Meaning & History of the Lord's Supper

The Lord's Supper as a Neglected Ordinance in Baptist Life

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I remember very clearly when I was baptized. I was seven years of age and people told me later that all they could see was the top of my head. So I don't think, I think I would have been all right in there.

I'm not sure, but it was Bible Baptist Church in Charlemontown, Pennsylvania, and they said that pretty much all they could see was that. And I do remember that we sang, Up From the Grave He Arose. It's a good baptism song.

But what's interesting, and I had not thought about it literally until today. I'm going to move that over there. I don't remember the first time I partook at the Lord's table. I remember the baptism, but I do not remember the first time I partook at the Lord's table.

And what it reflects is there was not, in my more fundamentalist background, much of an emphasis upon the Lord's Supper. Anybody else from a background like that? Anybody would say, yeah, it was pretty much okay.

Not many of you. Not many of you. That's interesting. In most Baptist churches, non-reformed in the United States, the Lord's Supper is celebrated once per quarter on a Sunday night at the end of the service.

And so that would be, you know, four times per year, sometimes made to sync up with some type of holiday celebration for Christmas, sometimes with some candles and stuff like that for the Christmas service, whatever it might be.

But in general, the Lord's Supper was just that one time per quarter when you were not going to beat the Methodists to tasty freeze. Dairy Queen? Does that work better? He's dating himself over and over again up there, isn't he?

Poor man. Yes. It was not a central aspect of worship. How did we get there? How did we get there? Because when you think about, we're going to be looking in Matthew chapter 26, if you want to turn there, we will get there.

But.

The Early Church, Persecution, and the Centrality of Communion

When you think about the Lord's Supper historically, that is not how the Lord's Supper has been viewed by Christians from the beginning. In the early church, even during the period of persecution, remember the church begins to encounter official Roman persecution as early as the 6th decade of the 1st century.

There is often on sporadic imperial persecution of the Christian church, really kicking off toward the end of the 1st century. You've certainly got Nero's persecution in the 7th decade, but especially in the 90s, you start getting more imperial persecution across the empire.

It's always spotty. It's not all the way around. It can be very severe in certain places for a number of years. And it's not until the 250s that you get empire-wide persecution everywhere, from the middle 250s into the peace of the church in AD 313.

So you've got about 60 years of very bad the worst persecution right there at the end of that period, when then you have the conversion of Constantine, the peace of the church in 313. Which by the way is not when the Roman empire technically becomes a Christian empire, if you could ever really use that term.

That happens in the 380s under Theodosius. So during that time period, during the persecution, you would have individuals who would literally risk their lives just to go to church. You've heard the stories about using the fish as a symbol of where the meeting place was going to be and how Christians would hook up with one another.

And yet it was still dangerous. And just as we have many believers in the world today that face the same type of situation where you might have people gathering together with you, if you don't know everyone, there might be people there who are there to spy out on you and to turn you into the Roman authorities.

And there were many, many, many martyrs that were made across the Roman empire during those centuries. And that's happening in the church even to this day in many places. And yet there was this incredible desire for Christian fellowship, which included very importantly the partaking of the Lord's Supper.

That symbol of fellowship and unity and people were willing to risk their lives. Now, it is important to know that, for example, if you were too sick to attend, they would take the elements to you. But keep something in mind.

How many here would say that you at some point in your life have been part of the Roman Catholic Church? Okay, that's a whole lot more than the fundamentalists were. And so you know that in Roman Catholicism today, the elements of not what's called the Lord's Supper, but of course the Eucharistic sacrifice of the Mass are considered sacred in the doctrine of transubstantiation.

The idea is that the the very body, soul, blood, and divinity of Jesus is not just represented in those elements, but there is a miracle that takes place called transubstantiation, which changes the elements.

Not the accidents, which is the outward appearance, but the inward essence of the substance. Technically, it's an Aristotelian distinction. The substance is changed in the body, soul, blood, and divinity of Jesus, while the accidents remain the same.

It still looks like wine, still tastes like wine, still looks like bread, still tastes like bread. But it isn't. What makes it what it is, its substance has been changed. Now, that was not the doctrine of the early church.

