A Feast for All Nations

A few Sundays ago, I preached on the equality that the Lord's Supper brings to those who are baptized into Christ. We spent some time considering how eating stratifies society both in Bible times and now. We considered how God enacted and emphasized the exclusivity of Israel by giving them a "kosher" diet, which illustrated the uncleanness of the Gentile nations in a daily and practical way, and how that the cleansing of food in the ministry of Jesus, Peter and Paul shows that the uncleanness of the nations has been purged in the baptism of the cosmos in Christ, and that now all nations eat together at the Lord's Table.

The communion that God has inaugurated among the nations is demonstrated in the ministry of Jesus, as He ate with sinners; of Peter, as he preached to Cornelius; and of Paul, as he preached the equality of slaves and free, men and women, Jews and Gentiles. Thus, when the church at Corinth observed Communion in a way that divided the body of Christ, Paul rebuked them for failing to "discern the Lord's body." The entire point of Communion is that God is forming a new creation community where all walls are broken down.

Also, we considered the correlation between circumcision and baptism as the initiatory rite of Judaism and Christianity, respectively, while highlighting the very dramatic difference: circumcision was designed to set Israel apart from all nations as a covenant people while baptism was ordained to bring all nations together as a new creation in Christ. There were three principle markers of Jewish exclusivity: circumcision, Sabbath observance, and food laws. Paul specifically shows that these markers have been fulfilled in the New Covenant as baptism, the Lord's Day and the Lord's Supper, and each of these now function as instruments of unity within the Christian community, which presages the final reconciliation of all things in heaven and earth into one, unified creation in the resurrection of all things at the last day.

A Feast for All Nations

Isaiah declared that all nations would come to eat on the mountain of the Lord (Isaiah 25). Jesus declared that His Father's house, which is the Temple of the Lord upon the mount of the Lord, should be a house of prayer "for all nations." Thus, Communion is no longer a feast of exclusion where only ethnic Jews may feast at the table of the Lord, but now all nations are called to come and eat at the table of the Lord. God once used food laws to demonstrate Israel's exclusive covenant identity, but now He uses the table of communion to show that all people have been made one in Christ—which means, of course, that they must be in Christ through baptism before they can eat at the table. But if they will be made one body in Christ, then all may eat together with all boundaries broken down. Jews and Gentiles, slaves and free, men and women, Greek and barbarian—all may eat together, as Peter learned on the housetop.

The Lord's Supper is a feast for all nations that signals the unity of all nations in Christ as the head of the new creation. Meals have spiritual significance. We have largely lost the meanings of meals in our fast food age, but remnants of the deep, primal idea remain. We all know on some level that eating together signifies communion. We include and exclude people from fellowship by the means of meals. We refuse to eat with those we exclude, and we are eager to eat with those we include. This is universal.

There is a long history of eating together in Scripture from the ministry of Christ and His conflict with the Pharisees to the ministry of Peter and his experience with Cornelius to, finally, the ministry of Paul and his conflict with the Judaizers. The Lord's Supper is a meal where Christ invites all nations to eat together in anticipation of the resurrection when all things shall be made new. Everywhere the church goes, we eat a meal together as we gather together for worship. Indeed, this is one of the fundamental reasons why we gather, to eat together. Eating together is listed in Acts 2:42 as a fundamental ritual of corporate worship (along with doctrine, fellowship and prayer). Paul makes it plain by the implicit assumption in I Corinthians 11 that the church gathered for the purpose of eating the Lord's Supper. Thus, the meal that we eat together is a proclamation of new creation: by eating, we "proclaim the Lord's death until He comes." And by eating together with all nations—as Gentiles—we proclaim the power of the Lord's death and resurrection for a new creation extended into every corner of the world. This meal, then, signifies the invitation for fellowship and oneness of all people in every nation.

This may seem insignificant to us at first glance because we have been inured to the spiritual significance of table fellowship, but if we can see by the Word of God what the meal means, then we shall regain its power in the present, fast food age. "Come, whoever you are! Come to the table! You all, every one of you, are invited to eat at the table of the King!" This is what we proclaim when we eat the Lord's Supper. Jew and Gentile, slave and free, male and female, Greek and barbarian—all are invited to come and eat at the table of the Lord, to enjoy "A Feast for All Nations."

