If you've been around Christians, you've probably heard of the idea of having a personal relationship with God, which could mean different things in the Bible, like having God as a friend or your father or maybe your teacher. But there's one particular way that the Bible talks about this relationship that you find all over, but strangely, we don't talk about it that much. And that's the idea of a partnership with God. A partnership like working alongside someone to accomplish a goal together. Right.

And this is actually what you see at the beginning of the Bible. God creates this good world full of all of this potential. And then God appoints these unique creatures, humans, as his partners in bringing more and more goodness out of all that potential. But the humans don't want to partner with God. They rebel and try to create a world on their own terms.

And so this broken partnership is the Bible's explanation for why we're stuck in a world of corruption and injustice and the tragedy of death. It's not like there's just one or two humans who have bailed on this relationship. In the story of the Bible, everyone has abandoned the partnership with God. So what God does is select a smaller group of people out of the many, and he makes a new partnership with them called a covenant. And in a covenant, God makes promises and then in exchange, asks his partner to fulfill certain commitments.

And the purpose of all of this is to somehow use this covenant relationship to renew his partnership with everybody else. Now, there are actually four times in the Old Testament that we're told God initiates a covenant relationship with Noah, Abraham, the nation of Israel, and King David. And it's through these that God is forming a covenant family into which all people will eventually be invited. So let's see how these work. The first one is with Noah.

So in this story, God has just brought the flood to cleanse the world of humanity's corruption, and Noah and his family are the only ones left. And so God makes a covenant with Noah, saying, listen, I know that humans will continue to be evil, but despite that, I'm not going to destroy it like this again. Instead, the earth will be this reliable place for us to work together. Great. So what does Noah have to do?

Nothing. And that's what's so interesting about this first covenant, is that God is promising to be faithful, even though he knows humans won't be. The next time we see God make a covenant is with a man named Abraham. God chooses him, promises to bless him, give him a large family, lots of land where they can flourish. And in Return.

God asks Abraham to trust him and train up his family to do what is right and just. And the whole reason for this covenant is God says that somehow he's going to bring his blessing to all families of the world through this one family. So that's Abraham. The next time we see God make a covenant is when Abraham's family grows into the tribe of Israel. And this covenant is with the whole tribe.

God asks them to obey a set of laws which are these guidelines for living well as a community of God's partners. And if they do this, then God promises to bless them and that they will become a people who then represent him to the rest of humanity. That's the covenant with Israel. The last covenant is with King David. Yeah, the tribe of Israel has become this large nation ruled by David.

And God asked David and his descendants to partner with him by leading Israel in obeying the laws and doing what is right and just. And God promises that one day one of David's sons will come and extend God's kingdom of peace and blessing over all the nations. So those are the four covenants that God makes in order to restore his partnership with the whole world. But here's what happens. Israel breaks the covenant.

They worship other gods, they allow horrible injustice, and so they lose their land and are forced off into exile. So it seems hopeless, but. So during this time, Israel's prophets talked about a day when God would restore these covenants in spite of Israel's failure somehow. Yeah, they called it the new covenant. And this is actually what's so interesting about Jesus is that he's introduced into this story as the one who fulfills all of these covenant relationships.

We're told that he's from the family of Abraham, and so he will bring the blessings of that family to the whole world. We're told that he's the faithful Israelite who was able to truly obey the law. And we're told that he's the king from the line of. And so he goes about extending God's kingdom of justice and peace to all. That's really remarkable for one guy.

Yeah. And what it highlights is perhaps the most surprising claim of all made about this man, that Jesus is no mere human, but rather God become human. And God did this in order to be that faithful covenant partner that we are all made to be, but have failed to be. And so through Jesus, God has opened up a way for anyone to be in a renewed partnership with. So Jesus calls people to follow him and become part of this new covenant family.

And despite their Failures. Jesus is committed to making them into partners who were becoming more and more faithful. The story of the Bible ends with a vision of a fully renewed world full of goodness and peace. And there's this renewed humanity there, partnering together with God to expand the goodness of his creation. And so the end of the Bible story is really a new beginning.

