Devotional 142: The Nature of Sacraments: Signs and Seals of the Covenant of Grace

The Confession Read

Sacraments are holy signs and seals of the covenant of grace, immediately instituted by God, to represent Christ, and his benefits; and to confirm our interest in him: as also, to put a visible difference between those that belong unto the church, and the rest of the world; and solemnly to engage them to the service of God in Christ, according to his Word.

— Westminster Confession of Faith, Chapter 27, Section 1

Introduction

A young woman holds out her hand, and a ring is slipped upon her finger. In that single motion something quiet but decisive happens. The ring does not create the love between two people; it was there long before the gold was forged. The ring does not even add a single degree of warmth to their affection. Yet the moment it rests on her finger, everything is confirmed and declared. It is a sign, for it points to something far greater than a circle of metal. It is a seal, for it solemnly ratifies the covenant that two hearts have already made. It puts a visible difference between this woman and every other, marking her out as belonging to one man. And it binds her, gladly, to a life of faithfulness. Beloved, in this little picture you have, in miniature, almost the whole doctrine that now lies before us. For we are leaving behind what we have learned of the church and its communion, and we are crossing the threshold into a new country: the doctrine of the sacraments. We have watched in recent weeks how God gathers a people to Himself, how that people is knit together in the communion of saints, and how Christ alone is its Head. Now we ask a further and very tender question: what visible, tangible tokens has God given to His people, so that the covenant of grace might be not only heard with the ear but seen with the eye, touched with the hand, and tasted upon the tongue? The Westminster divines answer that question in a single dense sentence, and it is one of the most carefully packed sentences in the whole Confession. Before we unfold it, let us be clear about why it matters. We are bodily creatures. We do not live as pure minds floating above the world of things. God made us with senses, and in His mercy He stoops to those senses. He does not leave His gospel as a bare word spoken once and remembered with difficulty; He clothes it in water, in bread, in wine, so that the promise of Christ might come to us again and again through the very gates of the body. This is not the exaltation of ritual, but the condescension of a Father who knows our frame and remembers that we are dust. Yet precisely because sacraments are so tender a provision, they are also a field where grave errors have grown. Some have made them too much, as though the water or the bread carried grace within themselves and could save by the mere outward performance. Others have made them too little, reducing them to empty badges and bare memorials with no heavenly weight at all. The divines steer a narrow and beautiful path between these two ditches, and they begin by telling us what a sacrament essentially is: a holy sign and seal of the covenant of grace. Let us take that sentence apart, phrase by phrase, and then let it take us apart, until our hearts are laid open before the Lord who instituted these mercies for our weak faith.

