We have been reviewing how it is that the Lord's Supper shows us there can only be one way of salvation, and that by faith in the finished work of Christ. We saw that the shedding of blood is essential - a life must be given up if a life that has been forfeited through sin is to be saved. Next we saw that to save a countless multitude required that the life given up must be pure and sinless and of infinite value. Only Christ had such a life, so His sacrifice was the only possible means to save people from sin, death and hell.
This time, we are stepping back from the whole scene and surveying the life of Christ from 30,000 feet. We are going to ask ourselves, if indeed there was any number of alternative and equally effective ways of finding salvation and arriving in heaven, why did God the Father put His Son through such a life and such a death?
700 years before He was born, God gave Jesus the name, "Man of Sorrows", "Acquainted with Grief". Look at some of the things He faced during His 33 years on earth:
- When He came into the world, only a few worshiped Him and some tried to kill Him
- He dwelt as a sinless soul among people who were thoroughly corrupted by sin. If Lot was tormented when living in Sodom and Gomorrah, what must this have been like for Jesus?
- Most of the people He lived with did not truly believe and trust in His Father in heaven
- Even His disciples were frequently slow of heart to believe what He was teaching them
- He witnessed the money changers and traders turning His Father's house into a den of robbers
- He was despised and rejected first by the crowds, then by His hometown and His earthly brothers. He was betrayed by Judas, deserted by His disciples and finally was forsaken by His heavenly Father on the cross. No one has ever been so alone as Jesus was.
- He wept over the hardness of heart of the Jews, wept angry tears at the tomb of Lazarus because of what sin had done, was often weeping and crying aloud in prayer to God. His anguish in Gethsemane was so great that He sweat, as it were, great drops of blood
- He was tempted - not just in the wilderness, but at every opportune moment, and He resisted those temptations to the point of shedding His blood.
Most of the points above have to do with the sorrow and grief of the life of Jesus, but these pale in comparison with what took place on the cross. In the garden, Jesus asked the Father that He might be spared what He was about to endure if it was possible - in other words, if there was another way to save the people of God, that the Father might not put Jesus through such agony as He was about to face. Yet Jesus went to the cross.
Read Psalm 22 for a first hand account of what Jesus went through. We leave on one side the scourging, spitting, beating and even the excruciating (a word itself derived from crucifixion) physical pain of hanging on the cross by nails. Infinitely worse was the breach of fellowship that the man Christ Jesus experienced with His Father, and the full force of God's anger and wrath that He bore in His soul in the place of those He would save, which their sins richly merited. He endured hell on the cross for a countless number of people.
We could never fully plumb the depths of Christ's sorrow, grief and suffering, and certainly not in the few short words we have given here, but hopefully this will serve to make our point. If any other way to God was good enough and would work out just fine for those who sincerely followed it, would God put His infinitely precious Son (His "Beloved") through all of this? Would He do this so He could offer Jesus as just one more path to heaven, of equal efficacy as any number of other possibilities? Would He hear His own Son cry to Him in anguish to be spared the cross if it were possible, and then send Him there anyway, knowing that there were plenty of other ways to salvation? The thought is both monstrous and absurd.
For all these reasons, then, and because Jesus and Peter are recorded as confirming this in the Scriptures, we contend that Jesus is the only Savior, and that all religions, philosophies and ideologies that put the crucifixion of the God-man Christ Jesus on one side to offer an alternative path to heaven are false - they must be false for all the reasons we have seen.
So now, believer, when you come to the Table, treasure it! Treasure it because it points to this only way of salvation, and to a Savior Whose love for His people is such that He came to provide that way at a cost that we will never fathom throughout all eternity!