[Songs in the Night - April 20]
Christ our Passover is sacrificed for us: therefore let us keep the feast. I Corinthians 5:7, 8
WHAT a meaning is in these words when seen in
connection with the Memorial Supper as the remembrancer
of the Jewish Passover!
How the light of the
type illuminates the antitype!
As the firstborn of Israel
were exposed to death, so "the church of the firstborn
whose names are written in heaven" are now on
trial for life or death everlasting.
As then all the
typical firstborn were safe so long as they remained in
the house and ate of the lamb whose blood was
sprinkled upon the doorposts and lintel, so we who
abide in the household of faith under the better "blood
of sprinkling" and who eat of our Passover Lamb,
Jesus, are safe from death—sure of life everlasting
under God's providence.
We do not now recognize
the typical lamb, but instead Jesus, "the Lamb of God,
which taketh away the sin of the world."
On him we
feed; not eating his flesh literally, but by faith partaking
of the merit of his sacrifice and appropriating it to
ourselves.
All through this night of the Gospel age
do we thus feast on our Lamb—until the morning of
the Millennium, when we shall be delivered.
The
annual Memorial Supper is not our feast, but an illustration
or archetype of it—a remembrancer—most
beautiful, most solemn, helpful.
Let us keep the feast
of faith and also the Memorial Supper. Z'08-37 R4128:3 (Hymn 190)