WWUTT 2492 The Institution of the Lord's Supper (Luke 22:14-18)

We read of the institution of the Lord's Supper in Matthew, Mark, and Luke, but Luke's account appears to differ a little bit. It seems as if there's two cups at the Lord's table, but there's still just the one when we understand the text.

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Here once again is Pastor Gabe.

The Setting of the Lord's Supper in Luke 22

Thank you, Becky. We come to the Lord's table today. No, not that we're doing communion on the broadcast, but in our study of Luke chapter 22, we are up to that place in the narrative where Jesus and his disciples are in the upper room and he institutes with them the Lord's Supper.

I'm going to read verses 14 to 23, hear the word of the Lord. And when the hour came, Jesus reclined at table and the apostles with him. And he said to them, I have earnestly desired to eat this Passover with you before I suffer.

For I tell you, I will not eat it until it is fulfilled in the kingdom of God. And he took a cup and when he had given thanks, he said, take this and divide it among yourselves. For I tell you that from now on, I will not drink of the fruit of the vine until the kingdom of God comes.

And he took bread and when he had 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 likewise, the cup after they had eaten saying, this cup that is poured out for you is the new covenant in my blood.

But behold, the hand of him who betrays me is with me on the table for the son of man goes as it has been determined, but woe to that man by whom he is betrayed. And they began to question one another, which of them it could be who was going to do this.

Now, this is the third time that we have done a study of the Lord's table as it pertains to the gospel accounts. There are other occasions in which we've talked about the Lord's table, particularly in first Corinthians chapter 11, where Paul talks about it there.

There's been sermon series that have aired where I've talked about the Lord's table also. But in our study of the gospel narratives, we've been through Matthew's account, which was in Matthew chapter 26.

We looked at Mark's account in Mark chapter 14. And now we come to Luke's account in Luke chapter 22. And what Luke details here about the Lord's supper, the Lord's table. There are two differences between Luke's account and what is said in Matthew and Mark.

Matthew and Mark are pretty close. So what is different about what Luke says? Well, one of them you probably spotted right away. It appears as if there's two cups. Now where did that come from? That wasn't in Matthew's account or Mark's account.

I'm going to explain that coming up here in just a little bit. The other aspect of this that's different than the other two accounts is that Luke mentions the betrayal at the end, or you could argue during the Lord's supper rather than beforehand.

So in Matthew and Mark, it's before. In Luke's account, it's during or after. And that could be because of the way that Luke will arrange things. We've seen before in this gospel how he'll put events together, things that share the same characteristics thematically or the same lessons, so on and so forth.

So that could be the reason why he puts the betrayal at the end or during the supper rather than at the beginning. But those are the two big differences between Luke's account and Matthew's and Mark's.

Let's go through it here, and then I'll explain some of those things as we go. So in verse 14, when the hour came, he reclined at table and the apostles with him. Now we read yesterday that this is at the beginning of the feast of unleavened bread, which is also called the Passover meal, when the Passover lamb had to be sacrificed.

And so Jesus tells his disciples to go to the upper room and make preparations for them to partake in this particular meal. Now, Jerusalem was where Passover had to be celebrated. You weren't supposed to celebrate Passover anywhere else.

You weren't supposed to eat the Passover lamb anywhere else. So consider what's said in Deuteronomy 16, beginning in verse 5. You may not offer the Passover sacrifice within any of your towns that the Lord your God is giving you, but at the place that the Lord your God will choose to make his name dwell in it.

There you shall offer the Passover sacrifice in the evening at sunset at the time you came out of Egypt, and you shall cook it and eat it at the place that the Lord your God will choose. And in the morning, you shall turn and go to your tents.

So the Passover lamb was supposed to be sacrificed at the place of God's choosing. That's what it says in Deuteronomy that would later come to be Jerusalem. This was the place where the Passover lamb would be offered.

