins in
His own body on the tree, that we, having died to sins, might live for
righteousness----by whose stripes you were healed.
So there are two
things we can see there. We had died to
sins and been forgiven, and should now live righteously because Jesus bore our
sins on the tree, and “by whose stripes (or wounds, my margin says) you were
healed.” Of course, that is exactly what
we read in Isaiah 53:5, and my margin actually refers back to that. It talks about “by whose stripes,” or wounds,
or scourging, or “by whose bruise” as one translation has it - “you were
healed.” The word for “healed” you might
think perhaps just means healing your mind from anguish or anxiety, but the
word “healed” there is the word used commonly throughout the entire New
Testament for physical healing of sickness and disease. It is used, I believe, 26 times in the New
Testament, and it means “physical healing,” “physical healing,” “physical
healing,” “physical healing.”
So there are two
aspects, as I keep reiterating in a sense, to the Passover, to Jesus’
sacrifice. There is the blood AND the
body, there is the bread AND the wine, and, as you see here, there is
forgiveness AND there is healing. Let’s
turn to Psalms 103, yet another reminder, 1 Bless
the LORD, O my soul; And all that is within me, bless His holy name! Really, when we understand the Passover,
truly and deeply, this is what we have to be saying, because when we understand
the truth of God’s Word on this subject, everything God has done and God is
doing, then, of course, this is how you respond. 2
Bless the LORD, O my soul, And forget not all His benefits: 3 Who forgives all your iniquities, Who heals
all your diseases, Notice that
forgiveness and diseases being healed go side-by-side. They are linked together, and the reason, as
we were seeing and as we will continue to see, is because Jesus purchased our
forgiveness and He purchased our healing at the same
time.
Let’s turn now to
I Corinthians, chapter 11, which brings many of these aspects all
together. Paul writes, 23 ¶
For I received from the Lord...
So this is actual, direct revelation; this is not something that Paul
received from other preachers in the church.
This is something, he says, “I received from the Lord.” One would imagine, if Jesus Christ actually
gave this as direct revelation, then Jesus understood it to be rather
important. 23 ¶ For I received from the Lord that which I also delivered to you:
that the Lord Jesus on the same night in which He was betrayed took
bread;24 and when He had given thanks,
He broke it (He broke the bread.) and
said, "Take, eat; this is My body which is broken for you; do this in
remembrance of Me.”
Of course, we read
these verses on the Passover evening. It
is pretty clear; the broken bread symbolizes Jesus’ broken body. “This is my Body which is broken for you; do
this in remembrance of Me. Do it year by
year to remember My broken Body. This
bread symbolizes My broken Body.”
25 In the same manner He also took the cup (of wine, that would be) after
supper, saying, "This cup is the new covenant in My blood. This do, as
often as you drink it, in remembrance of Me." So every year, on the fourteenth day of Abib,
we take the broken bread, drink a little sip of red wine to picture Jesus’
broken body and to picture the New Covenant.
26 For as often as you eat this
bread and drink this cup, you proclaim the Lord's death till He comes. “As often” doesn’t mean as often as
we feel like it. If you are a Catholic,
you would take Communion potentially every day if you wanted to. In some churches it is once a month. I think for the Adventists it is four times a
year, every quarter. As often as you
“show the Lord’s death” is when you show the Lord’s Death —on the day He died, once a year, as a
memorial.
It starts to get
rather important when we pick up the message of the next few verses. 27 Therefore whoever eats this bread (That’s
one thing you could do) or drinks this cup of the Lord (Another
thing you could do) in an unworthy manner will be guilty of the body and blood of the Lord. I wonder what that would mean? To take the bread in an unworthy manner, or
to take the wine in an unworthy manner, means we will be guilty of the body and
blood of the Lord? What is Paul getting
at here?
28 But....(In connection with that rather cautionary note) ...
let a man examine himself, and so (having examined himself) let
him eat of the bread and drink of the cup. So there is something here that we are told
we have to do, before we take the bread and the cup of
wine. It says, “Let a man examine
himself...” Some versions say, “test
himself.” Some say, “prove himself.”