Our thanks to the fine folks at the Bible Project for making that video. Hopefully you enjoyed it and learned something because it would have taken me 15 minutes to do what they did in five. So that was kind of the decision on that one. We're going to be in Mark chapter 14 today and looking at the moment when Jesus kind of initiated, commemorated the new covenant. And the newest covenant, the final one that God would make with his people was one that began with his death and began with his resurrection.

And he brings us into that part of it. We celebrate communion. We commemorate or partook of communion last week. And perhaps we should have said, well, let's do that this week, but I didn't want to for some reason. But anyway, we celebrate that at communion.

When we're looking at this new covenant Jesus made, and like these tables here that churches have, and so many of them, it says, do this in remembrance of me, or this do in remembrance of me. Talking about what we do when we participate in communion, we're doing it to remember and partake in that covenant that God had made through Jesus Christ with us. And so I want to read to you this scripture. In Mark 14, 12, 26, we pick up kind of right after where we left off last week. We're going to read these verses and then I'm going to talk about it a little bit.

Now, on the first day of the Feast of Unleavened Bread, when the Passover lamb is sacrificed, Jesus disciples said to him, where do you want us to prepare for you to eat the Passover? He sent two of his disciples and told them, go into the city and a man carrying a jar of water will meet you. Follow him. Not creepy at all, is it? Anyway, wherever he enters, tell the owners of the house.

The teacher says, where is my guest room where I may eat the Passover with my disciples? He will show you a large room upstairs, furnished and ready. Make preparations for us there. So the disciples left, went into the city and found things just as he had told them, and they prepared the Passover. Then when it was evening, he came to the house with the 12.

While they were at the table eating, Jesus said, I tell you the truth, one of you eating with me will Betray me. They were distressed, and one by one they said to him, surely not I. And he said to them, it is one of the 12 who dips his hand with me into the bowl. Then the Son of Man will go as it is written about him. But woe to that man by whom the Son of Man is betrayed.

It would be better for him if he had never been born. While they were eating, he took bread, and after giving thanks, he broke it, gave it to them and said, take it, this is my body. And after taking the cup and giving thanks, he gave it to them, and they all drank from it. He said to them, this is my blood, the blood of the covenant that is poured out for many. I tell you the truth, I will no longer drink of the fruit of the vine until that day when I drink it new in the kingdom of God.

And after singing a hymn, they went out to the Mount of Olives.

The Bible is full of stuff that you want to know more about, full of questions if you really stop to think about them. Like that last part, it says they sang a hymn and then they left for the Mount of Olives. Wouldn't you like to know what that hymn was? I mean, it was probably one of the Psalms, although it may not have even been one of the psalms that's in the Book of Psalms. There was a whole bunch of them that were written that they might have known that just weren't in that book.

Like, if you look in the hymnals that we have in the racks here, there's songs that are in there, and there's some that you might have grown up with in a different denomination, and that's in their hymnbook, but not in ours, who knows? But they sang a psalm, most likely of some kind. They called it a hymn. And. And as they sing this, they sang it together.

And then they left, and they went for a walk and they went out to the Mount of Olives. That's a whole other story about what happens in that place called what we typically have translated as the Garden of Gethsemane. But it's a place where there was an olive grove. And when they harvested the olives, they would put them in these burlap sacks, and they would stack them up and they would put them in this press. It was like a long pole with a rock on it, a weight that they would hang from it, and it would just slowly, slowly press down the olives.

It's literally the Garden of the pressing. And it was there where Jesus was pressed so much in his soul, because he knew what the next step was in his passion of Christ. We call it the suffering of Jesus Christ for you and for me. But here in this moment, they're sitting well before they sit down at the meal they're about to prepare for it, they're going to. They're looking ahead to the week.

They know they're at this Passover feast, which is a week long celebration commemorating the time that God had led the Israelites out of Egypt. This was about 1400 years before. They had been slaves for 400 years. As a people, they were enslaved to the nation of Egypt. They were mistreated terribly.

And God had heard their cries for redemption. He had heard their cries for them to be saved. And so he begins doing a work through a man named Moses and his brother Aaron and some other leaders. And they go and they speak to Pharaoh. They have the 10 different plagues which each one was a judgment on the gods of the Egyptians.