Scripture Foundation

The whole doctrine of the sacrament rests upon a verse the apostle Paul wrote while reflecting on the life of Abraham, and here we must begin. He writes in Romans 4:11 that Abraham "received the sign of circumcision, a seal of the righteousness of the faith which he had yet being uncircumcised: that he might be the father of all them that believe, though they be not circumcised; that righteousness might be imputed unto them also." Observe with care the two words Paul joins together, for they are the very spine of the Confession's definition. A sign, and a seal. The Greek behind "sign" is sēmeion, a mark that points beyond itself to some reality it is not. And the Greek behind "seal" is sphragis, a stamp that authenticates, confirms, and makes sure. Abraham was not justified by his circumcision; he was justified by faith while he was still uncircumcised. Yet God gave him this outward mark afterward, to represent the righteousness already his by faith, and to confirm it to his heart. The sacrament does not make the man righteous; the man is righteous by faith, and the sacrament then testifies to him of that righteousness. This order is everything. Lose it, and you slide into either superstition or bare ceremony. Now turn back to the moment the covenant was first sealed in blood. In Genesis 17:7 God speaks to Abraham and says, "I will establish my covenant between me and thee and thy seed after thee in their generations for an everlasting covenant, to be a God unto thee, and to thy seed after thee." And then, in the verses that follow, He appoints the outward token: "This is my covenant, which ye shall keep, between me and you and thy seed after thee; Every man child among you shall be circumcised. And ye shall circumcise the flesh of your foreskin; and it shall be a token of the covenant betwixt me and you." Here the Hebrew word rendered "token" is 'ot, a sign or badge, something appointed by God to stand before the eye as a pledge. Notice who institutes it. It is not Abraham who devises this rite; God commands it. Notice also what it marks: not some private religious feeling, but a covenant, a solemn bond between God and His people that reaches down to the seed after them. The sacraments of the new covenant stand in this same line. They are not the church's invention, and they are not the believer's private devotion; they are God's appointed tokens of His covenant, given to the visible people of God. That is why, when the new covenant arrived, the Lord Jesus Himself instituted its sacraments with His own lips. In Matthew 28:19, as He commissions His apostles, He charges them: "Go ye therefore, and teach all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost." The word baptizō means to dip, to plunge, to wash; and here the washing with water is bound to the name of the triune God as the visible entrance into His people. It is not a human custom adopted by the church and later blessed; it is the risen Christ's own appointment. And on the night before His death, He instituted the second. Luke 22:19-20 records: "And he took bread, and gave thanks, and brake it, and gave unto them, saying, This is my body which is given for you: this do in remembrance of me. Likewise also the cup after supper, saying, This cup is the new testament in my blood, which is shed for you." Paul later hands this same institution to the Corinthians, adding in 1 Corinthians 11:26: "For as often as ye eat this bread, and drink this cup, ye do shew the Lord's death till he come." We must not hurry past the phrase "this do in remembrance of me." It has been much abused, as though "remembrance" meant nothing more than a bare calling to mind, the way one might remember a departed friend with a photograph. But in the language of the covenant, remembrance is a far weightier thing. When God "remembers" His covenant, He acts upon it. When Israel was to "remember" the Sabbath, she was to keep it holy. And when Christ says "this do in remembrance of me," He is appointing a sign that recalls His death and presents it afresh to faith, sealing to the believer all the benefits that His broken body and shed blood have purchased. The bread and the cup are not the mere ornaments of our recollection; they are God's appointed instruments for confirming to us our interest in His Son. Let us press the point further with a text that shows how real the sacramental communion is. In 1 Corinthians 10:16 Paul asks, "The cup of blessing which we bless, is it not the communion of the blood of Christ? The bread which we break, is it not the communion of the body of Christ?" There is a real participation here, a true fellowship with Christ through these elements. Not that the bread is turned into Christ, but that in the believing use of these signs Christ communes with His people and nourishes them with Himself. The sign is not the thing signified; yet the sign, rightly received, brings the soul into living contact with the thing signified, by the working of the Holy Spirit. And one more text, to show that the sign points to a real washing and a real union. In Romans 6:3-4 Paul writes: "Know ye not, that so many of us as were baptized into Jesus Christ were baptized into his death? Therefore we are buried with him by baptism into death: that like as Christ was raised up from the dead by the glory of the Father, even so we also should walk in newness of life." Water does not wash away sin by any power in itself; but baptism, as a sign and seal, proclaims to the believer that he is washed in Christ's blood and buried with Him, and calls him to rise and walk in newness of life. The visible water testifies to the invisible cleansing. So the apostle Peter could say to trembling sinners in Acts 2:38, "Repent, and be baptized every one of you in the name of Jesus Christ for the remission of sins," binding the outward sign to the inward grace it seals, without ever teaching that the water itself saves. Consider, then, how God has woven these outward tokens through the whole of redemptive history. The sacrament is no late invention. The Passover blood upon the doorposts in Egypt was itself a sign and seal, for God declared in Exodus 12:13, "The blood shall be to you for a token upon the houses where ye are: and when I see the blood, I will pass over you." There the lamb's blood was a token appointed by God, distinguishing His people from the Egyptians and sealing to them His promise of deliverance. The blood did not in itself deliver, but it marked those who were sheltered under the appointed mercy of God. So the water of baptism and the cup of the new covenant in Christ's blood stand in this very line. What the Passover blood was to Israel in Egypt, the sacraments of the new covenant are to the church of Christ: visible tokens of an invisible grace, signs that point to a Substitute, seals that confirm a promise, and marks that set a people apart for their God. Here, then, is the scriptural foundation, laid stone upon stone. Abraham received a sign and seal of the righteousness of faith. God appointed it as a token of the covenant. Christ instituted two such tokens for the new covenant by His own authority. And these tokens represent Christ and His benefits, confirm our interest in Him, mark out His people, and bind them to His service. The confession is not spinning doctrine out of thin air; it is simply reading the Bible carefully.

