Grace Bible Church
PastorTeacher
Robert R. McLaughlin
Sunday, February 2, 2014
1. The importance of memories. 2. The importance of friendship.
One of the most precious moments of our memory is that memory includes the concept of people living in your soul even when they are no longer here.
One of the true tests of love is that: Do you think of them when they are gone?
When I think of Ray Almeida Sr. I think of someone who was a selfless, caring, humble and faithful friend who led me and taught me what a real man was.
True friends don’t compete with you, and therefore they will never stab you in the back socially or economically.
Your true friends also will guard your privacy.
You can be honest with your friends; you can level with them, and that is a part of you being faithful to them.
Marcus Cicero said A friend is, as it were, a second self.
Aristotle asked a question, he said “What is a friend”? And then he answered by saying “A single soul dwelling in two bodies!”
PRO 27:10 tells us about the attitude the son should have toward his father’s friend when it says “Do not forsake your own friend or your father’s friend.”
Friendship is essentially between individuals; the moment two people are friends they have in some degree drawn apart together from the herd.
1. Passover began on the first month of the Jewish calendar, April 14, 1441 BC According to EXO 12:1‑14; LEV 23:5 – April is spring for the Jews and it represents the beginning of life.
2. The house must be free of all leaven – symbolic of sin or evil. MAT 16:6 “Watch out and beware of the leaven of the Pharisees and Sadducees.”
GAL 5:9, a little leaven leavens the whole lump of dough.
3. After the leaven is cleaned out, the next procedure = get out the special white linen cloths that go with the meal – white linen is symbolic of perfect righteousness in the Bible.
4. the table is set with a white tablecloth and white candles, and the father of the house wears a white robe called a kittel and a white crown.
The white linen, white plates, and white candles are used to create an atmosphere of purity.
5. Once the table is set and the father is ready, the candles are lit as the preparation continues – they are lit by a woman.
A woman lights the candles because it was a woman who brought us Christ, the light of the world.
God chose a woman, Mary, to bring us Christ our Passover, therefore, a woman still brings the light to the Passover celebration.
6. “Blessed art Thou O Lord our God, King of the universe, who has exalted us among all people and bade us to kindle the passover lights.” our cups of wine will be drunk as part of the Passover ceremony – the cups should be filled by one of the servants representing leadership and freedom.
The first cup = the cup of sanctification and it sanctifies the table and all of the preparations – the drinking of this cup symbolizes approval and gives the blessing for the Passover supper to begin.
The father takes three loaves of the unleavened bread and places them in a special white linen envelope which has three compartments.
The father removes the middle loaf from its compartment, breaks it, and then wraps it in a separate piece of white linen and hides it away or “buries” it somewhere.
This foreshadows TLJC being buried by His disciples in MAT 14:12 And his disciples came and took away the body and buried it; and they went and reported to Jesus.
1. First question = Why is this night distinguished from all other nights? On this night we eat only unleavened bread. Answer = unleavened bread symbolizes purity from sin.
2. On all other nights we may eat any kind of herbs, but on this night only bitter herbs. Why? Answer = The bitter herbs remind the Jews of the bitterness of slavery in Egypt.
3. On all other nights we do not dip in the bowl, but tonight we dip twice. Why? – This is the dipping, by which the Lord Jesus Christ identified His betrayer, Judas, when he said the “The one who dips with me shall betray Me.”
First dip = Israel going into the Red Sea and coming out unharmed. Second dip = the Egyptian army who tried to follow them, the parsley is dipped and then immediately.
4. On this night we all recline in our chairs at the table. Why? The reclining in the chairs has to do with freedom. The Jews are no longer slaves and so they can relax.
As the father is telling about the bitterness of slavery, he serves each person horseradish from the center plate and they take the bread and take a bite of the horseradish.
As he talks about the lamb, he gestures to the unbroken shank bone of the lamb which is on the plate.
There is the charose which was like a paste made thick to symbolize the clay or representing the mortar than Pharaoh made them make – made of figs, dates, nuts and was to symbolize the sweetness or the pleasures of sin in the world.
Second cup is spilled into the individual plates in front of each person, a drop at a time.
Each drop remembers a plague God visited upon Egypt while the implacable Pharaoh hardened his heart.
The ten red drops fall into the empty white plate in front of each person and they are clearly representative of those ten great plagues in Egypt.
As this happens, the father chants the name of each plague, blood, frogs, gnats, insects, boils, locust, darkness, death etc. It is a very melancholy moment but it is dispelled quickly as the main meal comes out.
Third cup = the cup of redemption.
They would eat the meal and after the meal was through, the father of the house would now go and get the piece of bread which he hid and a new cup of unfermented wine = Communion.
It is now time to bring forth that buried loaf of unleavened bread that the father symbolically hid and buried, which will serve as the desert to the meal.
The afikomin = “the arrival” and it represents the Lord Jesus Christ, as the bread of life! The buried unleavened bread, the middle piece, is then eaten with the third cup of wine.
The three loaves represent the “Trinity”, and the middle one represents God the Son. It was the Son who was broken for our sins…it was his body which was broken for you – no bones were broken.
The bread was wrapped in white linen and buried, as was the body of Jesus.
The bread [desert] is the last thing eaten because it represents the fact that once someone partakes of the bread of life, they will be sustained forever.
JOH 6:35 Jesus said to them, “I am the bread of life; he who comes to Me shall not hunger, and He who believes in Me shall never thirst.
In the actual ceremony, the father breaks off pieces from the loaf (the size of an olive” says the haggadah – the Jewish guide to rituals) and passes the pieces around the table.
When we celebrate the Lord’s supper, we are actually taken a part out of the Jewish Passover and celebrating it today.
When the Jews celebrate Passover, they are actually celebrating a part of the Lord’s supper.
This is the part of the passover that the Lord took the bread and the cup and instituted what we call “communion.”
MAT 26:26 “and while they were eating [passover], Jesus took bread, and having blessed it, He broke it and gave it to His disciples, and He said, `take, eat; this represents My body.’
“Blessed art Thou O Lord our God, King of the universe who brings forth bread from the earth.”
He picked the bread from the floor, representing the earth, and said, “This is my body”, a prophecy of the fact that bringing forth bread from the earth represented our Lord’s resurrection as the bread of life.
He was actually saying to His disciples, if they try to bury My body this week, than just like this piece of bread, it will just come up again from the earth.
JOH 12:24 “truly, truly, I say to you, unless a grain of wheat falls into the earth and dies, it remains by itself alone; but if it dies, it bears much fruit.
You cannot bury a kernel of wheat, the Lord said it will only come up again. And so our Lord said he was the bread of life,JOH 6:35
Jesus said to them, “I am the bread of life;
He was born in Bethlehem which means “house of bread”. He was buried on the second feast, which was the feast of unleavened bread which represented his impeccability as the God-man.
The matzoh bread has stripes, and as Isaiah said “by His stripes we are healed”.
ISA 53:5. The bread is pierced through with wholes and as the O.T., which is also the Jewish Bible says, they shall look upon Me whom they have pierced.
Third cup = JOH 6:53, “truly, truly, I say to you, unless you eat the flesh of the son of man and drink his blood, you have no life in yourselves.”
“Blessed art Thou, O Lord our God, King of the universe, Creator of the fruit of the vine.”