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At 2 A.M. on Monday morning, I awoke hungry, ravenously so, to the point I had to get up and find something to eat. I lay back down about 2:30, but was tossing and turning in a semi-sleep as a “download” came to me about the significance of meals and several important meals that are described in the Bible. Finally, when those thoughts became alliterated (a sure sign of the anointing - LOL!), I knew I had to get it written down or I’d never go back to sleep, so about 3:45, I grabbed my phone and typed it into the notetaking app.

There’s an old joke about an elementary classroom that had a wide variety of students of different religious backgrounds. The teacher assigned them to bring in a symbol of their faiths for show and tell. Little Mary Margaret stood and said, “I’m Catholic, and this is a set of rosary beads.” Little Abraham said, “I’m Jewish, and this is a Star of David.” The third student proclaimed, “My name is Ali-Abdul. I’m a Muslim, and this is my Koran.” Finally, the fourth student proclaimed, “I’m Johnny. I’m a Southern Baptist, and this is a casserole dish.” The joke, of course, is that Baptists tend to have fellowship meals, some churches a lot. Maybe we’re on to something. In the ancient world, there was something mystical and powerful about shared meals. Even today, we recognize the power of shared meals. When a couple goes on a date, whatever else they do, they generally go out to eat. Celebrations usually involve food. When we bemoan the breakdown of families, one of the signs we point to is that families seldom eat meals together anymore. Somehow, it seems, God has invested in meals a deeper meaning beyond just fueling our bodies nutritionally. Let’s think about several powerful meal descriptions in the Bible. In a sense, we can trace all of salvation history in these five meals.

I. THE MEAL OF CORRUPTION (Genesis 3): We all know the story of the Fall, which came about because of a meal gone wrong. Adam and Eve were given a perfect place to live, the Garden of Eden, and a wonderful variety of trees and plants producing all kinds of food. The one tree whose fruit was forbidden to them was the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil. And of course, the devil, in the form of a serpent, tempted them to disobey God in that matter, and at once they were corrupted bodily (they began dying at that very moment), spiritually (instead of running to God in joy, they now ran away from Him in fear), environmentally (instead of living in the Garden, they would be expelled from that perfect environment and struggle in a fallen world marred by their sin), mentally (shame entered the picture, causing them to try to cover themselves), socially (Adam had been so excited when Eve came on the scene; now he tries to blame the whole fiasco on her), and genetically (because like gives birth to like, Adam and Eve passed along the sin nature to all of their descendants). All of us when we come of an age of understanding right from wrong will choose the wrong at least some of the time, and thus we are all sinners by nature and by choice.

II. THE MEAL OF COMMEMORATION (Exodus 12): Despite the Fall and failure of human beings, God chose to set in place a plan of redemption to save us from our sins. That promise of redemption came even in the midst of God’s judgment over our first ancestors’ sins (Genesis 3:15). In the course of time, he chose one man, Abraham, and called him out of idolatry to Himself, promising that from his descendants the Savior would come. Several generations later, Abraham’s descendants went to Egypt, where they were enslaved for some 400 years. But God sent devastating plagues on Egypt to obtain their release, including the final, most devastating plague of all, the death of the all the firstborns in Egypt. Because the Israelites obeyed God, and put the blood of a sacrificed lamb on the doorposts of their houses, the death angel passed over their houses. The sentence of death that was upon the firstborn Israelites was taken away because of the blood of the lamb. Still to this day, the Jewish people celebrate the Passover each year, commemorating that deliverance, but unfortunately, for many of them, they are ignorant to its true significance as a foreshadowing of a much greater deliverance. The true Lamb of God, the Lord Jesus, was sacrificed on a cross, and when we apply His shed blood to our hearts through repentant faith, we pass over from the sentence of death that sin brings to eternal life in Him.