What the Divines Meant

When the Westminster divines sat down to write this section, they stood in the thick of a battlefield of controversy. On one side stood the Roman church of their day, which had multiplied the sacraments to seven and taught that they confer grace by the mere act of being performed, ex opere operato, so that the outward rite itself carried saving power regardless of the faith of the receiver. On the other side stood the Socinians and various radical spirits, who so feared superstition that they stripped the sacraments of all efficacy, leaving them bare signs, empty ceremonies, little more than badges of a man's profession with no divine sealing at all. The divines refused both ditches, and this first section of the chapter is their careful answer to both. The first phrase is the load-bearing wall: "holy signs and seals." Notice the two nouns must never be divided. A sign without a seal would be a bare emblem; a seal without a sign would be an invisible stamp with no earthly shape. The divines hold the two together because the Bible holds them together. Romans 4:11 gives them the exact vocabulary: a sign, and a seal. The sign represents; the seal confirms. Or as the divines would later unfold it in their own catechisms, a sacrament both exhibits Christ to us and ratifies our interest in Him. Then comes the phrase "of the covenant of grace." This locates the sacraments in their proper home. They are not signs of the covenant of works, under which Adam stood and by which no flesh can be justified. They belong to the covenant of grace, that everlasting covenant which God has made with sinners in Christ, promising to be their God and to save them for His Son's sake. The sacraments are covenant ordinances. They are the seals God has affixed to the charter of His grace, so that our weak hearts might have something visible and sure to lay hold of. And do not miss the little word "holy" at the head of the definition. These are "holy" signs and seals. They are holy because God has set them apart for sacred use; they are not common things. The water of baptism is not any water, but water appointed by God to this end; the bread and wine of the supper are not a common meal, but a sacred feast. To treat the sacraments as we treat the world's ordinary things, to come to the table as to a mere refreshment, to baptize without reverence as though it were a formality: this profanes what God has made holy. The holiness of the sacrament is not in the element itself, but in the divine appointment and in the grace it signifies; yet because God has so appointed it, we must handle it with holy fear. The words "immediately instituted by God" carry enormous weight, and we must not read them lightly. "Immediately" here does not mean "soon" but "directly," without any mediating human authority. The sacraments come from God Himself, not from the church. Christ instituted baptism in His great commission and the Lord's Supper in the upper room. No church council, however ancient or venerable, may add a third, or a seventh. This single clause is a silent sword against the Roman multiplication of sacraments, for it declares that only those ordinances which Christ Himself appointed, and which the church can point to in His Word, may be called sacraments at all. Where Rome had confirmation, penance, extreme unction, holy orders, and matrimony, the divines found no word of institution from the Lord, and so they set them aside. Now observe the four great ends the divines assign to the sacraments, for each is a treasury of comfort. First, they are appointed "to represent Christ, and his benefits." This is the sign. The water of baptism represents the washing away of sin by the blood and Spirit of Christ. The bread broken represents His body given for us; the wine poured out represents His blood shed for the remission of sins. God, who could have left us to a naked word, has condescended to paint the gospel for us in visible things, that the eye might help the ear and the taste might strengthen the faith. Second, they are appointed "to confirm our interest in him." This is the seal. Here is a point of the deepest tenderness. The sacrament does not make us Christ's; faith does that, through the Spirit's secret work. But having made us His, Christ gives us these tokens to assure us that we are His, to set His own seal upon the covenant He has made with us, to say to the trembling believer, as He says in the water and at the table, "I have made this covenant with thee, and I am thy God." A weak faith loves such confirmation, and Christ in mercy provides it. Third, they are appointed "to put a visible difference between those that belong unto the church, and the rest of the world." The sacraments are the boundary markers of the visible church. By baptism a soul is enrolled among the professing people of God; by the Lord's Supper he continues in their fellowship. The world is not baptized and does not come to the table; the church is, and does. When the lines between church and world blur so easily, we do well to recover this holy distinctiveness. Fourth, and this is the point so often forgotten, the sacraments "solemnly to engage them to the service of God in Christ, according to his Word." A sacrament is never only a gift received; it is always a vow made. In baptism we are enlisted; at the table we are re-enlisted. We receive mercy, and we bind ourselves to obedience. The sign that comforts us also obligates us. To be baptized is to be marked for God; to come to the table is to renew our allegiance to the King who died for us. Robert Shaw, in his Exposition of the Confession, presses home the word "sacrament" itself, noting that it comes from the Latin sacramentum, which among the Romans meant the oath of allegiance by which a soldier bound himself to his commander and pledged himself even unto death. Tertullian and the early fathers took up this word to describe baptism and the supper precisely because these are the ordinances by which the Christian binds himself to his Captain. So the divines, with a single word, remind us that the sacrament looks in two directions at once: Godward, it is a seal of His promise to us; manward, it is a vow of our allegiance to Him.

