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The Coming of the Kingdom
(17th in the series of expositions on Communion delivered on Mar 18, 1979)
For as often as you eat this bread and drink the cup, you proclaim the Lord's death until He comes. (1 Cor 11:26)
Communion has three tenses: it looks back to what Jesus has done for us at Calvary, it proclaims His death by words and by our lives, and it looks forward.
Luke 22:18 says:
For I tell you that from now on I shall not drink of the fruit of the vine until the kingdom of God comes.
The person of Jesus and the kingdom of God is identical. The Kingdom of God and His rule will be established when Jesus comes again, when God's will will be done on earth as it is in heaven. No worship of Communion is complete without this expectation. In Luke 22:16, Communion becomes a prophecy that we will join together in this messianic feast in the kingdom of God, it is a promise of the full salvation. Eternal life is something that we should always look forward to, just as in Paul's teaching of the hope of the eternal life. (We have it now as a down payment, and the fullness of it is in the future.)
Communion is a prophecy that God's word will not fail, and that we will enjoy this eternal life in the future, the joy of pass-over, of going over the Jordan into the promised land (Acts 15:11; Rom 5:9,10; 8:23). "Blessed is he who shall eat bread in the kingdom of God" (Luke 14:15). To have the privilege to eat bread in the kingdom of God is to be fully saved , to be able to partake in the final Passover in the fellowship with Christ.
In the Jewish Passover, they must clean out all the leaven, which is a symbol of sin. Therefore if we hope to take part in this prophecy of Communion that the kingdom will come, we must be cleansed in order to enjoy the pass-over feast. "Cleanse out the old leaven... for Christ our paschal lamb has been sacrificed" (1 Cor 5:7). By God's grace and His Holy Spirit we can remove all our sins. If we do not clean out all the leaven which makes us puffed up, we then will have nothing to do with God (1 Cor 5:7,8).
This is the beauty of holiness, therefore remove all sins and put on clean garments.
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Communion Series:
- Worship
- A Sharing in the Body of Christ
- God's Expression of Love to Us
- Pressing toward the Mark of the High Calling
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