Q. .What is the Lord's Supper?

A.This is a very important concept in the Scriptures and it started in the Torah. The information on what a Lord's Supper is will conflict with the concepts, ideologies and doctrines of many but hopefully you will look deeper into this. Again, there is no way to get into detail about all of
the concepts related to it but you will get a good idea of what it is and what it isn't.
Let's start with what it is. A Lord's Supper is a meal, a full meal, dedicated to God and concentrated on Him. Every Sabbath, festival (except Yom Kippur), life-cycle event had a theme and a meal was centered around it. Harvests and sacrifices also had meals around them. The emphasis of the meal always came back to the Wedding Supper. A Lord's Supper pointed to Sukkot and Sukkot pointed to the Marriage Supper of the Lamb. The idea was to rehearse being in the Messianic Kingdom ( Mt 8.11; Mt 22.1-14; 25.10;Dt 16.1-16;Gen 18.1-8;31.54;Ex 24.1-11;Lk 12.35-38;Job 1.4). Each festival had a meal with songs, prayers, blessings, a theme, teaching, ceremonies, symbolic foods and scriptures.You could have a meal to celebrate victories, give comfort to mourners and it had a celebatory nature to them. Joy was an essential element and a right attitude. Paul admonished the Corinthians about how their meals had degenerated. Portions were given to the poor and guests were invited accompanied by a spirit of hospitality. The essence of a Lord's Supper was a banquet, an eschatological meal that taught something about the redemption. To eat with someone showed you had accepted them. In The Book of Galatians, the Gentile believers were being told that they had to be ritually circumcised( become Jewish) to be saved by some well-meaning believers but that wasn't true. When these teachers came to Galatia, Peter stopped eating with them to show he had not accepted them and Paul took him to task about it. It was Peter who had the revelation from God in Acts 10 that Gentiles did not have to be circumcised to be saved and yet he entered into hypocrisy for fear of them. This didn't look very good and Paul had to correct Peter to his face. A communal meal is one of the concepts around a meal concecrated to God and Peter didn't want to be seen "communing" with them. As you can see, there a many elements to a Lord's Supper that is very unfamiliar to most reading this and that is because what is being practiced today is not what the biblical model is. The current practice in many congregations is based on pagan concepts related to Mithraism. If you did some research on the Lord's Supper as it was done in Mithraism you would be very surprised to find out that
that it has more to do with pagan rituals than what the biblical model is. It has some mystical, sacramental element that has nothing to do with what the Lord had in mind. And
how did a full meal degenerate down to a thimble full of grape juice and a piece of bread?
It's because Replacement Theology has turned it into something it never was supposed to be. How many of us would invite someone over for a Thanksgiving dinner and then serve grape juice and a piece of bread? Now, if we wouldn't do that for a man-made festival why do people do it with a meal consecrated to God Himself? I hope this gives you some idea of this concept and also causes you to rethink what you may be practicing. There is so much more to this than what people have experienced and I hope this motivates some to find the true essence of what a meal consecrated to God is all about. For more information on this you can go to the Jewish Encyclopedia on the Internet and to Tyndale's commentary and look up "Banquets" and also look up"mithraism" on the Internet and find out what was practiced. You will be very surprised.