Oh, the people in the early church did believe that Jesus was present with them. But you want to know how you can prove that the early church did not have the doctrine of transubstantiation until about 1000 AD?

It's real simple. Those of you who are former Roman Catholics, if this was a Roman Catholic church, as you came in the back, what were you supposed to do? You've got the holy water back there. You're supposed to do the sign of the cross.

But what is the focus of the attention? Well, in the church somewhere is something called a tabernacle, or a monstrance, or a ciborium. There's different names that are given to the various types of these containers, into which consecrated hosts are placed.

And so once the priest elevates the hosts, and he says, in the old Latin anyways, it doesn't say it this way after the 1960s, though there are Latin mass churches that still continue to do this. Hoc es corpus meum, this is my body.

Because of the ordination of the priest, the miracle of transubstantiation takes place, and that wafer becomes divine. It becomes the incarnation of Jesus. And so you keep consecrated wafers in the tabernacle.

There's a light on in front of it in most Roman Catholic churches. And when you come in, you bow. You genuflect, because God is physically present in the room. That's why you do that. The early church would take the elements.

They would take the bread and the wine, and they would go to those who were sick, who could not come to the fellowship, and they would distribute those elements to them. But they would never then venerate them or store them up in any special way.

Once that was done, it was done. That proves they did not believe in the doctrine that became prevalent at the beginning of the second millennium, the doctrine of transubstantiation. But there was, obviously, especially after the period of persecution ends, that celebration of the supper.

Now you have many people coming into the church who are not coming to the church because they have repented of their sins and believe in the Lord Jesus Christ, but because that's now the fashionable thing to do.

And eventually, as I said, under Theodosius, it becomes the official religion of the empire. Well, folks, the church has never done real well when it's been governmentally promulgated. I was just in the Netherlands, and Holland was a place of deep Calvinistic orthodoxy in centuries past.

What has become of most of that is something you and I would not even recognize. In fact, in many churches in what's called the Bible Belt in Netherlands today, well, earlier today anyways, because it's a good eight hours earlier there, in those churches, you might have this many people gathering in one place.

In a Reformed church, but then when the supper is offered, you might have 10.

People.

Who would partake of the supper, and that wouldn't even include all the elders.

Why?

Well, it's not because of a change in the theology of the supper particularly. It's because of a perversion of Reformed theology to the point where they have so hyper-defined things like repentance that no one can do it.

And so they have no assurance of salvation. Without an assurance of salvation, you don't partake of the supper, and therefore it's almost like Jehovah's Witnesses. The Jehovah's Witnesses gather once per year for the memorial supper, and the only people that partake are the people who claim to be of the 144 ,000, which means in 99 of all congregations, the elements are passed up and down the aisles and nobody partakes anywhere.

Sad.

When you think of what Jesus actually said to his disciples, it's sad in light of what we are going to do in only a few minutes in this room. But that's what has happened there in the Netherlands. Now, what happens once you have a lot of unbelievers coming in is you start to emphasize elements within the worship service that are more common in human religion.

You see, the supper is a place where we are all equal. There is one food, there's one table, there's one Savior. We all have the same need for Him. It's the great equalizer. You had the rich and the poor, slave owners and slaves, Jews and Gentiles, they all come to one table.

And we don't have one table over here for one kind of person and one table here for another kind of person. But once the nature of the church starts changing, then people start bringing in their traditions.

And you've already had the development of a priesthood. By the time of the turn of the millennium, you have a allegedly celibate priesthood, which was almost never celibate, but that's what had happened.

And you have sacerdotalism, sacramentalism, the idea that the priest has the power in and of himself by his ordination to do special things. The number of ordinances, sacraments, the church has ballooned up until the current Orthodox seven amongst Roman Catholics.

But then when you get the idea of transubstantiation, then everything starts changing. Everything starts changing. So once that becomes popular, one of the rules that comes up is if you spill the wine, and that could happen here.

We've got little ones and sometimes I've seen someone just come right through here, trip, fall, hit one of these tiny little things, and the wine's going to be all over the place, isn't it? Well, if you think that that is God, literally, what are you going to do?

How do you clean God up? And so the rule was passed, because they didn't have carpet back then, obviously, the rule was passed that the priest had to get down and lick God up.

Yeah.