And as they do all that, God leads them out of Egypt. And on the night that he leads them out, he tells them, I want you to eat a special meal. I want you to first of all, get rid of all of the yeast, the yeast in your house that symbolizes the thing that works in and through and changes it from within. You know, when you mix yeast into a simple bread recipe, it causes it to rise. It works through the whole batch of dough and it's just a little bit.

But yeast, especially in the New Testament in the Scriptures, is shown to be something like sin, working through just a little bit of sin, working in your lives and how it can infect your whole being and you need to get it out. And so once a year to remember the Passover, they would remove all the yeast from their house and they would only eat flatbread, which I like going to like a Mediterranean or a Greek restaurant and getting flat bread. I like the Indian restaurants with the naan. Who loves naan? If you haven't had naan, man?

Yeah, I introduced you to that, didn't I, Elaine? Yes, it's great. If anybody wants to go to an Indian restaurant, let me know. But it's just so good. But like, they would get rid of all the yeast and they would eat the sacrificial lamb, the Passover lamb.

It would be slaughtered, the first Passover there that they celebrated in Egypt, the night that God brought them out of Egypt. For out from under the clutches of Pharaoh, they slaughtered the lamb. They took the blood, they painted it on the doorpost. And that way the angel that would pass through and slaughter all the firstborn sons of Egypt as God's final judgment on them. The angel, when he would see the marks of the blood on the doorpost, he would pass over that house.

That's where they get the word Passover from. And so that was God's. That blood on the doorpost from the shed, the shed blood of the lamb. The lamb that was slain for them was the mark that brought them salvation. You hear what's going on?

And so they hadn't yet understood this. The disciples of Jesus don't yet understand. The symbolism that God had put into the Passover celebration centuries before was now in this moment coming into fruition. God was making good on all the things that he had set in motion so long ago. So 1400 years ago in Egypt, they slaughtered the lamb, they painted the blood on the doorposts, they ate the meal.

There was no yeast, no leavening in the home. So they were eating flatbread, they were eating roasted meat, the lamb that was the sacrificial lamb, they were doing that. And there were some other things to do with that meal, and they would do that. And then that very night, when the angel of death came through, slaughtered all the firstborn animals and sons, and. And that sounds terrible to us, but Egyptians had plenty of warning and their hearts were hardened and they refused to repent.

And God said this was coming if they didn't repent. And so God made good on his judgment. So they pass. They leave that land, they leave the land of Egypt in the middle of the night with all their belongings and their animals and their families, and they depart from there. And so God had told them every year after that to commemorate the Passover meal, to celebrate it, to reenact it in a way, because in so doing, they would remember the mighty hand of God who had worked on their behalf.

I don't think we do that often enough, do we? Like, not often enough. Do we sit back maybe as a family or maybe having a friend over and reflect on what God has done in our midst? We don't reflect on the things, sometimes the small things. Like Wendy, we worked on her truck earlier this week twice.

It was a mess. And it turns out a fuse had come out. We replaced the alternator a couple times, put a battery in it. All this stuff is not working. And finally I'm like, lord, we just.

We're stranded out here. We need your help. And all of a sudden I'm like, is there a charging circuit fuse? There is. I've never had to check that before in my Life.

Yeah, There's a charging circuit fuse. And it was out. And guess what? It starts charging right away there, this whole ordeal over. And it's like, thank you, Lord.

Like, it seems so small, like God just saying, like, you know about a fuse, right? It's like, yeah, I know about a fuse. Like, should I have checked that first? Well, of course. But, you know, my brain doesn't go there.

And it's like, you finally, after hours of working on this, step back and like, lord, we need your help. It's time to remember those things. It's time to give testimony to those things. Sometimes it's as small as God saying, like, check the fuse, you know, and so we, you know. But sometimes it's a big thing like, did he heal you of something?

Did he deliver you from something? Did he restore your family in some way or another? We need to sit around and recall those things and give thanks to God for those things. So the Israelites were commanded to do this every year. Every year they were to commemorate the Passover because it was a big turning point in their life, in their nation's history, in their people's history.

And God was doing something through the people of Israel. He was doing something, as he called them, as you saw in that video at the beginning, that God had chosen. When everybody had kind of broken his covenants and fallen away, he chose one people group. He started with the man named Abraham. And then he said, I'll bless you and your family will become this big deal.

