Category: Devotions

These verses contain Luke’s account of the institution of the Lord’s supper. It is a passage which every true Christian will always read with deep interest. How wonderful it seems that an ordinance, so beautifully simple at its first appointment, should have been obscured and mystified by man’s inventions! What a painful proof it is of human corruption, that some of the bitterest controversies which have disturbed the Church, have been concerning the table of the Lord! Great indeed is the ingenuity of man, in perverting God’s gifts! The ordinance that should have been for his wealth is too often made an occasion of falling.

We should notice, for one thing in these verses, that the principal object of the Lord’s supper was to remind Christians of Christ’s death for sinners. In appointing the Lord’s supper, Jesus distinctly tells His disciples that they were to do what they did, “In remembrance of him.” In one word, the Lord’s supper is not a sacrifice. It is eminently a commemorative ordinance.

The chapter which opens with these verses, begins Luke’s account of our Lord’s sufferings and death. No part of the Gospels is so important as this. The death of Christ was the life of the world.–No part of our Lord’s history is so fully given by all the gospel writers as this. Only two of them describe the circumstances of Christ’s birth. All four dwell minutely on Christ’s death. And of all the four, no one supplies us with such full and interesting details as Luke.

We see, firstly, in these verses, that high offices in the church do not preserve the holders of them from great blindness and sin. We read that “the chief priests and scribes sought how they might kill” Jesus.

These verses form the practical conclusion of our Lord Jesus Christ’s great prophetical discourse. They supply a striking answer to those who condemn the study of unfulfilled prophecy as speculative and unprofitable. It would be difficult to find a passage more practical, direct, plain, and heart-searching than that which is now before our eyes.

Let us learn from these verses, the spiritual danger to which even the holiest believers are exposed in this world. Our Lord says to His disciples, “Take heed to yourselves, lest at any time your hearts be overcharged with surfeiting, and drunkenness, and cares of this life, and so that day come upon you unawares.”

The subject of this portion of our Lord’s great prophecy is His own second coming to judge the world. The strong expressions of the passage appear inapplicable to any event less important than this. To confine the words before us, to the taking of Jerusalem by the Romans, in an unnatural straining of Scripture language.

We see, firstly, in this passage, how terrible will be the circumstances accompanying the second advent of Christ. Our Lord tells us that “there will be signs in the sun, and in the moon, and in the stars; and upon the earth distress of nations, with perplexity; the sea and the waves roaring; men’s hearts failing them for fear, and for looking after those things which are coming on the earth: for the powers of heaven shall be shaken. And then shall they see the Son of man coming in a cloud.”

The subject of the verses before us is the taking of Jerusalem by the Romans. It was meet and right that this great event, which wound up the Old Testament dispensation, should be specially described by our Lord’s mouth. It was fitting that the last days of that holy city, which had been the seat of God’s presence for so many centuries, should receive a special notice in the greatest prophecy which was ever delivered to the Church.

We should mark in this passage, our Lord Jesus Christ’s perfect knowledge. He gives us a fearful picture of the miseries which were coming on Jerusalem. Forty years before the armies of Titus encompassed the city, the dreadful circumstances which would attend the siege are minutely described. The distress of weak and helpless women,–the slaughter of myriads of Jews,–the final scattering of Israel in captivity among all nations,–the treading down of the holy city by the Gentiles for eighteen hundred years, are things which our Lord narrates with as much particularity as if He saw them with His own eyes.

We should notice, for one thing, in this passage, Christ’s prediction concerning the nations of the world. He says, “Nation shall rise against nation, and kingdom against kingdom: and great earthquakes shall be in divers places, and famines and pestilences: and fearful sights, and great signs shall there be from heaven.”

These words no doubt received a partial fulfilment in the days when Jerusalem was taken by the Romans, and the Jews were led into captivity. It was a season of unparalleled desolation to Judea, and the countries round about Judea. The last days of the Jewish dispensation were wound up by a struggle which for bloodshed, misery, and tribulation, has never been equalled since the world began.