So it didn't take long till the cup was withdrawn from the laity. And only the priest would commune with the cup and when you came forward, all you got was the bread. And so, and this was not very long ago, they stopped doing this, but you would see for a very, very long time, you'd come forward and the priest would place.

The.

Small little wafer on the tongue, but there would be no drinking of the cup. And that then developed a whole new theology, because when you keep changing stuff, you've got to keep changing your theology, and that developed a whole new theology, that Jesus was equally present, body, soul, blood, and divinity, in both the bread and the wine, because it was sort of obvious that the wine represented the blood of Christ and the bread represented the body of Christ.

So if you're only getting the bread, then you're only getting part of it. And so they developed the idea that no, Jesus is equally present in all of it, and it really doesn't represent any particular aspect, which of course it does in scripture.

So much so that one of the problems that developed was that, you know, standard sort of superstitious people would go, well, hmm, if the wafer is God, then if I take a wafer, if I steal one while the priest isn't looking, or if I don't actually swallow it, but I, you know, just put in a napkin, this thing might be able to bring me good luck.

And so one of the favorite stories, I even used it in a debate a number of years ago, I was debating Robert St. Genes on the mass, one of my favorite stories that Philip Schaaf tells in the portion on medieval history, in his multi-volume church history, which I highly recommend to you, was of a man who stole a, he was a beekeeper, and so he stole a wafer, and he placed it in his hive, thinking that this would make the bees make more honey than anybody else made.

But then all of a sudden he goes out, and he discovers to his horror that the bees are no longer making honey at all. And so he runs, and he finds the priest, and he says, you're not going to believe what has happened.

And he confesses to having stolen the wafer. And so the priest comes, and they open up the hive, and what has happened is that the bees have taken the wafer, and they have created an altar, and they are surrounding the altar and worshiping the wafer on the altar and no longer making honey.

And so the priest has to come and take the wafer from the bees, and then they take it in procession back to the church so that the bees can get back to making honey, I guess. This is the kind, I mean, there are all sorts of stories of bleeding wafers, where the wafer would bleed because it's the body, soul, blood, and divinity of Jesus.

This is the medieval world. This is the superstitious world in which this kind of theology was thriving all the way up to the time of the Reformation. And it wasn't an overnight thing. It wasn't like November 1st, 1517, that was all done with.

The Reformation took time, and some would argue is continuing to take time, and needs to be a continuous process. Semper Reformanda, always reforming. But historically, even between 1517 and our confession of 1689, you've still got 170 some odd years in there, in which there is development and thought and consideration.

And there was tremendous struggle. What do we get rid of? What's biblical? What's not biblical? Let me tell you a story about what happened in Wittenberg. Some of you have seen a video. It's sort of a bucket moment for me, and I'm closer to the bucket than most of you are, but one of those things that I'll never forget, Lord willing, but you may have seen the video where I got to preach in the castle church in Wittenberg, the very church where the Reformation began, where Martin Luther posted the 95 Theses.

And Martin Luther is buried there. If you stand in the high pulpit there, you've got to go up the circular stairway. You're up way up above everybody, much higher above everybody than I am here. And you can see the entirety of this beautiful church.

And if you look right over the front of the pulpit like this, you can see Luther's grave right down there. And I think I mentioned to you once the fact that we had a little bit of a buzz in the sound system.

At the beginning, it cleared up later on, but I joked afterwards with some of my friends that that sound was Luther spinning in his grave because a Baptist was preaching from his pulpit. Because I can assure you in the days of Martin Luther, that would not have happened.

No way. I could tell you some stories about Luther and Baptists, and they are not friendly stories. Fritz Erba comes to mind, but that's another story we can tell for another time. But most of you know the story.

You know Luther's appearance after the beginning of the Reformation in 1517, which nobody knew that anything had begun then. That date is something we've assigned later, but he is finally called to the Diet of Worms, which was not a weight loss methodology, but was a gathering in the Holy Roman Empire in the city of Worms to appear before Charles, the emperor of the Holy Roman Empire.

You've heard the story. You know that he is told he must recant from what is in his books. He says he cannot do that. He does ask for 24 hours to consider. But finally, when faced with a decision to make, he says he cannot do so.