“But let a man (or woman for that matter) examine
himself,...” He should look at himself,
consider himself, consider his life, his conduct, his attitude, his behavior,
his direction and then, having done that, then “let him eat of that bread and drink of that
cup.” In other words, you and I dare not
just roll up on Passover night, sit down, and take the emblems without some
preparation. We are required to examine
ourselves beforehand.
29 For he who eats and drinks in an unworthy
manner eats and drinks judgment to himself, not discerning the Lord's
body. Not understanding, really, what it is all about. 30 For
this reason many are weak and sick among you, and many sleep (Margin -
“are dead”). So Paul is bringing out
something just a trifle worrying here.
People who take the bread and wine in an unworthy manner, not
understanding or discerning what they are doing, he says about them:
“Look. For this reason (because they
haven’t examined themselves, because they haven’t understood) many - (it doesn’t say a few, it says many) of
you (that he is writing to) are weak and sick.
You are not healthy; you are not strong.
You are physically frail; your health is shot and lousy. In fact, many are dead!”
Now, there is
nothing is wrong with being dead, if you have lived a long and healthy life and
reached the end of your life. You go to
sleep in the grave and await the Resurrection.
But Paul was clearly disturbed that many were dead who obviously he
thought ought
not to be dead. I have to take it here that he is talking of
people who have died prematurely, who have been weak and sick and died sick,
full of disease. He is saying,
“Look. This should not be the case. If you understood what you are doing when you
take Passover, if you understood the emblems properly, if you discerned the
Lord’s body, then you wouldn’t be weak, sickly, and dying prematurely. You have got a problem.” Any of us, who take Passover without fully
grasping, are made to suffer penalties that we need not suffer, because part of
the focus of Passover, particularly the bread, is because it has to do with our
physical healing.
31 For if we would judge ourselves, we would not
be judged.32 But when we are judged (by God), we are chastened by the Lord,
that we may not be condemned with the world. It is preferable for you and me to judge
ourselves. When you start to examine
yourself, and I start to examine myself so that I fully understand what God is
doing for me, so that I understand His laws, so that I understand how I should
be living, so that I properly appreciate His sacrifice, His shed blood and His
broken body, and I start to consider my understanding, whether I am really
showing by my actions that I appreciate it, then if I see things that I am
doing which are wrong, it is better for me to take some action and put them
right. It is not better for me to ignore
the problems that I see in my life and wait for God to come along a bit later
and sort me out.
Ideally, if He is
opening up our minds to understand His Word and we can compare our lives to
what His word says, and we find out, “Oops.
There is a discrepancy there. God
says this and I am doing that. Oh! I had better get moving and try and overcome
that problem and start to sort it out....”
Then, of course, if we do that, God doesn’t have to come along and judge
us a little bit later. If we would judge
ourselves (not, of course, judging each other), we wouldn’t need to fear God’s
greater judgment.
Judgment can apply
spiritually. If you see in your life
that you are guilty of certain things that God’s Word speaks against - a
typical problem would be, for example, gossip - then it is up to you and me to
deal with that in our lives. Judging
ourselves could be physical too. Our
bodies are the temple of the Holy Spirit.
We are supposed to look after our body.
If we want to trample all over the laws of health, getting three hours
of sleep at night, drinking twelve pints of beer at a time, consuming a
gigantic chocolate gateau, and carrying a few hundred pounds of extra weight,
well, we are not judging ourselves, are we?
Most of us have a reasonable knowledge of the laws of health, perhaps
not perfect in every area, but we know enough to know that carrying a ton of
weight that we shouldn’t have, is not good for us.
If our only
exercise is walking to the fridge and walking back to our easy chair that is
not much in the way of exercise. If
sleep is something you don’t find time for, and I hold my hand up there
somewhat, then we are not judging ourselves.
