Freshbrook Church Podcast | 22Mar26 | Passion | Phil Bailey

Phil Bailey continues our series of talks from the Gospel of Luke - Passion (How Jesus founded an everlasting kingdom upon love, humility and sacrifice).    

Today's passage is - Luke 22: 1 - 23.

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:01

Good morning. Today I'll be reading from Exodus 12, which is on page 68 in the Church Bibles. The Lord said to Moses and Aaron in Egypt, this month is to be for you the first month, the first month of your year. Tell the whole community of Israel that on the tenth day of this month, every man is to take a lamb for his family, one for each household. If any household is too small for a whole lamb, they must share one with their nearest neighbor, having taken into account the number of people there are. You are to determine the amount of lamb needed in accordance with what each person will eat. The animals you choose must be year old males without defect, and you may take them from the sheep or the goats. Take care of them until the fourteenth day of the month, when all the members of the community of Israel must slaughter them at twilight. Then they are to take some of the blood and put it on the sides and tops of the door frames of the house, where they eat the lambs. That same night they are to eat the meal, uh eat the meat roasted over the fire, along with bitter herbs and bread made without yeast. Do not eat the meat raw or boiled in water, but roast it over a fire, with the head, legs, and internal organs. Do not leave any of it until morning. If some is left till morning, you must burn it. This is how you are to eat it. With your cloak tucked into your belt, your sandals on your feet, and your staff in your hand. Eat it in haste. This is the Lord's Passover. On that same night I will pass through Egypt and strike down every firstborn of both people and animals, and I will bring judgment on all the gods of Egypt. I am the Lord. The blood will be a sign for you on the houses where you are, and when I see the blood, I will pass over you. No destructive plague will touch you when I strike Egypt. This is a day you are to commemorate. For the generations to come you shall celebrate it as a festival for the Lord. A lasting ordinance. For seven days you are to eat bread made without yeast. On the first day, remove the yeast from your houses, for whoever eats anything with yeast in it must be cut off from Israel. On the fifth on the first day, hold a sacred assembly, and another on one on the seventh day. Do no work at all on these days, except to prepare food for everyone to eat. That is all you may do.

SPEAKER_01 3:02

Please turn your Bibles to the Gospel of Luke twenty two. Verse 1 to 23. Luke, Gospel of Luke, verse chapter 22. Now the festival of unleavened bread called the Passover was approaching, and the chief priests and the teachers of the law were looking for some way to get rid of Jesus, for they were afraid of the people. Then Satan entered Judas called Iscariot, one of the twelve, and Judas went to the chief priests and the officers of the temple guard and discussed with them how he might betray Jesus. They were delighted and agreed to give him money. He consented and watched for an opportunity to hand Jesus over to them when no crowd was present. Then came the day on unleavened bread on which the Passover lamp had to be sacrificed. Jesus sent Peter and John saying, Go and make preparations for us to eat the Passover. Where do you want us to prepare for it? They asked. He replied, As you enter the city, a man carrying a jar of water will meet you. Follow him to the house that he enters and say to the owners of the house, the teacher asks, Where is the guest room where I may eat the Passover with my disciples? He will show you a large room upstairs, all furnished. Make preparations there. They left and found things just as Jesus had told them. So they prepared the Passover. When the heart had come, Jesus and his apostles reclined on the table, and he said to them, I have eagerly desired to eat this Passover with you before I suffer. For I tell you, I will not eat it again until it finds fulfillment in the kingdom of God. After taking the cup, he gave thanks and said, Take this and divide it among you, for I tell you, I will not drink again from the fruit of the wine until the kingdom of God comes. And he took bread, gave thanks, and broke it, and gave it to them, saying, This is my body given for you. Do this in remembrance of me. In the same way, after the supper, he took the cup, saying, This cup is the new covenant in my blood, which is poured out for you. But the hand of him who is going to betray me is with mine on this table. The Son of Man will go as it has been decreed. But woe to the man who betrays him. They began to question among themselves which of them it might be who would do this.