He cannot go against conscience. And then, of course, you have that famous saying that some historians question, but it seems to have a decent pedigree. He says, here I stand. I can do no other. God help me.

And then he's kidnapped on the way home by his protector, Duke Frederick, and he's taken to the Wartburg Castle. And there he takes on the identity of Knight George. And there he translates the Bible, the New Testament, into German, eventually the Old Testament as well, but that took him longer.

He knew Greek better than he did Hebrew. While he is hidden, the Reformation goes radical in Wittenberg under Andreas Karlstadt. Karlstadt stops wearing the vestments, the clerical vestments. And then he announces that for New Year's Eve, he is going to make the Lord's Supper, all of it, available to everyone.

Anyone who wants to participate will be welcome to partake in the Lord's Supper. Well, Duke Frederick is like, time out. No, you're not. This is going too fast. We need to slow down and consider things.

And so Karlstadt, as the faithful, obedient citizen, doesn't do it on New Year's Eve. He does it on Christmas Eve. Because he had only said you're not going to do it on New Year's Eve. It's not quite what I think obedience really is supposed to mean.

Now, I want you to picture what takes place in the castle church in Wittenberg. It's easy for me to do. I've stood there larger than this room. I'm not sure. Yeah, I think it's probably about the same width, actually, interestingly enough.

Maybe a little bit narrower. I'm not sure. It certainly goes up higher, but there are similarities. Except the statue part. Lots of those. We don't have any of those. And all of the, we do have some stained glass, but no, nothing compared to what you have in the castle church.

But the place is filled. Because people have been promised that they are going to be able to partake of the bread and the wine. And they surge forward. And some people are scandalized because as they're reaching, the cup is tipped and some of it spills.

And still there's that thinking in the back of the mind. God is being spilt on the floor, but and Luther's theology has not yet developed on this. And so this is the background of the people. But here you have the people who for so long have had to watch somebody else doing this.

Now being told you get to do it and there is such a longing and a hunger to do it. I think about that. And then I think about the Lord's Supper in most churches today. Where'd that longing and desire go?

For most people, it's just something that gets in the way. Fast forward to 1552. Leave Germany, go over to Geneva, Switzerland. Canton of Geneva. And now you have a French pastor by the name of John Calvin.

And Calvin has developed a much more consistent doctrine of the Lord's Supper. And in fact, I mentioned on Facebook this week, if you wanted to read through section 30 of the of the London Baptist Confession of Faith, most historians can see a very deep influence on the part of our Confession of Faith as it defines the Supper from John Calvin.

And you know if you've been here before, that we guard the table. That does not mean that Zach and Luke stand down here and look very mean as you're coming forward as if they can see into your soul or something.

What we mean is that beforehand we give instructions. If you are not a follower of Jesus Christ, this meal is not for you. Talk to us about how you can become a follower of Christ, and it will be, but it's not for you until you have bowed the knee in repentance and faith to Christ.

But, also, if you are under the discipline of the church, and the church has said you have sinned, you are under discipline, and there are unresolved issues, do not partake of the Supper. That comes from Calvin.

That comes from his recognition of the importance of doing this. And so in 1552, Calvin was not loved in Geneva. Calvin was there, as you may know, William Farrell struck the fear of God into him. He was a rather retiring French scholar guy who wanted to go to Strasbourg and read books.

And Farrell said God wants you here, and he will curse your studies if you do not stay here in Geneva. He and Farrell only lasted a couple years before the Genevans kicked him out. And eventually Calvin got to Strasbourg, and he loved it there.

And he was pastor of a French congregation there. He was a wonderful pastor. He was a courageous pastor. The plague came through Geneva while he was there. He didn't run for the hills like most people did in those days.

He stayed with his congregation and ministered to them in the midst of the plague, just as Ulrich Zwingli did. Zwingli actually got the plague when it came through Zurich. He survived. But he loved his time there, but eventually the Genevans wrote to him and said, uh, we made a mistake.

We can't keep the Reformation going here in Geneva. It's fallen apart, and we need you back. The funny thing is, Calvin was an expositional preacher, and he had begun preaching verse by verse when he was first in Geneva.