Like your family will be the chosen people. And from them, from your offspring, I'll make a great nation of people. And from them I will bring one forth who will be the ruler, the shepherd of my people. And through him all nations will be blessed. And so God way back then, at the time of Abraham, was pointing ahead to the Messiah, to Jesus Christ.

And so God was doing something through the people of Israel, through this nation of people. But what he was doing was he was, he called them to be a kingdom of priests. The priest is the person that mediates between God and the people. They're the in between, the go between person. And God was setting up the nation of Israel to be the go between, to be the ones that related the presence of God throughout all of humanity.

Now, of course, we know they failed at that. They didn't do that. They failed to do that over and over again. Jesus would be the one who would come forth and perfectly live out the calling of God upon the people of Israel. He would be the perfect Jew, the perfect Israelite the perfect son of Abraham, who was the mediator between God and all people.

But he was also the sacrificial lamb. He was the one whose blood was shed. And by his blood we are all cleansed. All who will receive him. To those who believe in his name, John tells us he gave the right to become children of God.

That brings us in as adopted sons of God. And some of you are like, what about me? I'm a girl. You know, like, yes, you have the status of a son. And in that society, sons were the ones that received the inheritance.

And to all men and women who believe in the son of God as savior, you receive the right to be adopted into the family of God and the status of a son. Amen. So the Passover meal is coming up. It's a big deal. People would travel from all over Jews that had dispersed to different cities, different nations, all over the Roman Empire and beyond.

They would travel into Jerusalem. They would go through purification rituals and rites. Some of them, like we saw the blind man last week washing in the pool of Siloam. Some of them would go to a place like that, they would bathe in there, they would wash in there. The flowing water coming in and flowing out would wash away the uncleanness of the places in which they lived, of their travels, whatever it might be, their own personal sins.

They would be considered ritually or ceremonially clean. And now they are ready to go present themselves to God and to worship God. And one of the big like pinnacle celebrations in this whole week long ceremony would be the Passover meal. And one of Jesus disciples says, master, it's time to prepare the Passover meal. Where do you want us to go do that?

Now I started out by saying there's some questions that you might have as you read the scripture and maybe you don't have a question about this and after I talk about it, you might. But it says in there, it says there was Jesus said, you'll go into the city and you will find a man carrying a stone water jar. Now hold on a second. Maybe you don't know this about those times, that era. Guess who usually had the distinct privilege and honor of carrying water.

Women. Oh man, you guys are good. You've heard me talk about this. Maybe. Yeah, it's a woman's job.

No offense, that's a woman's job. It was a clearly defined woman's job in their society. In fact, I honestly don't know what the men did. Okay, when you think of shepherds and you see like Christmas, like Christmas cards and nativity scenes, and it's like bearded shepherds, idiots. They don't know.

It's okay. I was an idiot once, too. I still am. I'm just not in this area. Big idiot.

Anyway, shepherds, even to this day in the Middle east, are oftentimes young girls, teenage boys, women. The men guess where they are. They're, like, making sure everybody else is doing their job and they're sitting under a shade tree somewhere. That's what the man's job was. Sit under the shade tree.

I like that job. Where do I apply? You know, Sounds great. But one of the things that they did, though, was the reason that the man had that responsibility was because as a patriarch, his job is to ensure that the livelihood continues, because it's his job to make sure that everybody within the household has what is necessary for life and for human flourishing. That's his job, and it's a big job, and he's staying devoted to that.

If he's out there chasing down the one sheep out of the hundred that leave and the 99 are still here, if he's the one chasing the one sheep, that's good. But he can't be in control of what's going on. And so it's his job to oversee it. It's his job to send somebody at any cost to go rescue that sheep. It's his job if somebody in the family falls into debt and has to mortgage their property.

And is his job to buy the person or the person and their property back from enslavement and to restore them to their position? You see that with Abraham. As Abraham goes, his nephew Lot has separated from him. Lot's a wealthy man. He gets attacked along with the people that he lives with, and they're taken away by some foreign kings, and they're taken off.

And Abraham's like, oh, no, not on my watch. Why? Because Abraham has a big ego because he cares that about his nephew, Lot. I mean, maybe. But really what it is is Abraham is the patriarch.

