I gotta have my orange juice.

We have considered several different models for worship, all of which capture different aspects of what it means for the church to meet with Jesus on the Lord’s day. As the chief shepherd-pastor, Jesus is concerned that all of his sheep would be fed and tended (John 21:15-19) as they meet with him.

Different parts of the Lord’s service have different degrees of accessibility to Jesus’s lambs. The sermon is perhaps the least accessible. Confession and singing and tribute-bringing are more accessible to all. But there is only one part of the Lord’s service that is accessible to all but the smallest infants, regardless of age (young or old) or mental capacity.

Thus, weekly communion: because Jesus wishes to feed all of his lambs as they come to worship him, so that all from the least to the greatest share in the experience of meeting with and receiving from him.

Paul writes to the Corinthians that:

. . . Christ, our Passover lamb, has been sacrificed. Let us therefore celebrate the festival . . . (1 Corinthians 5:7-8 ESV)

Calvin comments on this, writing that:

Paul, having it in view to exhort the Corinthians to holiness, shows that what was of old figuratively represented in the passover, ought to be at this day accomplished in us, and explains the correspondence which exists between the figure and the reality. In the first place, as the passover consisted of two part—a sacrifice and a sacred feast—he makes mention of both. For although some do not reckon the paschal lamb to have been a sacrifice, yet reason shows that it was properly a sacrifice, for in that rite the people were reconciled to God by the sprinkling of blood. Now there is no reconciliation without a sacrifice; and, besides, the Apostle now expressly confirms if, for he makes use of the word θύεσθαι, which is applicable to sacrifices, and in other respects, too, the context would not correspond. The lamb, then, was sacrificed yearly; then followed a feast, the celebration of which lasted for seven successive days. Christ, says Paul, is our Passover. He was sacrificed once, and on this condition, that the efficacy of that one oblation should be everlasting. What remains now is, that we eat, not once a year, but continually.

Thus, weekly communion: we, who have a perpetual sacrifice and are made permanently holy, are continually in a festal season.

We have called worship a kind of a tryst between Jesus and his bride, and have identified it as a covenant renewal, which is really a highfalutin way of saying the same thing. We as the church do not live in just any old covenant with Jesus, but a marriage covenant:

“Therefore a man shall leave his father and mother and hold fast to his wife, and the two shall become one flesh.” This mystery is profound, and I am saying that it refers to Christ and the church. (Eph. 5:31-32)

Luke Welch observes that human marriage-covenants have two primary covenantal motions in them: the wedding that establishes the marriage, and one-flesh sexual relations that “renew” it. He goes on to make the powerful point that in Jesus’s covenant with his bride, there are two analogous motions to our earthly marriages: Jesus’s death-resurrection-ascension that establishes the covenant (together with our baptism that brings us into it as individuals), and the continued communion that the church enjoys with Jesus at his table to renew this covenant. This communion is even a kind of one-flesh relationship, where the church-body consumes Jesus’s body (and is herself consumed by Jesus; Rev. 3:16).

Thus, weekly communion; because is it even necessary to ask how often a husband and wife should get together? Do not deprive one another (1 Cor. 7:5) or neglect to meet (Heb. 10:25).

In John 2, Jesus attends a wedding at Cana, where he performs his first sign in John, the conversion of water into wine.

It is significant that John records this miracle occurred at a wedding, not merely a feast. John very skillfully writes this account in such a way as to equate Jesus with the bridegroom without, of course, suggesting that Jesus was actually the groom: Jesus provided the wine, and the master of the feast declares the bridegroom to have provided the wine.

This is the sign: Jesus is revealed as the provident Bridegroom, a theme which John takes up again in the following chapter, and which also underscores Jesus’s interactions with exemplary women throughout the book of John.

But the bride is missing from this account, and while many of John’s women are in need of a bridegroom, they only serve to typify the true bride. In a sense, the book of John serves as the revelation of the Bridegroom, and only in John’s book of Revelation do we finally see the Bride revealed.

It is widely said that while it is fascinating to study Revelation, and frustrating that Christians disagree so widely over its interpretation, it is nonetheless ultimately encouraging that these differences of opinion matter little in how they impact day-to-day Christian living because we all agree that Jesus will win in the end. This is a nice sentiment, but I find it unconvincing because “the righteous shall live by faith” (Rom. 1:17), and it matters greatly to our faith what it is that Jesus has already accomplished for his people. For example, consider Revelation 12:10-12:

And I heard a loud voice in heaven, saying, “Now the salvation and the power and the kingdom of our God and the authority of his Christ have come, for the accuser of our brothers has been thrown down, who accuses them day and night before our God. And they have conquered him by the blood of the Lamb and by the word of their testimony, for they loved not their lives even unto death. Therefore, rejoice, O heavens and you who dwell in them! But woe to you, O earth and sea, for the devil has come down to you in great wrath, because he knows that his time is short!”

If this event has yet to happen, then Christians may fear the accusations of Satan day and night (consider Job) and must reassure themselves regularly that Jesus is our intercessor (Rom. 8:34). But if Jesus and the early martyrs have already cast Satan out of heaven and bound him (Rev. 20:2), then Christians today enjoy a kind of security and freedom in the presence of God that goes beyond having an advocate to stand with us. We do not even have an accuser. And it is my firm belief that this is the case.

Consider one piece of internal evidence. We are told later in Revelation that “blessed are the dead who die in the Lord from now on” (Rev. 14:13). Clearly this cannot be talking about those who die after the second coming of Jesus. This must be referring either to those who die after the resurrection and ascension of Jesus or, as I think most probable, those who die after the vindication of Jesus in the final destruction of the old-covenant creation in AD 70.

Consider also the fact that it is angels who are mediators of the judgments in Revelation. We are told in Hebrews 1-2 that it was the old covenants whose messages were mediated by angels, in contrast with the new covenant where Jesus is the mediator. We are told that the world of the new covenant is not subjected to angels but to Jesus (Heb. 2:5). Elsewhere Jesus gives the keys of the kingdom to the apostles and elders of the church (Matt. 16), and Paul teaches that the second coming is a time where we will judge angels, not where angels will judge man (1 Cor. 6:3). Taken together, the angelic actions in Revelation seem much more likely to describe the destruction of the old-covenant creation during the first century than the final judgment. Revelation depicts the changing of the guard, the retirement of angelic elders and their replacement with human elders.

Lastly, we can identify the Babylon of Revelation with the first-century city of Jerusalem. One way we can do so is because she is represented as a good church (Israel) finally gone completely bad. She is called a prostitute (Rev. 17), a source of blasphemy and abomination (Rev. 17), and a house of demons and everything unclean (Rev. 18). This is the culmination of all of the denouncements of the old-covenant prophets. Jesus is finally making good on his threats and vindicating his name. But more than that, Revelation itself identifies Babylon as the “great city” (Rev. 16-18), which it has previously named as Jerusalem: “the great city that symbolically is called Sodom and Egypt, where their Lord was crucified” (Rev. 11:8).

Hebrews reminds us that presently everything is in subjection to Jesus, even though we do not see this visibly in every way (Heb. 2:8-9). History now is an outworking of Jesus’s present enthronement and authority chiefly through the sacrificial ministry of the gospel, and will end not with king Jesus receiving a new kingdom, but with his giving a completed kingdom to the Father (1 Cor. 15). Christians can rest confidently in Jesus’s present rule, which among many other blessings means that our accuser has already been cast down and bound.