Let us confine our thoughts to the Lord’s Supper. It was clearly
declared at the time of its institution to be a memorial of the death and
passion of our blessed Lord and Saviour. It was founded, moreover, on
the night before His suffering, and that amongst men who were
eye-witnesses of all that passed. Such is the statement of the
Scriptures, which we now follow up by the fact that, from that day to
this, wherever the name of Christ is named, there has never been a break
in the observance of that memorial. Now what is the plain, simple, and
obvious conclusion from all this? Is it not surely this, that the facts
actually took place? The Lord’s Supper is a memorial of the crucifixion,
and it was founded among persons who were eye-witnesses of the whole
transaction. Now if these facts had never occurred, and if the Book
recording them had not been a true Book, how could the memorial have ever
got its hold on the Church? The truth of the Book is proved by the
existence of the memorial. The Book and the memorial are bound the one
to the other. They stand and fall together; they cannot be separated.
But the memorial may be seen throughout Christendom as a visible fact.
It is, and always has been, co-extensive with Christianity. It is at
this present time open to the observation of any one; so, seeing the
memorial, we believe the Book, and are fully, perfectly, and historically
satisfied as to all the great facts of the crucifixion.
But we must not stop there; for the memorial is not merely a proof of the
facts of the crucifixion, but is also a proof of the doctrine of the
cross. We have found that the memorial could not possibly have been
introduced at any subsequent date, but that its institution must be
traced up to the fountain-head, even to the Lord Jesus Christ Himself,
and those words of His, “Do this in remembrance of me.” But this is not
the whole of the passage, and we must not forget those other words, “This
is my body, which is given for you,” and, “This cup is the new testament
in my blood, which is shed for you.” The memorial, therefore, is not
merely a memorial of the death, but of the purpose of it, and of the
great principle which underlies the whole. It is a monument of those two
sentences, “given for you” and “shed for you.” If it were a granite
column instead of a simple service, these would be the two sentences to
be engraved upon it; or if men wished to make the inscription shorter
still, they might be content with two words, and write “For you;” for
these two words contain the pith and marrow of the whole matter. It is
not, therefore, merely the fact that He died of which the Lord’s Supper
is a divinely-appointed witness, but the fact that He died as a vicarious
satisfaction for sin—“a propitiation for our sins: and not for ours only,
but also for the sins of the whole world.” It is well for us, therefore,
to look carefully at the certain and undeniable fact, that in this
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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