And so the first Sunday, he says, all right, comes back to Geneva. He didn't want to. He didn't want to. But you know what he does the first Sunday back? What would you do? Your first Sunday back after you got ridden out on a rail.

Nobody gave you any goodbye parties. You didn't get a nice little watch. They wanted you out. So what would you do when they've come back to you, hat in hand, please, please come back? What are you going to do?

Do a little gloating maybe? Find a few Bible passages that you can sort of go with? He gets into the pulpit, and he opens his Bible to the verse after the last one he had preached on the last time he was there, and just continued on.

That's why you have Calvin's commentaries, by the way. That's what they are. That's the fruit of his years of ministry there. But it's not like things got real nice. And in fact, until 1555, he is having to fight every day.

He has people, at night, people will get there, they'll sing bawdy, drunken songs outside his window to try to keep him awake. He'd wake up in the morning, do a musket balls on the wall above his bed.

It was not a wonderful situation that he was in. And one of the things he dealt with is a group called the Libertines, who refused to submit to the application of God's moral law and how they dressed and behaved in Geneva.

And Calvin said, as the lead pastor of the church of Geneva, these people will not be allowed to partake of the Lord's supper. Even though the council and the politicians wouldn't support him in it, he said, I don't care.

I am the pastor of the church of Geneva. And these people will not partake of the supper. So it came to a head. And one day Calvin had to go to Saint-Pierre, primary church there in Geneva, fully expecting to face swords when it came to the partaking of the Lord's supper.

Now in God's mercy, the other side backed down, but Calvin was willing to stand right there in the face of armed men and say, you will not partake. Now the question is, why would they want to partake so strongly?

Because to not partake was exclusion. It was an exclusion from the community.

The Lord's Supper as Fellowship, Equality, and Church Discipline

Now,.

We today, we look at the centuries that have passed and we can see a massive shift, a massive shift in my own upbringing, as I said. Once a quarter, if you miss it, and there was no emphasis upon its centrality, its importance, the fact that it was specifically ordained by the Lord Jesus Christ.

Why? Especially amongst us.

We,.

We read history. We, we read the documents. We know, for example, that that the early Reformed movement was split over this issue. If you ever heard of the Marburg Colloquy in 1529, where there was danger that the Reformed people, the Lutherans and the Zwinglians, and that they were going to split into little groups and hence could be gobbled back up by Rome.

And, and so people wanted to get together. Luther gets together. Zwingli gets together. Zwingli wants to be there. Luther does not. Luther does not like Zwingli. Zwingli was considerably more mature than Luther in his dealing with things like this.

They agreed on 14 out of 15 items, but the one they couldn't get was the supper. And they had no agreement. Everything. Can you imagine agreeing on everything else, but one item? And it was the Lord's Supper.

Now, it was mainly because Luther stood there going, Hoc est corpus meum. This is my body. This is, is, is, not represents, and so on and so forth, and all the argumentation that went through there. But the point is that our predecessors, our forefathers in the faith have seen the subject of the Lord's Supper as vitally.

Important. Vitally important.

Definitionally so. And yet how many churches today are even semi-identified on the basis of what they believe about this ordinance of the church? I remember when I first went to Reformed Baptist Church, I mentioned to my dad that we guarded the table.

And he was like, I had never heard of it before. I was in seminary the first time I heard of what a Reformed Baptist was. I had to go to a bookstore and get a handbook on denominations and look up Reformed Baptist, because it sounded like Deformed Baptist.

I wasn't sure if there was much of a difference. I had no, I'd never heard of anything about it. I didn't know. And so when it was explained to me the idea of guarding the table, that sounded weird. And when you've never heard of something before, if it's weird, it's probably wrong.

At least that's how we think, right? But then when it was explained to me, and then when I talked to my dad about it, I was like, well, think about it. We guard the baptistry, don't we? It's like, what do you mean?

We ask.

For a statement of faith, a confession of faith and repentance in the Lord Jesus Christ before you can partake in baptism. We examine someone. We guard the baptistry. But in our tradition, there was nothing said about the subject of being under church discipline or anything like that.

In fact, in many Protestant churches today, the supper is viewed as an evangelistic outreach type thing. Everybody come on along. Don't worry about that repentance stuff. Very few people today, when they're looking at a church, ask anything about what that church believes about the Lord's Supper.