His father's dead. Now it relies on Abraham. Lot's his nephew, but Lot was raised like a son because his father had died. So Abraham is like, this is essentially like my son that just got taken with his family and his stuff. I got to go get him.

Abraham has a mercenary army of 318 trained men born in his household. I love that. Just that detail. Like, Abraham has his own mercenary army of men that were born in his household that he trained or had them trained. He has his own army.

How cool is that? That's like more American than Americans are, you know what I'm saying? Like, we talk about militias and stuff. It's in the Bill of Rights and everything. It's like he had a militia.

How cool is this guy? He goes after him, he captures them back. Like he defeats the army that had taken them and he brings them back. And it's a cool story. He meets a guy named Melchizedek, who's a priest.

All this great stuff. But he does all this stuff. Why? Because as a patriarch, that's his job to go do that. Boaz, he redeems the property of Ruth's mother in law, Naomi.

Yeah, he redeems the property of Naomi and takes Ruth to be his wife. Because as a kinsman redeemer, as a patriarch in the family, it's his responsibility to do it. And the patriarch that was closer, more closely related above him, refused to do it because he didn't want to mess up his own family tree by having to bear sons with Ruth that would be attributed to her dead husband. So Boaz takes that responsibility and does it. So this is what a patriarch does.

Now, you guys are going to have to help me. Why? I started talking about patriarchs. Where did I get off on that subject? Yeah, but even before that, oh, man, we were talking about Jesus.

Oh, men's work. Men's work and women's work. So the men, the men are working. You know, the men have their certain jobs and it's not carrying water. I knew I was gonna be like, telling this whole thing.

I'm like, I'm getting off on this rabbit trail and I'm gonna forget why I was there. So Jesus tells his disciples, you're gonna go into the city, you're gonna find a man carrying a water jug. Now, here's where biblical archaeology helps us out. There was a portion of the city of Jerusalem in the first century in the time of Jesus that had what was called the Essene Quarter. The Essenes.

E S S E N E. The Essenes was a group, like a sect of Jewish men. They had separated themselves from the rest of society. Many of them had moved out into the wilderness. They lived in the middle of nowhere, and they lived off the land. There weren't any women around, so obviously this doesn't.

You either have to have a good recruitment policy or it quickly dies within a generation, you know what I'm saying? Like one generation long of a group. Got it. Okay, cool. Anyway, in other words, it doesn't reproduce very well, is what I'm saying.

So you gotta have a really strong, like, call to action to be like, hey, do you want to move out to the middle of nowhere and leave society? Yeah, that's fine. I'm kind of tired of the hustle and bustle, you know, and the technology and all this stuff. Great. You know, do you want to be able to like, look up and actually see the stars?

Or do you like the light pollution from the city to obscure that beauty from your eyes? You know, like, easy sell. Let's do it. You can't bring any women along. Like, no.

Okay. You know, so pretty tough sell. But what they were doing was they believed that they were living out the Torah, the law of God, that they were actually doing a lot of writings. We believe that the kind of the lineage of the Essenes might have been a big part of the scrolls they found in Qumran. There were a lot of biblical scrolls and other things, Dead Sea scrolls, such as, things like that.

We believe that they were kind of an influence behind that, or at least a large portion of them. But then also they had a portion within the city where some of them lived, or maybe they owned some homes there where if you wanted to like, kind of come out from the middle of nowhere and stay in a house for a while, I guess. And so that's what they did. So when Jesus tells them, I want you to go into the city and you're going to find a man carrying a water jar, it's pretty much like thinly veiled code saying, you're going to find an Essene, a man that's part of the cult, not really a cult, but the group, the side group of the Essenes. You're going to find an Essene there, and I want you to go and we're going to celebrate the Passover in his house.

And so what it'll be. And we don't know if Jesus had already prearranged this with the guy or what it was, but the guy had a room already prepared for somebody to celebrate the Passover meal. So the disciples go there, they find it just like he had said, and they prepare the meal there. And this room would have been on the rooftop room of a house. When they built their houses, of course, the roof was pretty well flat and it was load bearing.

