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During Holy Week we commemorate Christ’s Last Supper, when He declined the fourth cup of wine of the Passover Seder meal, announcing that we would drink it together in His Kingdom. On Easter Sunday, we drink that Fourth Cup because, with His resurrection from the dead, His Kingdom has now come, and He reigns!

As Frederick S. Leahy writes in The Cross He Bore: Meditations on the Suffering of the Redeemer:
“The four cups were understood in terms of the four-fold promise of Exodus 6:6, 7: ‘I will bring you out… I will deliver you from their bondage… I will redeem you… I will take you for my people, and I will be your God’. That fourth cup which the Saviour declined was the cup of consummation and fulfilment. He therefore said, ‘I tell you I shall not drink again of this fruit of the vine until that day when I drink it new with you in my Father’s kingdom” (Matt. 26:29). The expression ‘that day’ points us to the age to come when that which is now incomplete will be ‘new’, i.e., fulfilled….Christ did not drink from that sacramental cup or eat of that sacramental bread, but he clearly saw their redemptive significance…. We need to recapture the awareness of this when we come to the Lord’s Table. Again it becomes plain that Christ never doubted the outcome of his passion as he looked on that red wine symbolic of a violent death. He knew that he would drink from the cup of complete fulfilment with his redeemed in the kingdom of God and at ‘the marriage supper of the Lamb’.”

So lift your cup in celebration – The Age to Come Has Arrived, Already but Not Yet!