This is where God would put his name to dwell in it, of course, because that's where the temple would be built. So you could only sacrifice the Passover lamb and eat the Passover lamb there in Jerusalem.

And it was supposed to be because that was in the closest proximity to God. His presence was there in the temple with his people. So they eat with God the Passover meal in the city of God where his name dwells.

And so here Jesus eating with his disciples, they are eating the Passover meal with God. And Jesus institutes this meal in a new way, of course. By instituting communion or the Lord's Supper, as we call it, taking the bread, taking the cup and giving them significantly deeper meaning pertaining to his death and his resurrection.

Now, the Passover always had that meaning. It was types and shadows that was pointing to the Christ who was to come, the Christ who would be the lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world. It was always pointing to that.

But now Jesus instituted as this is the supper that you will partake in in remembrance of what I'm doing in fulfillment of what the law and the prophets had spoken about this. So on the Day of Unleavened Bread, on which the Passover lamb is sacrificed, Jesus and his disciples, they come to this place to eat this together.

And he says to them, verse 15, I have earnestly desired to eat this Passover with you before I suffer. Jesus is being very particular about this Passover specifically. All of these things have happened by the sovereign hand of God.

As I had talked about yesterday, even that Jesus and his disciples would come to this place on this night and eat this Passover, which is the night before Jesus is to be crucified. Just a matter of hours after this meal, this conversation, Jesus goes to the cross and dies, fulfilling everything that the Passover was pointing to.

We have been enslaved to our sin. Christ dies on the cross for us that by faith in him, we have been freed from our slavery to sin. And he is our promised land. So even as the Passover had pointed to this, Christ fulfills it.

And even this Passover meal happening in proximity with that sacrifice so that his disciples would know exactly what Jesus means by do this in remembrance of me. And this bread and this cup would be the memorial of what Christ came to do.

So when he says this about the Passover, I have earnestly desired to eat this Passover with you before I suffer. For I tell you, I will not eat it until it is fulfilled in the kingdom of God. Now you can add an again in there.

I will not eat it again until it is fulfilled in the kingdom of God. And it's not that we're adding anything to scripture. That's what the context indicates. Think about what is said in Matthew, chapter 26, verse 29.

I tell you, I will not drink again of this fruit of the vine until that day when I drink it new with you in my father's kingdom. So same sort of application here. And when Jesus says until the kingdom of God is fulfilled or rather until it is fulfilled in the kingdom of God, what Jesus means by that is we will continue to practice this, the eating of this bread, the drinking of this cup until the building of God's kingdom has come to completion.

The building in the sense of the people who come to faith in Jesus Christ and are added as citizens of that kingdom on the day when the last person that God had foreordained had elected from before the foundation of the world.

When that last person hears the gospel, repents and believes and comes to Jesus Christ, then that work is over. The kingdom of God is fulfilled and then we are all gathered to Christ forever in his heavenly kingdom.

And there, where we read in Revelation about the wedding feast of the lamb, he will eat again of this bread and drink again of this fruit of the vine. I tell you, I will not eat it until it is fulfilled in the kingdom of God.

And then he's going to make that statement again regarding the cup. I will not drink it again until it is fulfilled in the kingdom of God. So then that's next. Verse 17, he took a cup and when he had given thanks, he said, take this and divide it among yourselves.

Hold on to that thought. Verse 18, for I tell you that from now on, I will not drink of the fruit of the vine until the kingdom of God comes. Same sort of statement as before, but before he was talking about the bread, here he's talking about the cup.

And again, even this cup will be practiced until the fulfillment of everything that God is doing in bringing people into his kingdom. And when that work is completed, we enter into that kingdom. He eats and drinks with us there again.

So I will not drink of the fruit of the vine until the kingdom of God comes. And again, that's like the statement in Matthew 26. I will not drink again of this fruit of the vine until that day. I drink it new with you in my father's kingdom.