SPEAKER_02 6:04

Thank you, Rachel and Tom. Morning, everyone. It's good to see you all. And Phil, if I've not met you before, um the pastors here, it'd be lovely to say hello to you afterwards. Now, I um I can I Jesus' words resonate with me when he says, I have eagerly desired to eat this meal with you before I suffer. Um, you most of you will know I've not been particularly well recently and about to have three weeks off, but I have eagerly desired to preach this sermon because this is such a wonderful passage, and that Jesus' actions and his words here are such good news. And I've I've I've really, really loved dwelling in them this last week. I don't have much to say by by way of an introduction, other than I think the main takeaway from this sermon when we get there will be, I hope, a note of assurance for for those of us who struggle with either a sense of uh fear before God because of our sin, and that that fear that we that we might not be good enough, that Jesus' sacrifice might not be good enough, that somehow when we stand before God, he's gonna say, I'm sorry, you're not coming into my new creation. I I hope that this sermon will bring a note of encouragement and assurance for you, and for those who feel that they are really wrestling and struggling with their sin in a way that has just seemed to go on and on without any sense of breakthrough, without any sense of things improving, without any sense of victory, maybe for months, maybe for years. Again, as we come to what Jesus says about a new covenant in his blood, I really hope you will find some encouragement. So the two main things I want to talk about this morning: a better Passover and a better covenant. Let's pray and then we'll dive in. Lord Jesus, we come to one of the most profound, sacred, glorious moments in the whole gospel this morning. Because it gives to your death and to your life such amazing significance, and it gives us such hope. And Lord, we pray that you would, by your Holy Spirit, encourage us greatly this morning. For your name's sake. Amen. Right, if you keep your Bibles open at Luke chapter 22, um there is a real contrast between how Jesus entered Jerusalem back in chapter 19 and how he does so now in chapter 22. In chapter 19, his entrance was very public, with cheering crowds, welcoming him as the Messiah, expecting him no doubt to be crowned king very soon. In chapter 22, Jesus prepares to enter the city secretly as a wanted man. As verse 1 tells us, the religious leaders of Jerusalem wanted to kill him because they were afraid of the people. They didn't believe that he was the Messiah, but they feared, I guess, that the crowds of Jesus supporters would rebel against their own authority and rebel against the Roman authorities, such was their eagerness for the Messiah to make Israel great again. And the leaders knew from experience that the Romans might well respond brutally, not just to the rebels, but to the whole city or nation. But the leaders weren't the only ones with doubts about Jesus. Verses 3 to 4 tell us that Satan entered Judas called Iscariot, one of the twelve, and he went to the leaders to discuss how he might betray Jesus. Now we don't have time now to go into questions like why Judas might have done this or how Satan could enter someone handpicked by Jesus. If questions like these trouble you, um I've prepared a handout which is available at the back where Julie's sitting, um, with the table with the glasses on it. There's a well, there was a chair next to it, there are the handouts on there. Um I hope that will help with those questions. And in it, I I've tried to draw out um something of what distinguishes a true disciple from a false one, and I've tried to provide assurance that under this new covenant that Jesus speaks of, we have every hope of being different to Judas. So do take a copy afterwards if that would help you. For now, it's enough to note that Jesus looks increasingly vulnerable, doesn't he? And yet he remains completely in control of the situation. He knows he must die, not for his own sins, but for the sins of the world. But he will not surrender himself until the moment of his choosing. And his unusual plans for celebrating the Passover confirm this. Knowing that his betrayal is imminent, knowing that it will come from one of his own, he only lets two disciples know the location for the meal in advance. And you'll note in verse 8 that it's not Judas. And rather than giving Peter and John a street address, which Judas might overhear and then pass on to the authorities, he gives them pre-arranged one-off signs to follow, which only they will see. You have to be there in the moment to see them. Verse 10. A man carrying a water jar would meet them as they entered the city. Now he would have been pretty easy to spot because in that culture men didn't usually fetch water from the well. That was usually a woman's job. The man would then lead them to a house, and the owner would show them the room to use. And so Jesus ensures he won't be arrested until after he has celebrated the Passover with his key disciples. Why