Unity, Community and the Lordship of Christ against Idols

There is something tugging at the back of my mind here. I know that Paul referred to the oneness of God when speaking about the oneness of Jews and Gentiles among the people of God, which implies the oneness of all nations—the Gentiles—in the new creation. In other words, the oneness of God casts down the pluralistic worship of false gods throughout the nations. The proclamation of God's oneness as the basis for the oneness of the people of God says this: God is one—thus, His creation is one—and the pluralism of false worship is a lie that is exposed by the oneness of God. If there is only one God, then all of the gods of the nations are frauds. They are not gods at all. To tolerate and perpetuate the ongoing division of the nations—as Judaistic-Christian exclusivism did—is to abandon the nations to a damnable fate, to miss the point of Israel's mission in the first place, and to deny the basic message of the Shema: God is one, thus all creation must be made one in Him.

We must grasp this. The Lord's Supper is the supper of the Lord. We eat at the table of the Lord. We are celebrating the death and resurrection of Christ, which leads inexorably to His ascension and exaltation as Lord over all the cosmos. When we eat, we are declaring that Jesus is King of all kings, and we are His people. Thus, Communion celebrates that the one God rules over all as the one true God and that all other gods are frauds. All nations are called, then, to worship this one true God. And as we worship Him, we are all called to feast at the table of the King.

Remember, there were three things that marked the Jews off as separated people from the nations: circumcision, Sabbath observance and food laws. These things were given by God as temporary measures to ensure the distinction and preservation of Israel from among the nations of the world. This is why Paul asserts that the Law was "added" until the time of Christ. The Law was given to mark Israel off as separate from the nations. But now that the faith of Jesus Christ has been proclaimed to all nations, the marks of distinction are no longer needed. In fact, they must be removed, though it is acknowledged that this is a process that will take time and growth from the initial unity of the Spirit into the full-fledged unity of the faith (Ephesians 4). The marks of distinction have become a hindrance to the universal vision of God. If the Jewish contingent of the church insists that Gentiles are not fully Christian unless they become Jewish proselytes, then the church can never attain perfect unity, which means that the nations, indeed, all creation, will never attain the fullness of perfect unity for which it was created. The only way all things can be reconciled into one is if the one true God is worshipped properly by the one true people of God, made up of Jews and Gentiles, bond and free, male and female, Greek and barbarian. When the one true people of God worship the one true God in unity, then all nations will be brought to worship Him (John 17), and the idols of the nations will be exposed as the frauds that they are. All of this, however, is based on the oneness of God being lived in oneness by the people of God. A divided church perpetuates a divided world.

This is why the Lord's Supper is so important. The most practical sense in which the church was divided was played out at Antioch when the Jewish Christians refused to eat with the Gentile Christians. People who can eat together can grow together in perfect unity and fellowship. Thus, Paul was absolutely insistent that the church must not be divided at the Table. He raised this point again to the church at Corinth. The church cannot be divided in its observance of the Lord's Supper. The church must be brought together into one body by the indwelling Spirit, and one of the primary ways this is done is at the Lord's Table. The Spirit makes us one as we eat together. And as we are made one, as the church is brought into eschatological unity, the entire world is brought into one reality together, fully consummated in the resurrection when Jesus comes again.

Thus, we must go into the world eating together at the Lord's Table and inviting all nations to be baptized and join us. Now, certainly we do require that pagans leave the table of demons before they come to the Table of the Lord, and this decision is made in baptism; but we must not forget the significance of the "Feast for All Nations" when we eat together.

