I hope you all had a blessed Passover - and a joyful Feast of Firstfruits. Our Messiah Yeshua has risen and He is the firstfruits of the dead! We await His coming again in glory - and because we are still waiting, we did not drink that fourth cup at our Passover celebration.As I was putting together our Seder, I began to look more closely at the four cups and the promises they represent. It all comes from Exodus 6:6-8: "I am YHVH and I will bring you out from under the yoke of the Egyptians. I will free you from being slaves, and I will redeem you with My outstretched arm and with mighty acts of judgment. I will take you as my own people and I will be your God." From these four promises that YHVH gave to His people Israel, the four cups of the Seder were adopted and every year we gratefully drink from these cups. But this year I began to look at them more closely.
1. "I will bring you out from Egypt" - the cup of Sanctification
2. "I will free you with mighty acts of judgment" - the cup of Judgment
3. "I will redeem you" - the cup of Redemption
4. "I will take you" - the Kingdom cup
He set apart a people for Himself, and He continues to sanctify His people. Today we may not live in Egypt, but we do live in the world, a type of Egypt. We are still in the process of having "Egypt" taken out of us! And just as God freed the Israelites with mighty acts of judgment, so He continues to do today. Every single time our nation has come against Israel by pushing the division of her land, we have suffered great judgments in hurricanes, earthquakes or stock market collapses. I will never forget in 2005 when I was living in Jerusalem and the forced eviction of Jews in the Gaza took place. Ten thousand Jews were put into the streets of Israel, homeless. Three days later, Katrina hit the gulf coast of the U.S. and hundreds of thousands of Americans wandered the streets, homeless. God caused His "Outstretched Arm" (Yeshua) to redeem the Israelites, and as the blood of the Passover lamb painted upon Jewish doorways protected them from death, so the sinless blood of Yeshua, our Passover Lamb, saves us from dying in our sin.
In Matthew 26:26-28 we read about Yeshua sharing that last Passover Seder with his disciples. Verse 26 begins with, "While they were eating, Yeshua took bread, gave thanks... and then verse 27 begins with, "Then He took the cup, gave thanks, and offered it to them..." We know that this cup Yeshua gave His disciples - the one He called "My blood of the New Covenant" - was the third cup, the cup of Redemption. The third cup is the one that is drunk during the Passover meal, and we see that the disciples were eating. And of course it makes perfect sense that Yeshua calls this third cup "His blood of the New Covenant" for it is our Redemption from the wages of sin and death.
But what about that fourth cup? In Matthew 26:29 Yeshua says, "I tell you I will not drink of this fruit of the vine from now until that day when I drink it anew with you in My Father's kingdom." The Spirit quickened to me that Yeshua refused the fourth cup! Why? It is not yet time to drink it. The Passover is not yet completely fulfilled! The fourth cup is called the Kingdom Cup - and Yeshua promises to drink it with us when He is with us in His kingdom in Jerusalem! I believe that is why Paul says, "Our Passover Lamb has been sacrificed for us...therefore let us keep the festival!" We are to keep this feast throughout all generations, from that first generation that ate it in haste before their deliverance through the Sea of Reeds, to the Day of His Coming, when He will "take us" into the Land and we will lift that Kingdom cup with our King, and celebrate our final deliverance from "Egypt"!
All I can say to that is what the Jewish people have been saying for thousands of generations:
NEXT YEAR IN JERUSALEM!
