第70章 CHRIST AND HIS TABLE-COMPANIONS(5)

Do pray the Lord to reveal Himself to you. Ask that it may not be a dead form to you, but that now in very deed you may give to Christ your heart, while He shall show to you His hands and His side, and make known to you His agonies and death, wherewith He redeemed you from the wrath to come. All this, and vastly more, is the teaching of the table at which Jesus sat with the twelve. I have often wondered why the Church of Rome does not buy up all those pictures by one of its most renowned painters, Leonardo da Vinci, in which our Lord is represented as sitting at the table with His disciples, for these are a contradiction of the Popish doctrine on this subject. As long as that picture remains on the wall, and as long as copies of it are spread everywhere, the Church of Rome stands convicted of going against the teaching of the earlier Church by setting up an altar when she confesses her-self that aforetime it was not considered to be an altar of sacrifice but a table of fellowship, at which the Lord did not kneel, nor stand as an officiating priest, but at which He and His disciples sat. We, at least, have no rebukes to fear from antiquity, for we follow, and mean to follow, the primitive method. Our Lord has given us commandment to do this until He comes,--not to alter it, but just to "do this," and nothing else, in the same manner until He shall come.

III. We will draw to a close by asking--What further may be inferred from this sitting of Christ with his disciples at the table?

I answer: first, _there may be inferred from it the equality of all the saints_. There were here twelve apostles. Their apostleship, however, is not concerned in the matter. When the Lord's supper was celebrated after all the apostles had gone to heaven, was there to be any alteration because the apostles had gone? Not at all. Believers are to do this in remembrance of their Lord _until He shall come_. There was no command for a change when the first apostles were all gone from the Church: No, it was to be the same still,--bread and wine and the surrounding of the table, until the Lord came. I gather, then, the equality of all saints.

There is a difference in office, there was a difference in miraculous gift, and there are great differences in growth of grace; but still, in the household of God, all saints, whether apostles, pastors, teachers, deacons, elders, or private members, being all equal, eat at one table. There is but one bread, there is but one juice of the vine here.

It is only in the Church of God that those words, so wild politically, can ever be any more than a dream, "Liberty, Equality, and Fraternity." There you have them, where Jesus is; not in a republic, but in the kingdom of our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ, where all rule and dominion are vested in Him, and all of us willingly acknowledge Him as our glorious Head, and all we are brethren. Never fall into the idea that older believers were of a superior nature to ourselves. Do not talk of _Saint_

Paul, and _Saint_ Matthew, and _Saint_ Mark, unless you are prepared to speak of _Saint_ William and _Saint_ Jane sitting over yonder, for if they be in Christ they are as truly saints as those first saints were, and I ween there may be some who have attained even to higher saintship than many whom tradition has canonized.