Our meeting this morning we rightly speak of as “ the breaking of bread,” but did we break bread only, we should not observe the ordinance as it had been appointed of the Lord. There is “the cup of blessing,” as well as “the bread which we break” (1 Cor.10:16). We drink wine as well as eat bread in commemoration of “the Lord’s death until he come.” The significance of the cup is briefly expressed in the Lord’s description of it when he appointed the drinking of it: “the covenant in my blood.” We have recently considered the meaning of this description. We will not go over the ground again, although the subject would not suffer from reconsideration. We will rather dwell for a moment on this occasion on a further remark which the Lord made concerning the cup, following whithersoever it may profitably lead us.

He said,

“I will not drink henceforth of this fruit of the vine, until that day when I drink it new with you in my Father’s kingdom” (Matt. 26:29).

Here is a remark having a future bearing. As such it cannot fail to contain much that is of deep interest to those who shall be gathered with the apostles in the day of the kingdom of God. What is the meaning of it? It might seem that this ought not to be far to seek. Jesus had a cup of wine in his hand when he spoke. It was the last time he was to eat and drink in a familiar way with his disciples in the flesh. He had often done it before. In fact, so distinctly sociable was Jesus in this respect, that it gave his enemies occasion to speak of him as “a gluttonous man and a wine bibber,” in contrast with John, who was of abstemious habits. But now the time had come when there would be no more of this condescension on the part of Christ, and this wonderful privilege on the part of those with whom he ate and drank. “I will not henceforth” do this: or, as Mark says,

“I will drink no more of the fruit of the vine.”

But was it never to be again at all? Were the disciples never more to have the pure social delight of sitting at the same table with the Lord Jesus? If Jesus crucified had remained among the dead, the question might be in some doubt, but seeing that Jesus rose, and that the disciples are to be raised by him also (John 6:39), what more inevitable than the conclusion that social intercourse will be resumed when they meet in one body as appointed? This conclusion would stand on strong ground without express intimation on the subject; but what else can we think when we hear him say,

“I will drink no more of the fruit of the vine, until that day that I drink it new in the kingdom of God”? (Mark 14:25).

Especially when we take this in connection with Christ’s declaration to the disciples after the supper:

“I appoint unto you a kingdom, as my Father hath appointed unto me; that ye may eat and drink at my table in my kingdom” (Luke 22:28-30).

It might be easy to argue a figurative meaning for these words. Christ’s words might be quoted:

“These things I have spoken to you in parables” (John 16:25),

And illustrations of parabolic use would not be difficult to cite, such as,

“Whosoever drinketh of the water that I shall give him shall never thirst: but the water that I shall give him shall be in him a well of water springing up into everlasting life” (John 4:14).

And again,

“Destroy this temple, and in three days I will raise it up” (John 2:19).

The argument would merely show that Christ did speak often in parables or proverbs. It would not disprove the plainness of his meaning where that is evident. That his meaning is plain in the case before us will not be denied-cannot be denied in harmony with the facts. Jesus was eating the Passover-a literal act. Having finished this literal act, he performed another literal act. He took bread-literal bread, and wine-literal wine, and ate and drank with his disciples in a literal manner with a spiritual meaning which he explained; and he says,

“I will no more” do this, until you sit “with me at my table in my kingdom.”

What can this mean but that he will do again, when he meets his disciples in the kingdom, what he did then-eat bread and drink wine, and the Passover also, with them in a literal manner? There is no contradiction to this in the fact that the blessings to be provided for the nations of the earth in that blessed age are spoken of as a feast of “wines on the lees well refined” (Isa. 25:6). The figurative does not exclude the literal. The literal is the basis of the figurative. If there were no literal, there could be no figurative. Often they go together in one and the same act or phrase, as when it is said of a king that he holds the sceptre or wears the crown. The breaking of bread is a literal act which blends with it the significance which the Lord has associated with it now-the memorial of his death, the fellowship of his sufferings on our part. But the promise that we shall eat and drink with him at his table in his kingdom is to be taken as a statement of what will literally take place, comprehending in itself, however, all the significance which that literal act will carry with it. Who could literally eat and drink with the Lord in the day of his glory without sharing also of his position, his throne, his immortality, and his joy? To do the one implies the inheriting of the other. Therefore the statement of the one takes the other with it as a matter of meaning. The literal eating and drinking by itself would be a poor affair to make the subject of promise; but as taking with it the sharing of his friendship, the participation of his glory, the enjoyment of his love and fellowship, the inheritance of his throne, and his glorious immortal nature, it becomes a very great and precious promise indeed without abating a jot of its literalness.

