Why A Supper?
I Corinthians 5:7b-8
By Harold Dinsmore, M.Div.
© 2008Harold Dinsmore

Celebration!  A wonderful word that describes an event of jubilation.  Joy and happiness are conjured up when I hear the word celebration.  We have assembled here this morning to worship our Lord Jesus Christ.  We are gathered to enter into a celebration.  The celebration of the Lord’s Supper.

Often, I was taught that the Lord’s Supper was a solemn, serious, woe-is-me type of an observance.  But according to our passage this morning, we are to celebrate this festival.

As background to our I Corinthians passage, we must travel back through time to the days of Moses and the time of the enslavement of Israel in Egypt.  We travel to the record in the book of Exodus.  Moses, having entreated the Pharaoh to let God’s people go several times, now stands before the Pharaoh one last time.

A final plague is announced.  The firstborn of every family, both man and beast shall die.  But still, Pharaoh’s heart was hardened and he refused to let the people go.  In Exodus 12, we have the institution of Passover.  Pasach in Hebrew – Pascha in Greek – means to pass over or to spare.  On that night, he and the people take a lamb without blemish, kill it, and take some of the blood and put it on the door posts and lintel, go into the house and have a meal of the lamb, unleavened bread and bitter herbs.  This is the Lord’s Passover.