This Table is emblematic of the death of Jesus, and yet it is by this means that God enables us to partake of the living Christ. Christ is risen; He is not dead. And yet here is His body, and here is His blood. These emblems are dead, and yet through them we are being knit together with Life itself. How can that be?
If God had a workshop, the prime materials stacked up in piles in that workshop would all be the wreckage of death. This is what He specializes in, which is why the apostle Paul said this—“But we had the sentence of death in ourselves, that we should not trust in ourselves, but in God which raiseth the dead” (2 Cor. 1:9). While there is what we think is life in us, there is what we think is hope in us. But God is not an energy drink for our life; He is living water for our death.
I have been speaking over the last few weeks to those of you with troubles, which is to say, all of you. One of our difficulties is that we want to make these troubles smaller so that God might be willing to lend a helping hand with them, when we really need to see them as bigger. God deals with death. The Lord Jesus, now the steward of the whole universe, holds in His hands the keys of death and Hades.
So when we struggle against admitting death into our lives, we are actually struggling against the opportunity to see what God—who raises the dead—can do. The doors of every form of death have a key, and Jesus holds it.