In the gospel something new and wonderful has happened. The Old Covenant marks of separation made Israel an exclusive people until God would safely bring Messiah into the world through Israel. The feasts of Israel shut out the world. God wanted His people to have no fellowship with pagans. But when the Spirit came at Pentecost, a new reality broke in upon the world that resounded from Jerusalem to Judea to Samaria to the uttermost parts of the earth. This reality has new signs: baptism, Lord's Day and Lord's Supper. Moreover, these new signs are spiritual signs of a new universal mission, a new cosmic reality that has broken in upon the world. Now, all nations are called to be baptized confessing that Jesus is Lord, to be filled with the Spirit and to feast at the Lord's Table. "Come all who hunger; come and be filled!"

The Tapestry of Creation

In Romans 1, Paul speaks about the fragmentation of humanity, and in Romans 12-16, he speaks about the re-integration of humanity in the body of Christ. The thing that Paul is showing is that humanity has fallen apart in the fall through sin and death and that the only way to be brought back into one whole human family is through the work of Christ through the Spirit. This means, as Paul is careful to show, that this wholeness cannot come through the law. The only way the righteousness of God in Christ can come to mankind and re-integrate the human race is in the new humanity that is formed from the glorified humanity of Jesus Christ that is poured out and shared in fullness through the gift of the Holy Spirit.

Lawless humanity seeks to re-create the human race through their own law. This is humanism. Utopians are obsessed with creating their own rules and regulations that impose their own self-centered version of righteousness on the world around them, upon those over whom they gain dominion. But this experiment is doomed to failure. They seek to be righteous apart from the indwelling power of God in Christ, and they cannot attain it. The only way that the tragic fragmentation of humanity can be transformed into the re-formed oneness of Romans 12-16 is through the spirit/Spirit indwelling of Romans 8.

The law cannot produce righteousness, whether it is the self-centered, godless "righteousness" of Romans 1 or the religious, ritualistic "righteousness" of Romans 2. All the law can produce is the fragmented humanity of Romans 1. The only answer is to be filled with the Spirit per Romans 8. This is the answer. We must pray in this way to be filled with the Spirit so that we may become the whole, complete new humanity that finds its reality in Christ.

The one thing that we must understand and communicate to our children is that a godless, self-centered reality falls away from what it means to be truly human. Humanists will try to tell us that we can only be truly human if we flee from the image and likeness of God revealed in His Word, if we rebel against the purpose of God for which we were created. But they are wrong, flat wrong. When we flee the image and glory of God and seek our own righteousness, we end up becoming less human, less the person we were created to be. If we desire to be all that we were meant to be, we must discover the humanness revealed in the one perfect human, Christ Jesus. He alone can shape us into the destiny we were intended to become by pouring His Spirit out into us as we pray in the Spirit and are filled with Him in the depths of prayer where we cry, "Abba, Father!" and the Spirit brings us into oneness with Christ through faith.

The fragmentation of humanity is due to sin. All creation was formed around Christ as the center of all reality (Colossians 1). God created everything to be the outworking expression of the image and glory of God. Remember, God made all things to make His invisible attributes visible. All creation was formed, the very DNA of the universe was "written," to reveal the image and glory of God. Thus, when man sinned, he chose to repudiate the knowledge of God and "create" a distorted reality, a "vain" existence conformed to the idols of the world, which are simply expressions of man's own proud, self-loving heart. This means, because human existence must conform to its original reality, the reality created in the image of God, that humanity is dehumanized when it falls away from the image and glory of God. When man chooses to seek his own righteousness, he cannot help but fragment into a dehumanized creature.

Man was created as a part of a larger whole. God created a world that cannot express His glory apart from the countless multitudes of creatures bearing His image and sharing His glory. God created a world where countless creatures share in relationship with Him and with one another, and this complex reality of relationships become the mosaic of relational revelation that truly "images" the glory of God. Or, to use another example, God created a world where His glory could only be truly revealed through the countless threads that are woven together into one tapestry revealing the glory of God. When man sinned and created his own fallen reality, the fabric of that tapestry began to be ripped apart. The individual threads of the tapestry began to unravel until the picture of God, the invisible things of Him clearly seen, was distorted, and the image of God was defaced into a lying image of God in the leering faces of a thousand idols.