Even the language there suggesting the new heavens and the new earth. Now, let me come back to that part in verse 17, where it says he took a cup and when he had given thanks, he said, take this and divide it among yourselves.

That's verse 17. Verse 20 says, and likewise, the cup after they had eaten, saying this cup that is poured out for you is the new covenant in my blood. That's two cups. You might be looking at that going, where did the other cup come from?

Why don't we practice with two cups in communion? If Jesus had two cups with his disciples, there may be some communion practices out there that do utilize two cups. But I'm going to present the argument to you here that this is not two cups.

This is one cup. Look once again at what is said in verse 17. He took a cup and when he had given thanks, he said, take this and divide it among yourselves. They don't drink it. They don't drink it there.

They're just dividing it. That's all they're doing. And then when we get to verse 20, he says, this cup that is poured out for you is the new covenant in my blood. The cup that is poured out for you. So they took the one cup that Jesus had and they poured it into their individual cups.

And so they had those cups. They were doing that as Jesus was then taking the bread and talking about the bread. So these are the details that Luke is giving us here. It doesn't mean, though, that there are two cups.

And it's always frustrated me whenever I've heard pastors talk about, now there's two cups of this meal and one cup at the Passover represented this and another cup represented.

That.

That's not what's going on here. That's not what we're seeing in the narrative. It is one cup. It's always been one cup. Sometime last year, there was a young man that came to my church. He came to our church with his family.

I think he only came once or twice. And it was that second visit, if I'm remembering right, that he had asked me and he had asked one of the other elders. He said, if I'm a one cup communion guy, could I be a member here?

And I said, well, explain that. What do you mean by one cup communion? And he said, it is my conviction because of the way that I was raised, the way that I was taught regarding communion, that there's only supposed to be one cup and we all should be drinking of that same cup.

So the one cup either gets passed around or somebody standing up front with the cup and we all come forward and we drink from it. But this little individual cup thing, I could not in good conscience partake in the Lord's table in that way because it's a divided cup.

And so if I feel that way about communion, I could not partake in it as long as it's divided up like this. Could I still be a member here? And I responded to him very simply. I don't see how you could be because you're saying that just because the way that we practice communion is divided up in all these little cups, you would exclude yourself from the Lord's table over what's really a semantic argument concerning the cup.

Then, no, you couldn't be a member here. You would actually be excommunicating yourself in a certain sense from the Lord's table, from partaking in it because you think that the cup needs to be served in another way.

I said, if you feel that strongly about it, you really need to go to a church that practices one cup communion. I don't know where he was going to find such a place. And I did not think of this until after we had that conversation.

But I should have gone to Luke 22. It just did not occur to me to teach him through what the scripture says about this. And he never came to our church again after that. He talked like he was going to.

So I was hoping we could have another conversation about it. But he probably had decided at that point, no, I guess if I feel really strongly about this, I need to go to a church that's actually practicing one cup communion.

But again, if I had thought of this at the time, I would have brought this scripture to him and said, look here, we have one cup. He took the one cup and he gave thanks and he said, take this and divide it among yourselves.

So the disciples and Jesus at that first Lord's Supper don't practice one cup communion. They don't have one cup and pass it to everybody and everybody's drinking from that cup as it goes around. They all partake in it together at the same time.

But Jesus has them divide it just as the bread is divided. He broke it and gave it to them. So the cup is divided and is poured into their individual cups. That's what's being shown here. And Luke is just more particular with the details than Matthew and Mark were, which is which is why that's indicated here.

But there's not two cups. It's still just the one cup. Jesus takes the one cup and has them divided among themselves. So, yeah, again, if I could do that conversation over again, that's where I would point him.

To.

I would bring him to the text here. So, again, Jesus says in verse 18, for I tell you that from now on, I will not drink of the fruit of the vine until the kingdom of God comes. Now, it's that language in particular that I have used in response to Roman Catholics who insist that the bread and the cup that they partake in in the Roman Catholic mass, they say that it's really the body of Jesus and it's really his blood, the transubstantiation doctrine that at the moment of consecration, that the priest blesses the bread and the cup and the bell rings and everything else.