so particular about this? Was it because he was a faithful Jew who just knew he wanted to celebrate a really important festival? Was it because he wanted to enjoy one last meal with his friends before he died? I'm guessing that both of those reasons are true to some extent. But more importantly, the Passover would give vital context and meaning to his impending death. And this brings us to our first point. At the Last Supper, Jesus prepares a better Passover. Now, verse 7 tells us that this was the first day of the festival of unleavened bread. As we've read in Exodus, an eight-day festival commemorating when God rescued Israel from slavery in Egypt over 1,400 years before. The houses were swept clean of yeast or leaven, they ate flatbread. And on this day, each household slaughtered a spotless lamb without blemish or defect to commemorate the lambs that their ancestors sacrificed in Egypt. As we read Exodus 12, we saw how the blood of those first lambs was painted over the door frames of their houses, so that when the angel of death passed through Egypt, killing the firstborn sons and animals of anyone without the blood on their doors, he would see the blood on the doors of the Israelite homes and pass them by. And this was a judgment upon Pharaoh and all in Egypt who had enslaved, tortured, murdered the Israelites, and refused to let God's firstborn son, the nation of Israel, go free. There was something very fitting about it. And the message would have been very clear to the firstborn sons of the Israelites. This lamb died so that you don't have to. This lamb died so that you can live. And so significant was that first Passover that again, as we read, the month in which it happened became the first month in Israel's calendar because it was like the beginning of their nation, the birth of their nation, a bit like Independence Day in the USA. But Jesus says in verses 15 to 16 that there is something greater to come. This was not the end of the story. He says, I have eagerly desired to eat this Passover with you before I suffer. For I tell you, I will not eat it again, the Passover again, until it finds fulfillment in the kingdom of God. So there was unfinished business in that first Passover waiting to be fulfilled. And another occasion was coming, is still coming, in which Israel and indeed people from every nation need to be kept safe by sacrificial bloods to save them from judgment and death. Jesus says in verse 16 that this will be when the kingdom of God comes in full. Now, on the one hand, that will be a glorious day. God will reign unopposed over every square millimeter of creation, restoring it, renewing it, banishing sin and evil and sickness and suffering and even death. And he will wipe away every tear, replacing it with endless joy and peace. As I said last week, this is the true happily ever after that every good story foreshadows. It's the happy ending that produces tears and feelings of deep longing when we watch films as diverse as Gone with the Wind or Beauty and the Beast or Lord of the Rings. But in order to get there on that day, there must be a reckoning. Just as Sauron and the armies of Mordor must be defeated from Middle Earth to be set free in Lord of the Rings. So all human and demonic opposition to God's reign in our world must be subdued. And justice must be served if this world is ever to enjoy true and lasting peace. And this will happen on the day that Jesus returns to judge the living and the dead. It will come. And similar to the first Passover, it will be a day of wrath and vengeance against all who have opposed Jesus or refused to believe in him as King. And if we want God's wrath to pass over us on that day, we must shelter under the blood of a better Lamb. Jesus. As John said a few weeks ago when he was leading communion, Jesus starts to change the Passover liturgy. And to understand the shock and the significance of this, I want you to think of the King's coronation ceremony back in 2023. Now, for all that there were certain modern tweaks to that ceremony, things like music that represented Britain's multicultural population. Most of the ceremony strictly followed traditions dating back hundreds of years. The royal procession to Westminster Abbey, the king presented to the congregation, an oath to uphold the law and the Church of England, the anointing with holy oil, the investiture with symbols of his reign, the royal orb and two scepters and a ring, the crowning, the enthronement, the Prince of Wales coming to pay homage. All of these traditions were non-negotiable. If the king or the prime minister had tried to abandon them, the coronation might well have been rejected as unconstitutional. By comparison, the Jewish Passover ceremony had developed over an even longer period into a theologically rich and beautiful and comforting and firmly fixed set of traditions. If you want to learn more about them, again, as was said at the beginning, come along tonight to our evening service at 6:30. Jerry Cohen will demonstrate a traditional Passover meal and tell us how it points to Jesus. And it