And so what better place to add on to your house than to go up? And so they would build an extra floor on top of the house or an extra room on the top floor of the house. And you would go up, maybe through a ladder or an external Stairway most of the time. And you could get up to this roof and go in this room and eat the meal there. It would also be the kind of room that could be used for dry storage for your food, things like that.

In fact, it was such a room that was probably filled up that Joseph and Mary went the Christmas story, where they say there was no room for them in the inn. It was not an inn, like a motel. It was actually an upper room like this, one of these rooms on the upper floor of the house, and it was already filled with guests. That's one of the things that such a room would be used for, is when there were travelers that would come in that they could use that space as a guest room, a guest house. And so that room had a lot of different uses.

But one of those could be if you needed to do a big dinner or a banquet or something like that. And so Jesus said, hey, why don't we go there? So they go there, they prepare the meal, and as they're sitting down at this meal, Jesus, the gospels all tell us of this story. And they each want to give us different details. And some of them, they tell us things like he says, I've been eagerly anticipating this meal with you.

I've been looking forward to this. Why was he looking forward to it? Because in this meal, he was taking the old commemorative traditions and saying, I'm breathing new life into these. I'm breathing new meaning into these. These are going to be something now that isn't just a memory of the past.

It'll be very specifically useful in your current and future. So what he does is he says. He says, we're going to take this meal, and. And I'm going to kind of reorient the meaning of parts of it. Like, they would take this bread.

It was called the afikomen, and it was a flatbread. It was more like almost like a cracker. And they would take it and they would break it, and there was things they would do with that as part of the Passover meal. But Jesus said, this broken bread, it now represents my body. My body is going to be broken for you.

They had no idea what he was talking about. They wouldn't know for several more days until after he's raised again. And they're like, oh, that's okay. It doesn't mean they were dumb. It just means they hadn't seen the rest of the story yet.

But he says, my body is going to be broken for you. You know what that means for us today? It means that in the midst of our brokenness, Christ can make us whole. It means like Jesus, long before he was ever born. The prophet Isaiah said that by his stripes we are healed.

The stripes they laid on his back as they beat him and as they whipped him. Those stripes make us well. The brokenness of the body of Jesus Christ results in our wholeness and our healing. Jesus, he says they would drink these different cups of wine. There was a few different cups, there was four different ones.

But each one had a meaning and a purpose. And he would take one of them at each point of the meal. But on one of them he says, this cup now is the new covenant in my blood. It's not the blood we're not remembering. The blood on the doorpost, the blood of that lamb that you would slay, the blood that was shed for you, for your salvation back in Egypt.

We're not remembering that so much anymore. What we are now remembering is that my blood, the blood of Jesus Christ, is effective in your life, that it makes a difference in your life. And so Jesus, as he prepared to do this, he also says, I got to tell you though, guys, one of you is going to betray me. One of you is going to betray me. And I read this, except for this week, I've always read this, knowing the story, like, yeah, it's Judas.

We know it's Judas. We've seen that. We've flipped the page and saw what happens. All of them did not know this yet. And they begin to ask him, one at a time, is it me?

Am I going to betray you, Jesus?

And I read that and I looked at it and I tried to get inside the emotions that the disciples all had in that moment. Because none of them could imagine turning their backs on Jesus in this moment. None of them can imagine what it would take for them to turn their back on Jesus or to work against him. They're just. That's a foreign idea to them that they cannot wrap their head around.

And so they're in anguish over it. As you read their question, it's like, it's not me, is it, Lord? It's not me, is it? And I look at my life and I'm like, jesus, how many times have I denied you? How many times have I turned my back on you?

How many times have you, like, shown me the truth of your life or what you want me to do, or what your plan for the world is? And I just say, eh, I want to do it my way. You know what, God, I'm bought in, but not that far. I can go along with the good stuff, But I'm not so sure that I want to be totally committed to you. Like, I don't want to entirely set my life to you.

I don't want to be what we might call entirely sanctified, you know, where my whole life is set apart for you. God, I don't know about that. Is it me, Lord? Am I the one that will betray you?

They were distraught over this. And Jesus says, well, one of you is going to dip your hand in the bowl with me. You know, they would have this mixture of things they would dip the bread in with. And Jesus said, the one who's next to me, that'll do that. The way they would sit at the table, the way they would.