And everybody knows, OK, now the bread is actually become the flesh of Jesus. It is his body. He is physically here with us in the room, or they would say substantively or substantially. I can't remember what word they use for that.

They wouldn't they wouldn't agree with physically because the accidents, as they call them, still remain a substance of bread and a substance of cup. But they're still arguing that it's really Jesus flesh and it's really Jesus blood.

We really eat of his actual body when we eat the bread. We really drink of his actual blood when we drink the cup. That is that is the Roman Catholic teaching on that. And it is blasphemous in every way because they not only proclaim that about these elements that they're partaking in, but they worship it.

And the the the bread and the cup that have been transformed or transubstantiated into the flesh and blood of Jesus are kept in the tabernacle, in the sanctuary of a Roman Catholic church. That tabernacle might be in the center or it might be off to the side, but it's always this ornamented box where the host, as it is referred to, is inside.

And the people, when they go into the sanctuary and they bow or they genuflect, it's because they believe the physical presence of God is in the room inside that box. And when Roman Catholics will make that argument, I will point them to this passage.

And more often than not, I go to Matthew 26, 29, where Jesus says, I will not drink again of this fruit of the vine. He doesn't call it. I will not drink again of my blood. He says, I will not drink again of this fruit of the vine, even though he says this is my.

Blood.

He still calls it the fruit of the vine. It's not turned into his blood. It's still wine, and it's what it represents. Jesus has not died yet. He's not gone to the cross to have his body pierced or his blood spilled.

The disciples are not sitting there thinking when Jesus says, this is my body and this is my blood. They're not sitting there going, oh, we're eating his actual flesh. We're drinking his actual blood.

They were probably very confused about what Jesus was talking about. But even when it came to partaking in Passover, those elements of the Passover meal were symbolic. The cup was symbolic. The bread was symbolic.

The bread had to be unleavened because the people were told they had to make their bread unleavened so that they were not waiting around for it to rise and they had enough bread that they can gather up and they could take it with them.

The lamb represented something in particular, the blood that was put over the doorposts of the house so that when the angel of death came upon Egypt, it would pass over the house that would have blood on the doorposts.

And so eating the lamb is remembering the blood that was given for them. But Jesus is taking those elements and he's giving new meaning to them in this supper that he is eating with his disciples. They always saw it as symbolic.

So they see what Jesus is doing with them is symbolic. Now, I want to say, though, that the Lord's table is not merely symbolic. It is symbolic. It's not merely symbolic. It is more than that. This is something very sacred that we do when we partake in communion.

Whenever we do this in church, and we're going to consider that and talk more about that as we come to the institution of the Lord's supper again tomorrow, we should not see this as more than what it is.

And we most certainly shouldn't see this table as anything less than what it is. But Jesus showing to his disciples what was about to happen. And when we eat and when we drink today, we remember what has happened.

For us to be forgiven our sins and may and be made right with God. It took the sinless son of God. Dying on our behalf. Heavenly Father, as we finish up our study of the Lord's supper today, I pray that we would think deeply about these things.

We don't just go and eat the bread and drink the cup because, hey, it's our religious.

Duty.

It's our Christian thing to do. This is a ritual that's been practiced for 2000 years. But we truly think about what this represents. Jesus gave us these symbols for a reason that we would eat this bread and drink of this cup and remember the body and the blood that was given for us, that we would be forgiven our sins, made right with God and have entrance into that eternal kingdom that Jesus talked about there with his disciples.

And we are his disciples. We who have believed in the Lord Jesus Christ and obey his word. And so we come to this table and we eat and drink in remembrance of him, doing as Paul said in First Corinthians 11, proclaiming the Lord's death until he comes.

Come quickly, Lord Jesus. We pray in his name.

Amen.