Passover commemorates the emancipation of the Israelites from slavery in ancient Egypt. Israel had been in Egypt in bondage for over 400 years. They had been oppressed and enslaved. God delivered them by the leadership of Moses through a series of plagues. You can read about them in the opening chapters of the book of Exodus. Finally Pharaoh was so distraught at what was happening in his nation, that he let them go. The final plague was the death of the firstborn, the angel of death came and killed the firstborn in every family, the firstborn of man and animal unless you had sacrificed a lamb and splattered the blood on the doorposts and the side beams. Then the angel of death passed by. The end of the Old Testament is the death of Jesus.
Luke chapter 22: “No man takes My life from Me. I lay it down by Myself.” You might assume that the Jewish leaders took the life of Jesus. You might assume that the Romans took the life of Jesus. And while the Jewish leaders wanted Him dead and the Romans executed Him, no one took His life from Him. It was a willing sacrifice in complete submission to and agreement with God. God chose Jesus to be the final Passover Lamb, to pay the penalty for sin for all who would believe. But before Jesus dies, He is going to meet with His Apostles and He is going to end something and begin something. Luke 22:14 “And when the hour had come, He reclined at the table and His Apostles with Him, and He said to them, ‘I have earnestly desired to eat this Passover with you before I suffer, for I say to you, I shall never again eat it until it is fulfilled in the Kingdom of God.’ And when He had taken a cup and given thanks, He said, ‘Take this and share it among yourselves, for I say to you, I will not drink of the fruit of the vine from now on until the Kingdom of God comes.’ And when He had taken some bread and given thanks, He broke it and gave it to them, saying, ‘This is My body which is given for you, do this in remembrance of Me.’ And in the same way He took the cup after they had eaten, saying, ‘This cup which is poured out for you is the New Covenant in My blood.’”
What can we say about the 'New Covenant in My blood'? The New Covenant is everything. Now we know that covenants were ratified by blood. For example: Exodus 24: “'We will obey...we will obey...we will obey,' and they sealed their covenant by being splattered with blood."- The disciples knew that blood, death, of an animal, an innocent substitute, was part of the sealing of a covenant. They also knew, Leviticus 17, the life of the flesh is in the blood, that atonement came through blood through death. They understood that sacrifice by death, shedding of blood, was part of accomplishing forgiveness of sin. Jesus says, “This now is not going to be a symbolic sacrifice part of the Old Testament, this is the real sacrifice, this is the blood not of the Old Covenant but the New Covenant. To put it another way, this evening Jesus brings to an end the Old Covenant and the Old Testament and inaugurates the New Covenant and the New Testament. He goes from Passover, the last legitimate Passover, to the Lord’s table, or communion. He ends millennia of a celebration looking back to God’s delivering power in Egypt and inaugurates a new memorial, looking back to the cross and the deliverance far greater accomplished there. The new covenant is God's pledge to forgive the sins of his people and to put his laws within us and to write them on our hearts, and to be our God and to make us his people.
I refute transubstantiation(the turning of bread into the literal physical body of Christ) and also consubstantiation (the turning of bread into His spiritual body). It’s not either. It’s simply a remembrance. It’s simply a symbol. Bread, earthly, fragile speaks of His body, earthly, fragile, subject to death as bread has the same declining properties of all things in the physical world. Christ took on human form, became subject to death. The bread reminds us that His body is given for you. In the Passover, the bread was called the bread of affliction, it commemorated their affliction in Egypt. It is no longer the bread of affliction. He’s going to transform it. “From now on, this is not going to remind you of the affliction from which God delivered the people out of Egypt, this is My body which is given for you.” This becomes the Holy Communion.
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