God's world was created to be an image of God revealed in the manifold and multiple relationships of individual people brought together by the Spirit into one living expression and manifestation of the glory of God. God's glory cannot be fully revealed apart from "the number that no man can number," and this glory was refracted when the tapestry of human relations bearing the image of God was ripped in the fall and the threads of human relations began to be pulled apart. Redemption repairs the tapestry by reweaving the threads back into the beautiful picture of God that the Creator first intended. Romans 1 describes what the unraveled tapestry looks like as the human race begins to become more bestial than human, as it falls from man made in the image of God to fowls, to beasts, to reptiles. Romans 12-16 describes what the repaired tapestry looks like as all humanity is woven back together again into one, God-revealing, God-manifesting human race.

The fall of man had a dreadful effect on man, on nature, on relationships, on health and prosperity, and on all of life. The fall of man yanked man away from God in Christ as the center of creation. Thus, all of creation began to spin wildly out of control, and the threads of the tapestry of creation began to unravel and come unwound from the original picture that God intended. But in the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ, the threads are being re-sewn and re-wound. This does not happen all at once, just as the unraveling did not happen all at once. But the re-sewing of the threads of the tapestry is being done one thread at a time. The key here is that each thread cannot exist within the tapestry apart from the other threads. Every thread exists in relationship with the others. And this relationship begins and ends in Christ.

Daniel: Praying the Purpose of God

I began preaching again a few weeks ago on "Praying the Purpose of God." I am preaching this series from the book of Daniel. My principal text is Daniel 9 where the prophet prayed the prayer of confession after he discerned by reading Jeremiah 29 that time had come for Israel's exile to end and the desolations of Jerusalem to be finished. Daniel realized that the time for fulfillment had come, but he also understood that God works through the prayers of His people. So, Daniel began to pray the purpose of God into existence. However, another thing happened. The angel came and showed Daniel that Seventy Weeks had been determined upon his people, and that the exile would not end for another 490 years. Of course, Paul then tells us that this fulfillment has one more stage of fulfillment in the fullness of the Gentiles being gathered in unto the resurrection of the dead and the Second Coming (Romans 11; I Corinthians 15). So, I have been preaching about the role that prayer plays in the realization of the purpose of God.

The main thing I have been trying to communicate is that prayer should flow out of a passion for purpose rather than an obligation or duty that we must discharge to be faithful as Christians. And as I go back to the matter of praying the purpose of God, I must spend some time talking about destiny and purpose. I must talk about how Daniel understood as well as anyone how to live out the purpose of God buy allowing the glory of God to rest upon us as we live in everyday life.

The point that I feel to emphasize is how Daniel acted while waiting for the fulfillment of God's promises concerning the end of exile. Daniel did not retreat into a cave somewhere while he awaited the end of exile. No, Daniel went to work in the world he in which lived as a faithful child of God while praying for the purpose of God to be fulfilled. We must do the same while waiting for the end of exile in the Second Coming.

The point that I feel to emphasize tonight is that Daniel thought he was living in the last days until he received the vision of the Seventy Weeks. So, the point is this: what did Daniel do while he thought he was living in the last days? He entered into the world and rose to prominence through excellence—and he prayed!

Daniel learned how to "excel" in the world without becoming a part of the world. He had an excellent spirit; he went to the king's university while refusing to eat the king's meat. He worked in the government while refusing to allow anyone to stop his prayers. He was willing to go to the lion's den, but he would not stop praying. He was willing rather to die than to stop praying! Why? Because he understood the role that his prayers were playing in the fulfillment of the purpose of God! If he had seen prayer only as a matter of indulging his private desires, he could have been persuaded to go a day without prayer. But Daniel saw prayer as the means of fulfilling the purpose of God.

We must do the same. I am persuaded that too many of us fail to pray because we do not understand the role that prayer plays in the fulfillment of God's purpose in our lives, and thus, through us, in the entire earth. If we can see prayer as the means for the fulfillment of our own destiny, then we will pray! We must first of all be caught up in a passion for the purpose of God. Then, we must allow that purpose to be realized through our prayers.