They would actually recline at the table kind of on their left arm. Your left arm is your. It's your. Your common hand, you know, it's the one you use for the dirtier functions of life. And they didn't have, like, those hand sanitizer things everywhere, you know, like airports and hospitals and nursing homes and, you know, all these places that have them just every few feet.

It's like they have them as often as they have trash cans at Disney World, you know, it's just every so often, you got to put one. A few of us, we had visited somebody, a nursing home a while back, and I was just being a dork, and I was going through it, every one of them. And just until somebody noticed every single one down the hallway. I just kept getting more hand sanitizer on until somebody noticed what I was doing. And I learned that from my old pastor.

He used to take it and he'd say. He would put it in his hair like it was moose, you know. Anyway, I got. Now I can't blame him for that. I was a dork long before I knew him.

So you'd recline at the table on your left. You'd be sitting there with your feet kind of pointed out from the table. The table was a low table, just a little bit off the ground. And the food would kind of be on there. Somebody could be in the middle kind of serving you.

And the meal was served in these different courses that were commemorative, especially in the Passover meal, commemorative of the different movements of the Passover day. And so Jesus would be. There would usually be kind of three people near each other. And we know that John was kind of. As Jesus is laying at the table, he's kind of in front of him, because it says in one of the gospels that I think it was Peter said, motioned to him and said, ask him which one it is.

Like, who's gonna deny him? And it says, john leans back against the chest of Jesus and says, like, hey, who is it? And so we know John must have been in front of him. But Jesus said, hey, the one that I dip with. Well, there's only another.

There's only, like, three people that would share one dipping bowl. And so we believe that Judas was actually right behind Jesus the whole time at the meal. And this is kind of the setup of how they were sitting at the table. We're recreating that. It wasn't like the famous painting where they're all sitting on one side of the table, you know, like sitting up in chairs.

That's kind of a 1500s era painting, I think, of that, you know, where it's like they just kind of imagined that because they didn't really know. From archaeological dig sites of, like, history. Showing how they actually did. Would be kind of fun to go to a restaurant and be like, hey, we're gonna have, you know, we need a table for 26. And they're like, there's only 13 of you.

Like, yeah, we're all gonna sit on one side of the table. You ever thought it's just kind of a weird painting, you know? Anyway, we were at a restaurant the other day. We were gonna meet somebody there, and we all. It was me, my wife and daughter.

We just sat on one side of the table. And the waitress was like, ready to take our order. I'm like, we have more people coming. Okay. I didn't pick this, like, long table just for the three of us to sit on one side.

I wasn't trying to do that to you and take up your biggest table in the little restaurant, you know. Anyway, so Jesus, he's there with his disciples. He says, one's going to betray you. John leans back against Jesus, says, who is it? And he says, it's the one that I dip in the cup with.

Now, it could have also been John. He's thinking, it's not me, is it? The other disciples are thinking, it's not me, Judas, it's him. And we know from the reading all of the Gospels that what Judas does next is he leaves there and he goes out and Jesus in one of the Gospels, I forget which one, says, friend, whatever you've got to do, do it quickly. They didn't understand what he meant.

They thought Judas had to go to do something to help some poor people because he was the one that was controller of the money bag. He was their treasurer. And also, I think, as John says, and as such, he used to help himself to it whenever he wanted. You know, it's like a little bit of. A little, like, digging the elbow in, you know?

But anyway, he's like. He's like, judas is long gone and dead, but we're still gonna kinda turn the screws, a little tire on him, you know? We'll be like, hey, Judas was a thief. Like, just. Just so you guys remember that about him.

Like, you can't live it down anyway. So Jesus tells Judas, friend, whatever you got to go, whatever you got to do, go quickly and do it. Judas had already gone out from there. He went and made a deal with the leaders of the people. And he said, I'll find a way to betray him to you, to turn him into you.

And it makes you wonder, doesn't it? What would it take? I mean, you've been with Jesus, like, you've seen his miracles. You've seen him raise people from the dead, like Lazarus. A little boy, a little girl.

You've seen him raise people from the dead. You've seen him cleanse people of leprosy, which was thought to be an incurable disease. You've seen him drive demons out of people, restore the sight to people, bring people that were paralyzed, raise them up where they could walk. You've seen him do all these things. You've listened as he has won every religious argument with the best religious teachers of the day, and he's.