Some people have a difficulty in receiving the idea that Christ and his people will literally eat and drink together in the kingdom. Perhaps some who believe the truth may experience this difficulty. Such a difficulty is due to the bias inherited from orthodox religion. According to this religion, it is a matter of impossibility that Christ should drink wine again. Its idea of Christ excludes it. This idea perhaps is not very definite. So far as it can be defined, it may be expressed in the phrase, a spectral Christ-a bright “shade,” a luminous form of human shape without substance or tangibility-a something that could not drink wine. The wine should fall through it, as through a sunbeam. This idea of Christ is totally foreign to the Scriptures. It is part of the ghostism of popular theology. Popular theology makes man an immortal ghost to be saved, and therefore conceives of its saviour after the same manner. But the Scriptures show us man a body, as we find him to be, and they give us in Christ a real Christ, a Christ of flesh and bones, who can be handled, who can exhibit marks of bodily identity, and who can eat (Luke 24:38-43)-all this after his resurrection; a Christ as real as he with whom the disciples walked and talked and kept company for three years and a half-yea more real, for as Christ was then, he was a weak and a mortal Christ, a Christ who was of the seed of David according to the flesh, made in all points like unto his brethren (Rom. 1:3; Heb. 2:16). But as he now is, he is an immortal strong man, in whom dwelleth all the fulness of the Godhead bodily (Col. 2:9), one in whose substance is focally condensed the power from which creation has sprung.

Realising this view of Christ, it is an easy matter to receive what he has promised, that we shall eat and drink with him at his table in his kingdom. Some may feel affected just the other way. They may reason that if Christ is glorious and real and immortal, the act of eating seems the more incongruous because it has to do with the sustaining of life, and is associated with the phenomenon of corruption. They may ask, what need for an immortal to eat? What place in an incorruptible body for a process involving chemical decomposition? There is an answer. First, we must not govern possibility by our experience. The works of God are without measure, and without limit in their diversity. It does not follow that because we depend upon eating for living that therefore the act of eating has no higher function in higher organizations. It does not follow that because eating is associated with corruption in our experience, that therefore corruption is a corollary of eating in whatever nature of body that act takes place. Even our present observations of nature would forbid narrow conclusions on the subject. We see even now that the power of chemically absorbing the elements of food is in proportion to the electrical and functional vigour of the constitution. An enfeebled organization will scarcely take half the nutriment out of food, while a powerful organization will absorb it pretty completely, and reject but a small residuum. Is it impossible to conceive of an absolutely complete absorption? It is evident that there is an ascending scale of power in this respect in even the animal organization of present experience; and by analogy, it is a matter of irresistible conclusion that in the spiritual body which is powerful (1 Cor. 15:43), this power exists in perfection, and can assimilate food to the last grain of substance without a remnant for corruption. We must remember that all substance is spirit at the root; for out of God all things have come, and in Him they subsist. What we call matter is His energy made concrete in limited forms and conditions according to His wisdom. Consequently, a spiritual body will presumably possess the functional capacity of reducing all substance to its first element, spirit, and assimilating food to its own spirit nature, possessed by the eater. This excludes the very idea of corruption, and at the same time, it preserves to us the act of eating without the association of corruption which belongs to present experience. Eating in the spiritual nature will therefore be not merely a possibility, but probably a source of delight of which dull animal organisms know little: for the act of converting food, not into blood but into spirit itself will probably yield a sensation of pleasure as far surpassing the gratification of the animal palate as the spiritual body exceeds the animal body in life, glory and power. Such a view of the case enables us to realise the act of eating and drinking in the spirit state as the occasion of much spiritual joy and friendship among those who partake together. Even now the act of eating together is the highest act of fellowship, and the occasion of the most refined enjoyment of which the human mind is capable, all other things being equal. How much more must this be the case when weakness is eliminated, and when therefore there will be an absence of the many drawbacks to social enjoyment arising in the present state from feebleness in every function.

