Bully's Blog

“For as often as you eat this bread and drink the cup, you proclaim the Lord’s death until He comes.”

If, as preterists maintain, Jesus came in AD70, why do you celebrate the Lord’s Supper?

To answer as an orthodox preterist (I’m sorry, but ‘partial’ doesn’t work for me), I would mention that the communion is a covenant memorial that reminds God of the covenant. The covenant is the key.

At His ascension, Jesus opened a new scroll (Rev. 4-5 and the 7 seals) – the New Covenant. In AD70, he rolled up the Old Covenant, the one that was like an old garment, ready to pass away. There was a forty year “wilderness” overlap.

The idea of an open scroll or a garment aligns the Covenant with the firmament. It is a covering, veil or shield from being face to face with the Law of God.

Those who refused to enter the new ‘scroll’ were left ‘uncovered’ when it was ended. They cried “Cover us!” as Jesus predicted. But only the saints were covered.

With this introduction, here’s my theory:

God always divides, fills and reunites. In Communion, the bread and wine must be given separately. As the sacrifice, Christ’s body was divided from His blood. We are filled, and His body and blood are reunited—put back together again—in us. As we partake, we fulfill His resurrection as His body, a holy army (Ezekiel 37; John 12:24).

In the two trees, Life and Wisdom, bread and wine, priest and king, flesh and blood, Land and Sea, earth and heaven, the Lord presented Adam with a divided world. The only way it could be united was through obedience. If he obeyed the Father’s will, he would eat the bread, then drink the wine, and the divided world would be united first in his own body. This is what Christ accomplished in His resurrection.

The theme of Garden, Land, World recurs throughout the Bible.1 Christ conquered in the Garden. The church conquered in the Land and AD70 finished the Jew-Gentile divide begun in Abraham. But there is still work to do, so we are given the last supper elements separately. We are one, but the World God has given us to dominate is not. Dominion begins liturgically with bread and wine as separate elements, united in our bodies, renewing the Covenant weekly until the entire World is a Holy Place – until there is no more “Sea.”

“If the marriage feast was in AD70, why do we still take Communion?” Christ’s coming in AD70 finished the union of Jew and Gentile. But there is a greater feast to come at the second resurrection when the family is complete and the New Covenant scroll is also rolled up. Then Christ, victorious over Garden (Adam – Most Holy Place), Land (Cain – Holy Place) and World (sons of God – outer courts) will present the kingdom to the Father, the entire creation as a new Tabernacle.

Christ came in judgment at the end of the Old Covenant. He will also come in judgment at the end of the New Covenant. That is the nature of Covenants, and this is the future coming we look forward to when we celebrate as faithful “sons of God” in the World.

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1 See James Jordan’s Through New Eyes and Peter Leithart’s A House for My Name.