Now, you're probably aware.

That.

Most Baptists are associated with the idea of pure memorialism. The idea that the Lord's Supper is purely a memorial of the death, burial, and resurrection of Jesus Christ. And obviously, Jesus said, do this in remembrance of me.

So there you go. But if you read the London Baptist Confession, if you read section 30, you got down to some of the last two paragraphs and might have gone,.

Hmm,.

There's something more here. And there is. There is. We're not pure memorialists. And there's a reason for that. And we'll get into it. But isn't it amazing that something that once fundamentally defined fellowship that would keep Luther and Zwingli from being able to unite and to survive the onslaught of the Holy Roman Empire is not even thought about by the vast majority of those in evangelical churches today?

Now, obviously, we partake of the Supper every Lord's Day. That is not.

Normative.

The church that I came from, we did it the third Sunday of each month. So it was monthly. You'll find all sorts of different examples. There's all sorts of people who do it on the Lord's Day every day.

But some people meet twice on the Lord's Day. So it's not in every service. But for us, since we only meet once, it's in every service. So for us, knowing what it is we are doing and knowing why during the entirety of the service that is right there, right in front of where we're preaching, I think is extremely, extremely important.

And I've already mentioned in other sermons how I feel that having a proper theology of the Supper is one of the most important ways of understanding the nature of Christian unity and what unites us as believers in Christ.

It can't just be something that we just assume everyone's going to pick up as they go along. It needs to be something that we focus upon and that's why I want to do this series. So, I want to look at the key texts.

And so we're going to look at Matthew 26 this evening, this afternoon, whatever time it is. We'll do 1 Corinthians chapter 11 the next time because that is very key. And then we'll look at the confession itself.

So I'm not sure exactly how long this will take. I sort of figure I'm just following Jeff's example. It could take years. No, it won't. But you get the idea. I'm not going to rush. There's no reason to.

There's no reason to. Now, we can look at Matthew. We can look at the Synoptic Gospels as they present this. I'm not going to be going through all the questions you can have and ask about, well, when did Judas leave?

And you know, trying to put together a complete harmony of the Lord's Supper. That's not my intention here. That's a very worthwhile study. It's been done. You can access those types of materials. What I want to do is I want to see, I want to put the initial celebration of the Lord's Supper into its proper context this evening, which will then give us the foundation two weeks from now.

The next Lord's Day, I'll be preaching in Tucson. The Lord's Day after that, we'll have my official installation service here as an elder of this church, and I will also preach. And we will pick up with 1 Corinthians chapter 11 at that point in time, having the gospel background there.

So that'll help us to cover the New Testament evidence before we get to the confession of faith itself, to have that proper foundation. I think it's very, very important to go that direction. But here in Matthew chapter 26, remember what's going on here.

Remember what's going on here. This is so important. There's been a, I wouldn't call it a revival, but there's a lot of people running around doing Passover seders and things like that in Christian churches these days.

And unfortunately, a lot of that has ended up morphing into some weird stuff, where people end up going back under the law and things like that. But it is very useful to recognize the Jewishness of the context.

Of the Gospels.

And we don't know exactly what the Passover would have looked like in Jerusalem in the very beginning of the fourth decade of that century, so around 30 to 33. We don't know exactly what it looked like.

We have documents called the Mishnah, which was collected about 250 years after the birth of Christ. And we know from the Gospels themselves that many of the traditions that we can read in the Mishnah existed in the days of Jesus.

The Korban rule, for example, that Jesus specifically condemned when he brought that up is found in the Mishnah. So there's one that there's a direct connection. But we can't automatically assume that just because it's a Mishnah means it was being practiced in exactly that same way in the first century.

But we've got a pretty decent idea. What we do know, even from Old Testament sources, is that the Passover was a.

Rich.

Period of symbolic representation of the redemptive work that God had been doing amongst the people of Israel. It reminded the people of Israel of their intimate connection connection to every generation that had come before them.

And so everything in the Passover represented something. There were bitter herbs on the table and the bitter herbs represented the bitter suffering of the people in Egypt and then came over time to represent the bitter suffering of the people of Israel in their exile to Babylon.