Page 130 - Through New Eyes

Breaking Bread: The Rite of Transformation 125

3. Cain restructured part of the land of Nod into a wicked
city, naming it Enoch (Genesis 4:17).
4. Cain distributed his work to his son, Enoch, and to his
heirs. In so doing, he became their law-giver.
5. God came down to evaluate the works of men, and found
them evil (Genesis 6:3,5; cf. 11:5).
6. God resolved the situation by bringing judgment on them
and thereby “rested” (Genesis 6:7; cf. 11: 8; Deuteronomy
28:63; Psalm 2:4).

Thus, instead of progressively glorifying the world, man’s
labors progressively degraded it. Instead of a process of glorifica-
tion, we have a process of debasement (though restrained by
“common grace ,“ the crumbs that fall to the “dogs” from the Lord’s
Table; Matthew 15: 26-27). Instead of a paradoxical increase in
the revelation of God, we have an equally paradoxical obscuring
of that revelation (yet God continues to be fully revealed!).
Unless arrested, this process of debasement would lead to the
destruction of the world. God’s promise after the Flood, how-
ever, was that never again would He permit the process to go
that far. Rather, in man’s youth God would intervene to set
things right (Genesis 8:21). That restoration, of course, entailed
the whole work of Jesus Christ, especially His death under God’s
wrath as a substitute for our sins, and His resurrection as the in-
auguration of the transfigured Kingdom of God.
In practical terms, Jesus set at the center of His Kingdom a
rite designed to restructure our thinking, and reset our course
along the true lines of our calling. He did this by establishing the
ritual of the Lord’s Supper, or Holy Communion, which ritual
restores us to the holy six-fold action:s
1. Jesus took bread; and took the cup after He Himself had
sipped from it.
2. Jesus gave thanks for the bread and the wine.
3. Jesus restructured the bread by breaking it. In terms of the
Old Covenant sacrificial system, when the sacrifice was
slain and divided into pieces, the blood was always sepa-
rated from the flesh (Leviticus 1:5, 9). Thus, Jesus gave
them the wine in an act separate from His giving the