should be really encouraging. But for now, the point is that Jesus does the unthinkable. He interrupts a thousand, 1,400-year-old liturgy and reinterprets two of the key components: the unleavened bread and one of the cups of wine. And he uses them to point to another sacrifice. Now in verse 19, he breaks the bread and says, This is my body given for you. Do this in remembrance of me. And so from now on, the bread doesn't just symbolize a hasty departure from Egypt, it symbolizes the death of Jesus. His body broken through beatings and flogging and crucifixion and a spear wound through his side. And verse 20, he takes the wine and he says, This cup is the new covenant in my blood, which is poured out for you. Now, wine didn't even feature in God's instructions for the first Passover in Exodus. The actual blood of lambs was already on the doorpost. They didn't need a symbol. But now the wine comes to represent the blood. Of Jesus as the greater sacrificial lamb. And as with the first Passover, the message is clear. This lamb dies so that you don't have to. This lamb dies so that you can live. And when we commemorate Jesus' sacrifice with trust, with humble dependence in the Lord's Supper, or communion as we also call it, it is as if we are painting the blood of Jesus over the doorway of our own hearts, as the Pentecostals used to put it. At the Lord's Supper, we lay claim to his blood afresh. We take refuge under the cross of Christ, saying, God have mercy on me, a sinner. Because Jesus died in my place. So when we share the bread and wine later this morning, it should give us confidence. Sorry, Steve, that one. It should give us confidence that the wrath of God will pass over us on Judgment Day. When we share that bread and wine, we should have confidence that on Judgment Day we may pass safely through into God's eternal kingdom. So we can eat and drink with humble gratitude because the blood of because in the Lord's Supper, Jesus points us to a better Passover. And if you have not yet trusted Jesus, please will you seek shelter under his blood today. There will be an opportunity to do that later. But please, don't leave today without having prayed that prayer. And preferably with someone, there will be an opportunity at the end of the service to come up and pray with me or Hassan or someone else who you feel comfortable praying with. Don't leave today without taking shelter under the blood of Jesus. Now before we move on to the second part, I'd love it if we could stand and sing and can it be? We're just gonna sing verses one, three, and five because of time. Nothing against verses two and four, they're great, but we want to get to communion in good time. Let's sing and celebrate that blood that was shed for us. Let's just take a moment and just respond in prayer. Lord Jesus, we praise you that for every one of us who has a share in your blood, who has trusted in you to save us, that we will be able to approach the throne of God, not with pride, not with arrogance, but with a humble confidence on judgment day. Not because we deserve it, but because you have made us worthy by your perfect life and death. Amen. Okay, we've seen that Jesus prepares a better Passover. Secondly, Jesus prepares a better covenant. Now we've already read in verse 20 that Jesus says, This cup is the new covenant in my blood, which is poured out for you. Now, what is a covenant? We have two parallels in modern Britain. The first is marriage. Marriage is a legally binding covenant, agreement between two parties, giving mutual responsibilities and privileges to love and to cherish, to have and to hold, to be faithful until death parts us. And a last will and testament is also a covenant which legally binds the executors of the dead person to dispose of their property in accordance with their wishes. God's covenants in the Bible have similarities to both of those. Firstly, marriage. When he makes a covenant with the ancient Israelites after he's brought them out of slavery in Egypt, like a marriage, there are these mutual responsibilities and privileges. God promises to be their personal God and to treat them as their as his special people and to bless them so abundantly in Leviticus 26 and Deuteronomy 28 that it would be like heaven on earth in the promised land. And in return, the Israelites must keep his laws expressed primarily in the Ten Commandments, worshiping and obeying him as a sign of their love for him. That's how they express their love for God. If they rebelled or worshipped other gods, this would be treated as spiritual adultery. God would withhold the covenant blessings and instead he would bring on them covenant curses, ending, if they didn't repent, ending in exile from the promised land. A little like divorce, a separation of sorts. But like a last will and testament, God's covenant was not a contract between two equal parties. Just as a dying person has the right to unilaterally determine how their property will be shared, so the maker of heaven and earth, who single-handedly redeemed Israel from slavery with no help from them, had every right