We must be willing to go into all the world, into all the cosmos without allowing the world to go all the way into us. We must be willing to serve the kings of the earth, but we must know where to draw the line. We must refuse to eat the king's meat. We must refuse to worship idols. And we must refuse to stop praying. We must "understand by books" the vision that God has for us and His purpose for us and His church. Then, we must pray this purpose into existence as we work out the will of God and the glory of God settles down upon us as we live out the anointed, glorified destiny of the church. It is our destiny to be glorified. So, we must anticipate that destiny now, as we work, live and play in the world around us. We must share in the glory of God in everything we do so that we may bear the image and share the glory of God before the world. We must, as Daniel, pray the purpose of God into existence.

The one thing that stands out to me was the fact that the passage from Jeremiah that Daniel was reading in Daniel 9 was the passage where God tells Israel that He knows the plans He has for them, plans for good and not for evil, plans for a future and a hope. When Daniel read these words, he knew that he must pray them into existence. God knows the plans that He has for you; but you must pray them in! We cannot simply sit idly by while we wait for the purpose of God to be fulfilled. We must pray it in.

Daniel and his friends passed three tests: they refused to assimilate by eating the king's meat; they refused to worship idols; they refused to stop praying to their God. They were willing to serve in the world and excel in their roles, but they were not willing to compromise their commitment as Christians. The thing I feel to drive home to our church is that God has a purpose for every one of us. And this purpose can only come to pass in our life as we imitate Daniel and seek to excel so that the glory of God may rest upon us. Moreover, we must seek the purpose of God "by the book" so we can develop a passion for purpose that drives us to prayer as Daniel prayed. Christians are called to preach the gospel in all the world, which is all the cosmos. We must take the gospel into every strata of society. We must not hesitate to excel in everything. We must not allow our attitudes toward the Second Coming to paralyze us as we await His coming. If we are living in the end, then we must live as Daniel lived, and we must pray as Daniel prayed.

The God That Keeps Covenant

I have been thinking and praying today about "The God That Keeps Covenant." I am considering the idea of covenant, especially the idea of the covenant of grace, the idea that God keeps both sides of the covenant. The covenant is simply God's promise, God's formal declaration that He will perform what He said He would do. God enters into an agreement with Abraham that He will make him a mighty nation and bless all nations through him (Genesis 12). In an ordinary covenant, both parties would be equally obligated to keep the terms of the covenant, and this is also true of the covenant that God makes with Abraham. However, God does something different here. God puts Abraham to sleep and keeps both sides of the covenant. In other words, God declares that He will make sure that His will cannot be frustrated by man's failure to keep the covenant: God will keep the covenant for him! And how will He do this? As it turns out, by keeping covenant in Christ. In other words, Christ Jesus keeps the covenant on our behalf. Through His death, burial and resurrection, Christ Jesus perfectly performs the terms of the covenant, and God keeps His agreement with Abraham and the children of Abraham in Christ. In Christ, all nations of the earth shall be blessed. In Christ, all things shall be made new. Of course, there is one more step in this process: the mediated presence of Christ through the indwelling of the Holy Spirit enacts and performs the terms of the covenant (obedience) within us. God keeps covenant in Christ through the Holy Spirit within us.

This is such an incredible idea! God ensures that His faithfulness cannot be frustrated by perfectly fulfilling the terms of the covenant in Christ and filling us with His Spirit so that Christ may live out the terms of the covenant (perfect obedience) in us. So, then we must simply place our trust in Christ and be filled with His righteousness, with His perfect obedience. This perfect righteousness is manifest in Christ and exemplified in Communion. Communion is a matter of renewing covenant with God, but it is not a matter of us renewing a vow that we have made with God in ourselves—no, it is a matter of the covenant in Christ's blood, the covenant that God has made with us, that He will save His people from their sins and make all things new in the resurrection. When we receive communion, we are celebrating the covenant that God has made with us in Christ. We have been baptized into this covenant. We are plunged into the faithfulness of Christ. We are submerged in the perfect obedience of Christ. God keeps the covenant within us. He is the God that keeps covenant.