Jan 15
17
The Agony in Gethsemane
The following is from Spurgeon’s sermon,
“The Agony in Gethsemane” #1199. Luke 22:44
“My soul is overwhelmed with sorrow to the point of death.” Matthew 26:38
“And being in agony he prayed more earnestly: and his sweat was as it were great drops of
blood falling down to the ground.” Luke 22:44
See the excellence and completeness of the atonement of Christ!
How black I am, how filthy, how loathsome in the sight of God; I feel myself only fit to be
cast into the lowest hell, and I wonder that God has not long ago cast me there.
But I go into Gethsemane, and I peer under those gnarled olive trees, and I see my Savior!
Yes, I see him wallowing on the ground in anguish, and hear such groans come from
him as never came from human breast before.
I look upon the ground and see it red with his blood, while his face is smeared with
gory sweat, and I say to myself, “My God, my Savior, why do you suffer so?”
I hear him reply, “I am suffering for your sin.”
Now I can understand how Jehovah can spare me, because he smote his Son in my stead!
Sinner as I am, I stand before the burning throne of the severity of God, and am not afraid of it. Can you scorch me, O consuming fire, when you have not only scorched, but utterly consumed my substitute?
All hell was distilled into that cup of which Jesus Christ was made to drink. The woe
that broke over the Savior’s spirit, the great and fathomless ocean of inexpressible anguish
which dashed over the Savior’s soul when he died, was inconceivable.
Our Lord’s main suffering lay in his soul. His soul-sufferings were the soul of his sufferings.
His position as a sin-bearer, and the desertion by his Father engrossed his contemplations.
The bloody sweat of Jesus came from an utter faintness and prostration of soul.
He was in an awful soul-swoon, and suffered an inward death, whose accompaniment was
not watery tears from the eyes, but a weeping of blood from the entire man.
He could say with David, “The pains of hell got hold upon me.”
All God’s waves and billows went over him. Above him, beneath him, around him, and
within, all, all was anguish.
The cup of wine we drink at the Lord’s Table symbolizes the believer’s communion with God accomplished by Christ’s shed blood. How amazing that we have friendship with holy God and enjoy the blessings of grace such as righteousness, peace, and forgiveness! But never forget, in order for his children to drink of this cup of communion, our Head had to drink that bitter cup of wrath dry. (Zec 13: 7; Ps 22: 1-3) In the total darkness of the cross, there could be no communion with the Father for our Substitute until he had suffered all the consequences of sin to the full satisfaction of divine justice. (Rom 8: 32; Lam 1: 12; Zec 12: 10; Is 53: 8) But by making satisfaction, Christ took that bitter cup out of our hands and gave us this sweet cup of communion. Clay Curtis.
Weaned from feeding on husks and ashes
(J. C. Philpot, “Zion’s Blessings” 1843)
“I will satisfy her poor with bread.” Psalm 132:15
The Lord has given a special promise to Zion’s poor—”I will satisfy her poor with bread.”
Nothing else? Bread? Is that all?
Yes! That is all God has promised—bread, the staff of life.
But what does He mean by “bread”?
The Lord Himself explains what bread is. He says, “I am the Bread of life. He who comes to Me will never go hungry, and he who believes in Me will never be thirsty. I am the living Bread who came down from heaven. If anyone eats of this bread, he will live forever.” John 6:35,51
The bread, then, that God gives to Zion’s poor is His own dear Son—fed upon by living faith, under the special operations of the Holy Spirit in the heart.
“I will satisfy her poor with bread.” Psalm 132:15
But must not we have an appetite before we can feed upon bread? The rich man who feasts continually upon juicy meat and savory sauces, would not live upon bread. To come down to live on such simple food as bread—why, one must be really hungry to be satisfied with that.
So it is spiritually. A man fed upon ‘mere notions’ and a number of ‘speculative doctrines’ cannot descend to the simplicity of the gospel. To feed upon a crucified Christ,
a bleeding Jesus!—he is not sufficiently brought down to the starving point, to relish such spiritual food as this!
Before, then, he can feed upon this Bread of life he mustbe made spiritually poor. And when he is brought to be nothing but a mass of wretchedness, filth, guilt, and misery
—when he feels his soul sinking under the wrath of God, and has scarcely a hope to buoy up his poor tottering heart —when he finds the world embittered to him, and he has no
one object from which he can reap any abiding consolation —then the Lord is pleased to open up in his conscience, and bring the sweet savor of the love of His dear Son
into his heart—and he begins to taste gospel bread.
Being weaned from feeding on husks and ashes, and sick “of the vines of Sodom and the fields of Gomorrah,” and being brought to relish simple gospel food, he begins to taste a sweetness in ‘Christ crucified’ which he never could know—until he was made experimentally poor. The Lord has promised to satisfy such.
Communion- Don Fortner
The Elements
It is needful for us to understand the meaning of the elements our Lord used to give us the ordinance of the Lord’s Supper. Our Savior simply took the unleavened bread and wine of the passover supper and incorporated them into the elements to be used in the Lord’s Supper. He said, concerning the bread, “this is my body,” and concerning the wine, “this is my blood.” We need to understand the meaning of those words.
Error concerning the meaning of our Lord’s words can lead and has lead men to serious, deplorable idolatry and superstition. Papists tell us that the bread and wine literally become the body and blood of Christ. In the mass the priest pronounces his mumbo-jumbo, waves his hands, and pretends to magically transform the bread and wine into Christ’s body and blood. Thus, the mass becomes, in the idolaters’ minds, a sacrifice, a recrucifixion of Christ to make atonement for sin!