to unilaterally set the terms of his covenant with them. And there's another similarity because a will only comes into force when the person who wrote it dies. And God's promised blessings to his people could only be released through a death. We see this in his covenants with Abraham in Genesis 15 and Genesis 22. And we see it in his covenant with Israel in Exodus 24 at Mount Sinai. And there the young men sacrifice burnt offerings, probably rams and bulls, at the foot of the mountain. Half of the blood is poured on the altar, half of it is kept. Moses then reads the covenant law to the Israelites, the Ten Commandments. The Israelites commit to obeying everything God has said. This is the covenant-making ceremony. And then in verse 8, Moses takes some of the blood of the sacrifices and he sprinkles it on the people, saying, This is the blood of the covenant that the Lord has made with you in accordance with all these words. So God's covenants can only be made effective through death. Why? Ultimately, it's because the penalty for human rebellion and unfaithfulness towards God is death. We see that all the way back in Genesis 3 when Adam and Eve rebel, and it's not just that they will one day die physically, they are separated from God spiritually. Spiritual death. And there is a justice to it. If I can give an analogy, imagine a refugee comes to the UK, they are granted asylum, they enjoy a new start in life with all the privileges of a and the opportunities of a free, stable, prosperous, relatively peaceful society. It's not perfect, but it's not bad. And then imagine that that refugee begins to abuse our hospitality by breaking the law, disregarding our values, and getting involved in a terrorist plot to overthrow the government. What would the government do in that situation? If they didn't imprison the refugee here, they'd deport them back to their own country, wouldn't they? That's usually what happens to um asylum seekers and refugees who break the law. They are deported. And that is perfectly just because someone who takes so much but shows no respect or gratitude in return does not deserve the privileges that they've received. Privileges that were never earned in the first place, which were given as a gift in mercy. And it is the same with God's creation. If He made it and He made us and we live here entirely at His pleasure, not because we have earned it in any way. And if we are going to seize all the privileges of life and creation's bounty while refusing to respect God's authority and honour his will for how his creation is to be enjoyed, then we have no right to remain. And it is what all of us deserve because all of us actively willingly rebel against God's reign in so many ways. As we've seen throughout Luke's gospel, sin isn't just about outward acts like dishonoring our parents or theft or murder or adultery or lying. It starts in the heart with pride, with hatred, with lusting after what doesn't belong to us. And most of all, it is when we love and depend on other things and other people more than God, and we turn them into idols and objects of worship in the process. So all of us have sinned and fall short of the glory of God. And the privileges of entering into a covenant relationship with God cannot therefore be given justly to any human being unless and until the penalty is paid. Either by the sinner themselves or a substitute in their place, a life for a life. Now in the days of Abraham and Moses, God was content for a time for animals to act as those substitutes. Rams, goats, lambs, bulls. But a human life cannot ultimately be redeemed by anything less than another innocent, spotless human life. One who has no sins of their own to pay for. So it was inevitable that a day should come when God would require a better sacrifice to seal his covenant. And since Israel proved, ancient Israel proved utterly incapable of keeping God's covenant, of obeying the Ten Commandments, so deeply embedded was sin in their hearts, as it is in every human heart, that a better covenant was needed to bring about faithful obedience. A better sacrifice and a better covenant. Now, if we can have the next slide, Steve, that is exactly what God said he would do through the prophet Jeremiah. Chapter 31, verses 31 to 34. The days are coming when I will make a new covenant with the people of Israel and with the people of Judah. It will not be like the covenant I made with their ancestors when I took them by the hand and led them out of Egypt, because they broke my covenant, though I was a husband to them, declares the Lord. Again, that similarity with marriage. This is the covenant that I will make with the people of Israel after that time, declares the Lord. I will put my law in their minds and write it on their hearts. I will be their God, and they will be my people. No longer will they teach their neighbour, saying to one another, Know the Lord, because they will all know me, from the least of them to the greatest. For I will forgive their wickedness and will remember their sins no more. Never mind the rest of us, our unbelievably