III. THE MEAL OF CONDEMNATION (Daniel 5): The Babylonian king Belshazzar held a great feast for all of his nobles. He drank from the sacred vessels that had been stolen from the Lord’s Temple by his predecessor Nebuchadnezzar, even while praising the pagan gods of gold, silver, bronze, iron, stone and wood worshiped in Babylon. Suddenly, a hand appeared and wrote in the plaster of the king’s palace the words, “Mene, Mene, Tekel, Upharsin.” Daniel interprets those words to mean that the king had been weighed in God’s balance and found wanting, and because of that, his life and his kingdom had come to an end. That very night, Belshazzar was slain, and Babylon fell to the Medes and the Persians. Belshazzar’s story is the story of us all. We may not bow down or drink toasts to literal, physical idols, but anyone outside of Christ is in fact committing idolatry, putting other things in the first place that only God deserves. All of us have been weighed in the balance and found wanting. One sin, even if only committed one time, outweighs all of the good we could ever do, and we’ve all committed multiplied thousands of them - sins of commission, sins of omission, sins of thought, sins of attitude, sins of motivation, intentional sins, unintentional sins. We are under the Lord’s righteous condemnation for our sins, and our deaths, just like Belshazzar’s, can come at any time and totally unexpectedly.

IV. THE MEAL OF COMMUNION (I Corinthians 11:23-26): We are helpless to change our hopeless situation. We can try to turn over a new leaf, do good deeds, go to church, participate in religious rituals, etc, but in every case, we will be found wanting. Nothing we can do can commend us to God and earn His pardon. We can’t get to God, so He came to us in the person of Jesus. He came to live a sinless life and then to give Himself to die on the cross as a sinless sacrifice for us, taking our place and paying the price for our sins. When we place our faith in Him and His sacrifice on the cross, our sin debt is wiped out, and we receive the superabundant righteousness of Christ imputed to our account. The night before that great once-for-all final sacrifice, Jesus instituted a meal illustrating and commemorating that sacrifice, which we call communion or the Lord’s Supper. He lifted two elements from the Passover meal and invested them with new meaning. The bread that He broke was called the afekomen. It is a piece of unleavened bread, striped and pierced by the baking process over a griddle, which at a certain point in the Passover meal is broken, wrapped in linen, and hidden away, only to be brought out later and consumed. Jesus said that this afekomen represented His body. Over the course of the next few days, His body would be striped and pierced, broken in death, wrapped in linen, buried in a new tomb, but on the third day He would rise again! Then, Jesus took the last cup of the supper, called the cup of redemption, and He said that it represented His blood, shed on the cross for us. The blood of the ancient Old Covenant sacrifices could only cover sin for a season; His blood takes away sin for all time! The fact that we actually eat the bread and drink the contents of the cup symbolizes the fact that it is not enough that Jesus died for us; to be saved, each one of us must receive what He did for us through repentance and faith, trusting His sacrifice as the payment for our sins, and receiving Him as our Savior and Lord. Every time we receive the communion meal, we commemorate and celebrate God’s great love and Jesus’ great sacrifice for us.

V. THE MEAL OF CONSUMMATION (Revelation 19): In the ancient world, before a couple got married, there was a betrothal period of a year. During that time, the bride’s job was to make herself ready, learning how to be a good wife, and the groom’s main task was to build a home to bring his bride to once they married. When the year ended, the groom would come for his bride, then there would be a week-long feast, followed by the ceremony, and then the couple would live together from then on as husband and wife. The Bible presents Jesus as the bridegroom and the church as His bride. Right now, we’re in the betrothal period. We are in a learning program of sanctification, learning to be pleasing to Him, and He has gone to prepare us a place to be with Him. One day, He will return for His bride, the church will be taken from this earth,  and while the judgments of God fall upon this unregenerate planet, the church will be in heaven celebrating the Marriage Supper of the Lamb. From that time on, we will always be with the Lord. I’ve often said that marriage is the great eye-opener; you don’t really know someone until you’re married to him or her. Surprises - both good and bad - often mark the first year of a marriage. But there won’t be any bad surprises in this marriage. When Jesus comes for us, we will be perfected, removed forever from the presence and the power of sin, and the only surprise we’ll have is how much more amazing Jesus and what He has prepared for us are than anything we could have imagined! Now, we see and understand like looking in a mirror dimly, but then we will be face to face with our Lord forever.

Let’s gather together this Sunday for a foretaste of the worship of heaven as we sing our praises to Him, and a foretaste of the glories of heaven as we study His Word!

Numbers 6:24-26,
Bro. Donnie