The Table Bought with Blood

In the Fall of 2024, I went to a church conference with some friends. I didn't know much about the church hosting it, other than that it's fairly well-known internationally. However, with the amount of scandal that's rocked the charismatic church in America in the last couple years, I had felt the need to be more cautious and skeptical, even to the point of callousness to some degree. Regardless of the protective walls I was starting to build around my heart, I still wanted to encounter the living God and give my heart to Him fully, and what has been proven true time after time in my own life is that if you seek Him with ALL your heart, regardless of the external circumstances, or the inner turmoil of your own heart, you will surely find Him, and He will manifest His glory to you in a deeply personal way. He'll also reveal mysteries of His Word that will rock your world like He did mine that day.

A Vision of Fellowship

A message had just been preached about King David and how he disobeyed God by taking a census of the nation, which he was expressly instructed not to do. He immediately felt guilty for this act, and the Lord let him choose between 3 punishments. He chose the plague. Tens of thousands of people fell dead, and feeling the consequences of his sin, he wanted to set up an altar to make a sacrifice to the Lord. To do so, he was going to buy a threshing floor of a local farmer and set up his altar there. Naturally, the farmer was just going to offer it to the king for free. He is the king, after all. However, laying his ego aside and in full fear of the Lord, he says "No, but I will surely buy it from you for a price; nor will I offer burnt offerings to the Lord my God that which costs me nothing." and it says he proceeds to offer burnt offerings and "peace offerings" before the Lord (2 Samuel 24). Other translations call the peace offerings fellowship offerings, which is what this pastor called it. I had never heard that before, and it captivated me. "What exactly is a fellowship offering?" I pondered.

The message concluded and worship restarted again. I kept meditating on a fellowship offering when suddenly, the Lord hijacked my brain and I saw the clearest movie in my head. The visual of it brought me to my knees and even makes me cry now thinking about it again.

In the vision, I saw myself at the Last Supper, sitting across the table from Jesus. The atmosphere was heavy with the weight of the moment after Jesus just told me and the disciples that He was about to be betrayed, and that He was giving Himself up willingly to be crucified. I cried, because it's my best friend that's about to die for me. I can scarcely handle the thought. The horror. But He's sitting across the table, looking right at me. He has the softest smile on His face. It's full of a hope that's somber, and a look in His eyes that says "I want to do this for you. This is why I came."

He tears a piece of bread, and not breaking His gaze from me, He reaches across the table with the torn bread, and I hear Him say,

"I WON'T SACRIFICE THAT WHICH COSTS ME NOTHING."

Then it clicked. The Son of David BECAME a fellowship offering, not only in the Levitical, sacrificial sense, but in the other sense of Him literally offering me His fellowship, and not just any fellowship, but the closest, most intimate form of fellowship that exists, because it comes with a Passover cup of His shed blood and the bread of His broken body that He's giving me to eat and drink. I realized all over again how He really gave all of Himself to me, holding nothing back, just for the chance to win my fellowship--sinful dust that I am.

Realizing this, I had my face to the ground, weeping like a baby. I remembered all the times I put off spending time with Him. How many times He set a table for me to fellowship with Him and to feast on His goodness only for Him to stare across the table at an empty chair. How could He still be offering me His fellowship?

It Gets Deeper

When the Lord reveals a secret, rarely is it a "one and done" piece of information that you can put in your pocket and ignore, at least not for very long. It's been my experience that His Word is active and alive. It echoes through time, space, and human hearts. It's one thing to learn the Bible. It's another thing to have the Author Himself teach you about what's in it. This is another one of those cases.

Many months had passed since that conference, and I found myself in a church service, about to take communion. Suddenly, I remembered that vision again, and it felt every bit as real as it did the first time. However, my curiosity was stirred to look into this again, because the vision felt a bit open-ended, like I didn't extract everything I was supposed to extract, so I did a deep dive.

The Fellowship Offering was described in Leviticus 3, 7, and 19, and unlike the sin and guilt offerings to seek God's forgiveness, this was a freewill offering of thanks to God and to share a meal in His presence. One didn't eat the meat of the sin offering, but for a fellowship offering, one literally gets to dine at God's table in the joy of restored relationship, which was another prophetic echo of what the Son of God would ultimately fulfill in His own body and at the Communion Table.

I realized that Paul also made the same connection in his letter to the Corinthians, saying "The cup of blessing which we bless, is it not a participation in the blood of Christ? The bread which we break, is it not participation in the body of Christ? Because there is one bread, we who are many are one body, for we all share from the one bread" (1 Corinthians 10:16-17). Interestingly, he was making a point about idolatry here, and any Jewish readers would have made the connection to the implications of the Fellowship Offering in terms of sacrificing to idols, and how eating from their table is to eat from the table of demons, pointing to perverted fellowship offerings. I'll let you chew on that thought for a minute (no pun intended).

Conclusion

I really want the reader to wrap his or her head around this reality--that God wants to be in full fellowship with man. This is no light matter. This has always been God's plan A, and after our separation in the garden, when each seeks their own way to their own demise, while we hardened our hearts against Him, He was still saying to you and to me:

"I WON'T SACRIFICE THAT WHICH COSTS ME NOTHING."

So He became a fellowship offering--a voluntary sacrifice--so our broken fellowship with God could be restored. Now, we have a permanent place at the Father's table over the spilled blood and broken body of His Son. What a beautiful mystery. I hope it becomes as real to you as it has to me.

Thank you, Jesus, for offering us your fellowship.

The Secret Girl