Matthew 26:26-29

§§ 126, 128. INSTITUTION OF THE LORD’S SUPPER, Matthew 26:26-29

We come now to words which have sounded forth through the Church through all ages since our Lord’s departure, and which are to sound forth until he comes again. The nature of the Lord’s Supper is best understood when we recollect that it is, under the Christian dispensation, the continuance in a modified form of the passover of the Old Testament. As baptism is the modified ordinance of circumcision, as the Lord’s day is a modified continuance of the Sabbath, so is the Lord’s Supper a modified continuance of the paschal supper of the Old Testament Church. We may first remark that the passover was a true sacrifice; for the victim was a true substitute for the sinner, dying in his stead, and showing by his death that the sinner ought to die. Israel was as true a sinner as Egypt, and as truly deserving the stroke of the destroying angel; but God, as he passed over, accepted the blood presented by Israel’s faith, (which blood was a confession, on Israel’s part, that he deserved the death the victim suffered in his stead) as a substitute. And as this shed blood was typical of the shed blood of the Saviour, so the lamb itself was typical of the Lamb of God that taketh away the sin of the world. Hence it was, by anticipation, a representation of that same reality, which is set forth by the communion of the Lord’s Supper. Both are typical of the same thing, and therefore correspondent to each other. The Lord’s Supper is in a proper sense the bloodless sacrifice of the new dispensation.

And the very fact that our Lord instituted his supper on the same evening as the paschal supper, shows that it is a continuance in a modified form. It simply drops off the bloody elements; so that it is in fact true that our sacramental ordinance has been continued from the departure of Israel to the present time, and will be continued until the full redemption and departure of the spiritual Israel under the greater Moses to the full fruition of the heavenly Canaan.

We have then the following typical parallels:

The Redeemed. The Victim. The Deliverance The Result. Israel. The paschal lamb. From Egypt. Canaan. The communicant. The broken bread. From spiritual bondage. The spiritual emancipation. The believer. The crucified Jesus. From hell. Heaven. The prophecies of the Old Testament more commonly predicted a glorious and triumphant Messiah; the sacrifices predicted the Messiah as dying and atoning.