gracious God promised to make a new covenant where he would change their very hearts, giving them both the desire and the power to keep his law. And in Ezekiel 36, we haven't got time to go there now, but Ezekiel 36, verses 24 to 27, he makes clear that he will do this by the Holy Spirit, by pouring his spirit into us to change our hearts. And there is also the promise of a better sacrifice implicit in verse 34, when God says that he will completely forgive their wickedness and remember their sins no more. That could not be done on the basis of lambs and bulls being killed. This new and better covenant is what Jesus proclaims at the Last Supper. This new and better covenant is what Jesus seals by his blood at the cross as the innocent one dies in the place of the guilty. And unleashes the tidal wave of God's blessing on sinners. This new and better covenant is what God promises to extend even to Gentile nations like ours in places like Isaiah chapter 56. And this new and better covenant is what we lay claim to afresh every time we eat the Lord's supper, taking bread and wine together. And when we do so shortly, we should be awestruck that God has shown us so much mercy. That first Passover in Egypt meant the Israelites were no longer slaves to the Egyptians. That first Passover brought out about a covenant that could be broken and was broken, not by God but the people. But Jesus's Passover sacrifice brings about a covenant that will never be broken, even though we continue to struggle with sin, that does not invalidate God's new covenant with us. And so whether you would call yourself a Christian or not, we can have the next slide, Steve. If you know that you have not lived in a way that pleases God this morning, if you feel the weight of shame and condemnation, but if you feel powerless to escape it, come to Jesus this morning. Come for the thousandth time, if needs be. Ask and receive a forgiveness so complete that God promises He will forget your sins forever. Unlike friends or relatives who might secretly hold a grudge against you for something you did for years, keeping it in reserve, waiting to blandish it in your face like a weapon if you dare to do something that upsets them again. God will never mention your sins again once you have confessed them to him. As far as he is concerned, they are dead and buried and thrown to the bottom of the ocean. And if you feel defeated by your sin, unable to change, even though you know how God commands you to live, repeatedly tripped up by the same old habits or the same lies or the same addictions. Come to Jesus today, He promises to write His law on your heart and mind by the Holy Spirit. That's more permanent, permanent than letters carved in stone. And so if you are despairing of your own ability to change, you are actually in the very best place for him to work within you. Because as he says to Paul in 2 Corinthians, my grace is sufficient for you, and my power is. Is made perfect in your weakness. Ask this morning and receive fresh encouragement and fresh power from the Holy Spirit in your battle against sin. But please also find another Christian whom you trust to share that struggle with, to tell them what you are struggling with, and to get them to be praying with you, not just as a one-off, but continually. Preferably a Christian who displays a healthy degree of spiritual maturity. They might not have a silver bullet in terms of advice, but they have the Holy Spirit too. And Jesus has called us into a church, a family of people who have the Holy Spirit, who are being changed by the Holy Spirit, so that together, not as isolated individuals, but together, we can do battle with sin and we can gain victory. Even the simple act of confessing your sin to a brother or sister is liberating. Though it's hard to face, yes, but there is something about that act of bringing sin out into the cold light of day that makes it begin to lose its appeal and power because you you see it for what it is, and it's not secret, and that sense of illicitness starts to fade. We will confess our sins together this morning before we take the Lord's Supper. And when we do take it, be encouraged. Jesus' blood seals a better covenant. We can live in the freedom of total forgiveness and freedom from slavery to sin. We're not going to get it right all the time, but we now have the power to fight. And Jesus' blood prepares that better Passover so we can look with humility and confidence to the day of judgment. Let's take a minute just to give thanks quietly. Maybe if you've not asked Jesus to forgive you before, now is the time if we could have that prayer up on the screen, Steve, to pray very simply for Him to have mercy on you, a sinner, and to change you by His Holy Spirit. Let's just take a minute in quiet to pray, and then we're going to sing. That as we share bread and wine shortly, that you would encourage us, that your blood is sufficient to save us on the day of judgment. And your blood is sufficient to purify us even from within, to change our hearts by this new covenant. Lord, encourage us, we pray. Amen.