With us celebrating communion and remembering the sacrificial death of our Lord this Sunday, I thought I’d write something about it. Actually, it was my daily reading of the Scripture on Thursday that sparked the idea. My reading was from Zechariah 7.
On 4 December, 518 B.C., a delegation of men came to Jerusalem to ask the priests and prophets about whether they should continue with the tradition of mourning and fasting for the destruction of Solomon’s Temple when Jerusalem fell and the people of Israel were forced into exile in Babylon back in 586 B.C (the second fast was to remember the murder of Gedaliah, Babylonian governor of Judah – see 2 Kings 25:25).
The reason for the question is the exile is over and they are now back in Jerusalem and Solomon’s Temple 2.0 is at the halfway point of completion. While the aforementioned practice of mourning and fasting was not something God commanded, it had been in place for 70 years. The thinking was, “Since we’ve done this for so many years, we might as well keep doing it”.
God speaking through Zechariah rebukes them, telling them their fasting and mourning was self-serving like much of what they did in His name. Outwardly, they look the part but inwardly, their hearts are not with nor for God (see Isaiah 29:13 cited by Jesus in Matthew 15:8). At the end of the day, they lived to please themselves, not God.
Despite God’s attempt to highlight this, they ‘stubbornly turned away and put their fingers in their ears to keep from hearing’ (verse 11). They ignored God’s repeated pleas to change their ways and conform to His will for them which included administering true justice, showing mercy and compassion to one another, particularly the widows, fatherless, foreigners and the poor. And lastly, to stop scheming against one another (verses 8-10).
Brothers and sisters, I’d like to sound a warning to us and it is this: if we approach the Lord’s Supper but continue to live our lives as we please, with little to no regard for His lordship over our lives, then we are no different from the Israelites the Lord rebuked in Zechariah. That is why the apostle Paul told his readers to examine their lives before eating the bread and drinking the wine (read 1 Corinthians 11:17-34).
Upon examining our lives there are two things we discover: we are not worthy of Christ’s death. We never will be no matter how hard we try. The second thing we discover is we have been crucified with Christ. We no longer live but Christ lives in us. The life we now live in the body, we live by faith in Christ who loved and gave himself up for us (Gal 2:20). We belong to him and we live to bring glory to Him. This Sunday then, at the Lord’s Supper, let’s ask the Holy Spirit to help us live our lives with Jesus as both our high priest and our King!
Following Jesus,
Mark
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