He beats them at their own game. And yet he turned on him. He turned against Jesus for money, for 30 pieces of silver. Now, I know silver is going up in value these days a little bit, but it's just a piece of metal. And he's like, let me take some of your metal, and I'll turn Jesus over to you.

Why would he do that?

Why would we turn our backs on God after all he's done for us?

Judas might have thought he was doing the right thing. I don't know. I don't think he did. He wasn't a good guy. It turns out he had Satan in his heart.

He was in the company of people that were believers in Jesus Christ, and yet he allowed Satan to fill him. That gives me a bit of pause today, a little bit of caution, knowing that in a church, in any church, there can be this time where there are people, they look like they fit in. They look like they blend in. It could be one of you. I don't know.

Y' all are gonna be like, nobody says, is it me? They're like, is it the person next to me? You know, and you're doing all the right stuff, but somehow you're like, I'm just not ready to submit to Christ. And so you start letting the things of the evil one of the tempter of Satan into your life.

Judas had decided that he would take some money and turn on Jesus. Maybe Jesus had failed what he thought Jesus would be. You know, like, he thought Jesus was going to come in and overthrow the Roman leaders and the Roman rulers and take back the city for the cause of the people of Israel, for the name of God. Maybe he thought Jesus was going to do that. Maybe he thought that he would have a little bit more like power and authority himself because Jesus was going to turn him loose and give him some kind of authority.

Who knows? Whatever reason it is, Judas might have thought somehow that he was doing the right thing because he says, if I betray Jesus, then he'll stand up, he'll raise up in power and overthrow these people. Maybe I've just got to push Jesus to do the right thing. See, so many times the way that we betray Christ is trying to make him move and do things on our time schedule, on our time frame. We're like, lord, here's what I thought you would have done in my life by now.

So I'm just going to do that. Think of Abraham and Sarah. God's promised, Abraham, you're going to have a son. And they weren't having any sons, and they're getting pretty old. And so Sarah's like, hey, what if you just sleep with my servant girl?

And we can call that my child. Your child, you know, like the one that God promised. And Abraham's like, sounds good. She's young, you know, she's. Yeah, all that stuff.

Like, I'm gonna stop there before I get myself into trouble. Like, he just, he's. He's sold on the program, you know, and then it turns out to be really bad. And then his wife later is like, this is your fault. And he's like, I don't remember the story going that way.

There's so many times we try to push along and do things that even things that God has promised he will do. And we say, you're not doing it fast enough. I want you to do it now. So I'm going to manipulate the situation. I'm going to push in a way that will force you to do it now, force you to do it my way.

For all we know, that's what Judas was doing. And so often we look a whole lot more like Judas, or at least his actions than the others. What I want to wrap up with and encourage you today is this. The new covenant is one that you aren't automatically dragged into or brought into. You have to choose to live under that new covenant.

You have to choose that you want the blood of Christ to be effective in your life. You have to choose to be what the scripture calls us as born again. See John, the Gospel of John tells us in chapter three that there's a Pharisee named Nicodemus who met with Jesus. And he's like, we know you're a prophet. We know you're a good teacher, but we don't know what you're saying.

I mean, I'm translating a little bit, but that's what it comes down to. And Jesus says, it comes down to this. You need a new life. You have to be born again. And so now at the moment of the Passover, Jesus is providing for that in his death that will come shortly after this, the next day.

He is providing that new birth for all mankind, for all who will accept him. And so what he does is he says, this new covenant is built in my blood, is sealed in my blood. It is my blood that cleanses you. In the book of Revelation, it talks about saints that are in heaven. And those saints are wearing white robes.

And it says, the robes were dipped in the blood of the lamb. I don't know if you've ever cut yourself and gotten it on your clothes, but it never bleaches them, does it? But the blood of Christ is that which cleanses us. And so when we talk about the new covenant, it is a cleansing covenant, a new covenant that God has made with us saying, I'm going to cleanse you. I'm going to wash you clean of your sins.

I'm going to give you a new life. And now you are adopted into the family as sons of God. Even you daughters, it's a beautiful thing, but you have to accept it.