But if we see these things in our lives and start to deal with them,
then we aren’t going to worry too much about God having to intervene for our
best interests a bit later.
So we can see,
looking through 1 Corinthians 11, that there is a great deal there, but the
important thing to recognize is that if we don’t understand the full range of
Passover, its benefits spiritually and physically, then, like in Corinth,
people like you and me can be sick, ill and even die prematurely because we
don’t see what God has done for us and for our physical healing. We don’t have the faith in it; we don’t take
advantage of it and we don’t therefore get the benefits.
I have a little
booklet here, one of the old black and white booklets by Mr. Armstrong. It’s a thin booklet; 1952 is the date of
it. It is “How Often Should We Partake
of the Lord’s Supper?” I will just read
one or two short sentences. Mr.
Armstrong says:
“To take the bread
and wine while not truly accepting the body and blood of Christ with our whole
heart would be taking it unworthily and to one’s damnation. Let us observe it worthily!”
In other words,
Mr. Armstrong is saying that we should fully understand and accept the whole
meaning of Passover when we take it. We
dare not be casual about Passover, take it for granted, say “Ho hum. Oh. Here it comes again. It’s Passover tonight, I had better get
ready.”
For the most part,
most of us, I would think, understand the blood part, Jesus’ death paying the
penalty for our spiritual sins and making it possible for us to enjoy eternal
life. We’re fairly comfortable with
that, but that is not all. We can’t
ignore what Jesus went through physically on our behalf, before He was actually
nailed to the cross and died. I don’t actually
like reading the passages about Jesus’ arrest and what took place in the few
hours afterward because I find it rather uncomfortable. Mentally, it’s not easy to picture the events
and see them and deal with what took place.
It’s not pleasant, is it?
Jesus was
blindfolded; at times He was spat at.
This is the Creator. He was
humble, compassionate. He did good
everywhere He went, He was perfect. He was punched by soldiers, He was stripped
to the waist and scourged until His body was black and blue and flesh falling
off of His bones. For many hours He
suffered terrible torture, the way you wouldn’t treat even an animal. Before being stripped and nailed to that
tree, He had many hours and hours of suffering, and then He was hung in the
tree, naked, humiliated and shamed for more hours. Then finally He was speared to death.
Why? Why did Jesus go through all of that horrific
physical punishment? Why was He
beaten? Why did He accept that
scourging? To pay the penalty for our
spiritual sins just required Jesus’ death.
That could be accomplished just like you would kill a lamb. The little lamb which was chosen in ancient
You have to
recognize that this was God’s idea. I
don’t think, even though we are carnal, that you or I could ever have actually asked for Jesus to have done that. No matter how carnal we are, we could never
have thought of something as bad
as that. So God demonstrates, really, in an incredible
way, how much He cares, not only for the forgiveness of our sins, but how much
He cares for our physical well-being.
That is why He did it. What more
could God do? How unthankful we would be
if we treated Jesus’ broken body as of little consequence. “I’ll take advantage of the blood and Jesus’
death. That’s fine. But I’m not too concerned about His broken
body.”
Really? Would we treat His physical pain and the
tribulation He went through as irrelevant, of no consequence and to be
ignored? Sometimes the answer is, “Well
… it sure looks that way,” because some people set new speed records as they
race off to the doctors at the first sign of illness, trying to get the
surgeon’s knife or some pharmaceutical product into our bodies as quick as we
can, when there is a Healing God who has paid an enormous price
for our healing.
Let’s turn to Romans,
chapter 8, to just remind us of how much God is willing to do for us. Really, there is no boundary on it. 31 ¶ What then shall we say to these things?
If God is for us, who can be against us? That’s pretty true. If God is for us, would you be worried about
what Saddam was saying, and all these military men? If God was for you, if He was for me, who
could possibly be against us. Who could
do anything if God is for us?
32 He who did not spare His own Son, but delivered Him up for us all, how shall He not with Him also freely give us all things? God has already given the most precious, valuable possession He ever had. </