Luther taught that the bread and wine were mystically and spiritually transformed into the body and blood of Christ, so that the elements themselves became holy and conveyed grace to the communicants. Many today have a view similar to Luther’s. They attach a pagan, idolatrous meaning to the bread and wine of the Lord’s Table. I have friends who used to bury any bread and wine that was left over after communion. They had been taught that once it was consecrated, it could never be used again. Others make the ordinance (Christ’s established symbol of his finished work) to be a sacrament (a means by which grace is conveyed to the soul).
Without question, the meaning of our Lord’s words is this: “This bread represents my body. This wine represents my blood.” There is absolutely no indication that he meant any more than that. Frequently, in the Scriptures something is said to be what it merely represents simply because there was no term in the Hebrew language to express symbolism. Though the New Testament was written in Greek, it retains the idiom of the Hebrew. Words like “signify,” “denote,” “portray,” “typify,” or “represent” are not found in the Old Testament. Here are some examples of things being said to be what they, obviously, only represent.
Genesis 40:12 – “The three branches are (represent) three days.”
Genesis 41:26 — “The seven kine are (represent) seven years.”
Daniel 7:24 — “The ten horns are (represent) ten kings.”
Matthew 13:18 — “The field is (represents) the world.”
Revelation 1:20 — “The seven stars are (represent) the angels of the seven churches, and the seven candlesticks which thou sawest are (represent) the seven churches.”
The Bible is full of expressions similar to these, which we would never think of taking in a literal sense. Good sense demands that they be interpreted allegorically. Our Savior is called “the Lamb of God,” “the Door of the sheep,” “the Lion of Judah,” and “the Vine.” No one would ever think of saying that he is literally those things! And no one, whose mind has not been perverted by religious nonsense, would ever imagine that the bread and wine of the Lord’s Supper are anything but representatives of our Redeemer’s body and his blood. All you have to do is taste the bread to know that it is bread, not flesh! All you have to do is drink the wine to know that it is wine, not blood!
The unleavened bread represents the holy human body of our Savior. We dare not use soda crackers or light bread. Our Lord used unleavened bread for a reason. Leaven represents sin; and our Savior had no sin. Therefore, he used unleavened bread to represent his body.
The wine represents his precious, sin-atoning blood. Many today have found excuses for using grape juice, kool-aid, and other things in the celebration of the Lord’s Supper. But no excuse will justify such perverse behavior in the house of God. Wine is used because, like the unleavened bread, it is free of corruption, and thus a proper representation of our Savior’s blood. In verse 28 our Lord tells us four things about his blood.
He says it is “my blood” (Acts 20:8), the blood of that man who is God: infinitely meritorious blood, sin-atoning, precious blood.
This is “the blood of the new testament,” the everlasting, new covenant (Heb. 13:20).
His blood was “shed for many.” It was not shed for all, but for many; the many who are the objects of his mercy, love, and grace; the many who are redeemed and saved by it.
His blood was shed “for the remission of sins.” There was no other way by which God could, in his holiness, justice, and truth, forgive the sins of his people. Only by the shedding of Christ’s blood can he be both “a just God and a Savior,” both just and the Justifier (Isa. 45:20; Rom. 3:24-28).
When we come together around the Lord’s Table, we should take great care to focus our attention on the incarnation, life, and death of Christ as our Substitute. That is what is represented to us by the unleavened bread and wine.
The Purpose
When he established the Lord’s Supper as a standing ordinance of divine worship, our Savior plainly stated the purpose of the ordinance. The Holy Spirit tells us in 1 Corinthians 11:24 that he said, “This do in remembrance of me.” The Lord’s Supper was established by Christ to be a memorial of him and his great sacrifice of love for us, by which he redeemed his elect, no more and no less.
Immense harm has been done by those who have taught God’s people that this is a mysterious, complex thing. The fact is, as I have already shown you, it could not have been established with greater simplicity.
The Lord’s Supper is a symbolic memorial ordinance of public worship. It is not an ordinance to be observed privately, but publicly. It is an ordinance for redeemed sinners, for believers, for men and women who are born again by the power and grace of God the Holy Spirit. By our public observance of this ordinance, eating the bread and drinking the wine, we openly declare to all that we are sinners in need of Christ alone as our sin-atoning Savior, looking to him alone for salvation and eternal life, trusting him just as we did in our baptism when we were symbolically buried with him in the watery grave and arose with him to walk in the newness of life.
The Lord’s Supper is a solemn, but joyful ordinance of worship. At the end of the Supper, our Lord and his disciples sang a hymn. Every remembrance of our redemption accomplished by Christ should fill us with joy. John Trapp suggested that we ought to leave the Lord’s Table with “shouting as a giant after his wine, singing and making melody to the Lord in our hearts. We should come from the Lord’s table, as Moses did from the mount, with our faces shining; as the good women did from the sepulchre, ‘with fear and great joy;’ as the people went to their tents from Solomon’s feast, ‘joyful and glad of heart’ (1 Kings 8:66). If those in the wilderness were so cheered and cherished by their idolatrous feast before the golden calf that they ‘eat and drink, and rise up to play’ (1 Cor. 10:7), how much more should we by this blessed banquet?”