Let us notice in this passage, our Lord Jesus Christ’s words about the temple at Jerusalem. We read that some spake of it, “how it was adorned with goodly stones and gifts.” They praised it for its outward beauty. They admired its size, its architectural grandeur, and its costly decorations. But they met with no response from our Lord. We read that he said, “As for these things which ye behold, the days will come in the which there shall not be left one stone upon anotherm that shall not be thrown down.”

These words were a striking prophecy. How strange and startling they must have sounded to Jewish ears, an English mind can hardly conceive. They were spoken of a building which every Israelite regarded with almost idolatrous veneration. They were spoken of a building which contained the ark, the holy of holies, and the symbolical furniture formed on a pattern given by God Himself. They were spoken of a building associated with most of the principal names in Jewish history; with David, Solomon, Hezekiah, Josiah, Isaiah, Jeremiah, Ezra, and Nehemiah. They were spoken of a building toward which every devout Jew turned his face in every quarter of the world, when he offered up his daily prayers. (1 Kings 8:44; Jonah 2:4; Dan. 6:10) But they were words spoken advisedly. They were spoken in order to teach us the mighty truth that the true glory of a place of worship does not consist in outward ornaments. “The Lord seeth not as man seeth.” (1 Sam. 16:7) Man looketh at the outward appearance of a building. The Lord looks for spiritual worship, and the presence of the Holy Ghost. In the temple at Jerusalem these things were utterly wanting, and therefore Jesus Christ could take no pleasure in it.

We learn, for one thing, from these verses, how keenly our Lord Jesus Christ observes the things that are done upon earth. We read that “He looked up and saw the rich men casting their gifts into the treasury. And He saw also a certain poor widow casting in thither two mites.” We might well suppose that our Lord’s mind at this season would have been wholly occupied with the things immediately before Him. His betrayal, His unjust judgment, His cross, His passion, His death, were all close at hand; and He knew it.–The approaching destruction of the temple, the scattering of the Jews, the long period of time before His second advent, were all things which were spread before His mind like a picture. It was but a few moments ago he spoke of them.–And yet at a time like this we find Him taking note of all that is going on around Him! He thinks it not beneath Him to observe the conduct of a “certain poor widow.”

Let us observe in this passage, what striking testimony to Christ’s divinity the book of Psalms contains. We read that after patiently replying to the attacks of His enemies, our Lord in turn propounds a question to them. He asks them to explain an expression in the hundred and tenth Psalm, where David speaks of the Messiah as his Lord. To this question the Scribes could find no answer. They did not see the mighty truth, that Messiah was to be God as well as man, and that while as man He was to be David’s son, as God He was to be David’s Lord. Their ignorance of Scripture was thus exposed before all the people. Professing themselves to be instructors of others and possessors of the key of knowledge, they were proved unable to explain what their own Scriptures contained. We may well believe that of all the defeats which our Lord’s malicious enemies met with, none galled them more than this. Nothing so abashes the pride of man, as to be publicly proved ignorant of that which he fancies is his own peculiar department of knowledge.

We see in these verses what an old thing unbelief is. We are told that “there came to our Lord certain of the Sadducees, who deny that there is any resurrection.” Even in the Jewish Church, the Church of Abraham, and Isaac, and Jacob,–the Church of Moses, and Samuel, and David, and the prophets,–we find that there were bold, avowed, unblushing sceptics. If infidelity like this existed among God’s peculiar people, the Jews, what must the state of heathenism have been? If these things existed in a green tree, what must have been the condition of the dry?

We must never be surprised when we hear of infidels, deists, heretics and free-thinkers rising up in the Church, and drawing away disciples after them. We must not count it a rare and a strange thing. It is only one among many proofs that man is a fallen and corrupt being. Since the day when the devil said to Eve “ye shall not surely die,” and Eve believed him, there never has been wanting a constant succession of forms of unbelief.–There is nothing new about any of the modern theories of infidelity. There is not one of them that is not an old disease under a new name. They are all mushrooms which spring up spontaneously in the hot-bed of human nature. It is not in reality an astonishing thing that there should rise up so many who call in question the truth of the Bible. The marvel is rather, that in a fallen world the sect of the Sadducees should be so small.