But finally, even if we were unable to see a satisfactory philosophy of the matter, we should not be justified in shutting our eyes to the testimony of God. It is Christ’s parting promise that we shall eat and drink with him in the glorious company of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, and the precious section of mankind of which they are the heads. On this promise we may rest, as embracing in itself every good thing appertaining to the great salvation. It does not mean one sitting down, nor any particular sitting down, nor any sitting down as a mere ceremony; but all the intercourse one with another, that wisdom and love may call for in the glorious fellowship to be established among immortal saints in the age to come. It means the day of gladness that awaits the sons of God, gladness such as they can never know in the flesh; the gladness of a living union with Christ-a living union with God; not a union by faith, but of actual, manifest, and exhilaratingly-experienced fact. We do not know what gladness is now. We have never tasted the real joys of existence. It is with difficulty that we pull ourselves along, by reason of our own weakness, physically and mentally, and by reason of the coldness and the darkness of the present evil world. But joy is appointed nevertheless. It waits.

God never purposed that gloom should always reign: the gloom is but an episode in earth’s history. It is incidental to the advent of sin; it is the corollary of the reign of Death. It is inevitable while the tabernacle of God as yet is not with men. “Everlasting joy” is the end of the matter. The weeping endures but for a night; songs come with the morning, and the morning comes with Christ; who gives his people their first taste of the unspeakable joy of the ages to come, by effusing upon them that wonderful power of the Spirit which in a moment will change the body of their humiliation into that glorious nature which, among other delights, will be capable of the joy of sitting down to eat and drink with Christ. They will be the subject of glorious nuptials to the strains of heavenly music, and surrounded and upborne by the ineffable comfort of angelic attendance.

In that glorious day of comfort and gladness, the cup will be once more on the table, but with a different meaning. Christ will drink it new in the kingdom of God. It will be the cup of salvation, the cup of joy and rejoicing-filled to the brim. Now it is a cup of blood-shedding, a cup of suffering and death-a cup of blessing truly, because of the blessedness opened to us by its means, but still a cup pregnant with a significance of evil, speaking to us of sin and affliction and the triumph of the wicked. Then it will be the symbol of pure joy and the centre of a ceremony having a thrilling interest for the vast assembly that will surround the Lord Jesus on the day of the new celebration, when he will fulfil the psalm which says:

And again:

“The voice of rejoicing and salvation is in the tabernacles of the righteous: the right hand of the lord doeth valiantly. I shall not die, but live, and declare the works of the Lord. The Lord hath chastened me sore: but he hath not given me over unto death. Open to me the gates of righteousness: I will go into them, and I will praise the Lord. This gate of the Lord, into which the righteous shall enter . . . This is the day which the Lord hath made; we will rejoice and be glad in it. Save now, I beseech thee, O Lord . . . send now prosperity” (Psa. 116: 13-18; 118: 15-25).

The rejoicing of the righteous here depicted will not be a perpetual session; it will not be an everlasting sitting down of the literal sort, as some are apt to imagine. There will be literal sittings down, and many of them; but God is a God of order in all things. For everything there is a season and a time. There will be times and seasons of festal intercourse; but times and seasons also of more practical service-intervals of separation and work-pleasant work-the work of ruling nations-the work of instructing the people-the work of administering justice among the inhabitants of the earth-each saint in his own particular district-over his own particular “ten cities” or “five cities”-for which there will be ample qualification in the possession of a spirit nature. In this nature there will be no weariness; work will be a pleasure. And there will be no error of judgment; what is true of the head will be true of the whole ruling body of Christ.

“He shall not judge after the sight of his eyes, neither reprove after the hearing of his ears . . .. The spirit of the Lord shall rest upon him; the spirit of wisdom and understanding, the spirit of counsel and might, the spirit of knowledge and of the fear of the Lord; and shall make him of quick understanding in the fear of the Lord” (Isa. 11).

What a glorious prospect. Look at it and feast your eyes and heart upon it. It is no cunningly-devised fable. It is not the conception of any human brain. Though so gorgeous, it is the picture plainly and soberly placed before us in the gospel. Men in the weariness of constant disappointment may whisper or shout that it is “too good to be true”; but wise men will remember that weariness and weakness are conditions of the present transient state only. They are not the standard by which the purpose of the wisdom that made all things is to be measured. They will pass away. God, the strength of all, remains; and His mighty purpose will prevail at the last, and fill every waiting, sorrowful, obedient soul with gladness. Christ is our hope. He is God’s pledge to us of the glory to be revealed. We call him to mind, and thank God with all our hearts for him, while we take this cup into our hands, concerning which he said,

“I will drink it new with you in my Father’s kingdom.”

Taken from: - “Seasons of Comfort” Vol. 1

Pages 508-513

By Bro. Robert Roberts

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