Theological Depth

Let us now descend a little deeper, for the surface of this doctrine covers waters that are very deep indeed. Calvin, in the fourth book of his Institutes, gives us a notably clear, warm account of what the divines were aiming at. A sacrament, he says, is "an outward sign by which the Lord seals on our consciences the promises of his good will toward us, to sustain the weakness of our faith." There is the whole matter in a single sentence. The sacrament is not a ladder by which we climb up to God, but a seal by which God comes down to us. It is addressed to the weakness of our faith. We are slow to believe; our hearts tremble and doubt; and so the Lord, who might have been content to speak once, speaks again through water and bread and wine, as though He would not have us miss His promise. Calvin is emphatic that the sign adds nothing to God's power or truth, but is wholly a mercy to our frailty, "a mirror in which we may contemplate the riches of the grace which God bestows upon us." But Calvin also guards the other side. The sign is not the thing itself, and the Spirit must make it effectual. A sacrament without the Spirit is a body without a soul; the outward element alone profits nothing. Here is the delicate balance the Reformed tradition has always kept: the sacrament is a genuine instrument by which God conveys grace, but it conveys that grace only as the Spirit works, and only to faith. It is neither an empty shell nor a magic charm. Turretin, with his usual precision, sorts out the errors on every hand. Against the Roman church he insists that the sacraments do not confer grace ex opere operato, by the mere working of the rite, as though a priest's incantation could wash a soul. Against the Socinians and the enthusiasts he insists that the sacraments are not naked signs, destitute of all spiritual efficacy, but are true seals and pledges of grace, "by which our faith is not only excited but also sealed." And he traces the word sacramentum to the soldier's oath, showing that the sacraments are at once divine pledges and human engagements. In Turretin's careful hands, the doctrine becomes a two-edged sword that cuts down both the superstition of Rome and the bare memorialism of the rationalists. Herman Witsius, in his Economy of the Covenants, teaches us to see the sacraments where they truly belong: inside the covenant of grace. He observes that God has always dealt with His people by way of covenant, and that a covenant in His good pleasure has ever had its seals. To Adam in the garden God gave two trees; to Abraham He gave circumcision; to Israel He gave the Passover lamb and the blood upon the doorposts, of which He said in Exodus 12:13, "The blood shall be to you for a token upon the houses where ye are: and when I see the blood, I will pass over you." To the new covenant people He has given baptism and the supper. The sacraments are thus not scattered ornaments but covenant signs, each standing in a long line that reaches from Eden to Calvary and on to the marriage supper of the Lamb. When we take the bread and cup, we are not beginning something new; we are joining an ancient and unbroken covenant conversation between God and His people. A. A. Hodge, in his commentary on the Confession, reduces this rich doctrine to its analytic skeleton, and his clarity is a gift to the teacher. He notes that the divines are doing two things at once: they are telling us what a sacrament is, and what it is for. It is a sign, and it is a seal; it is from God, and it is for us. And he stresses the fourfold end we have already traced (representation, confirmation, distinction, obligation) as the four hinges on which every faithful administration of the sacraments must turn. Hodge warns us that these four ends must never be severed. A church that makes the sacrament only a badge of membership loses its gospel comfort; a church that makes it only a comfort loses its covenant discipline; a church that makes it only a duty loses its joy. Thomas Watson, that physician of souls, brings the doctrine home to the heart as only he can. He bids us see in the sacraments the condescension of God to our weak and wondering faith. God might have saved us without any sacrament, but He knew our nature, and so He gave us these visible pledges, "that we might see Him, as it were, with our eyes, and handle Him with our hands." Watson presses us to come to the sacraments as a man would come to the seal of a will in which he is named an heir, not to be made an heir, for that was settled long ago in the testament itself, but to be assured and comforted that the inheritance is truly his. And then he turns the point sharply: if God has stooped so low as to confirm His promise to us with visible signs, how much more are we bound to confirm our promise to Him with a visible and holy life? One further word must be said, and it is the word that binds all this together for our comfort. The outward seal points to an inward sealing. Paul tells the Ephesians that believers are "sealed with that holy Spirit of promise, which is the earnest of our inheritance." The water and the bread and the wine are outward things, but they direct our faith to that inward work by which the Spirit sets His own seal upon our hearts, assuring us that we are God's. The sacrament, in other words, is not an end in itself. It is a finger pointing away to the Spirit, and through the Spirit to Christ, and through Christ to the Father. Where the Spirit has done His secret work in the heart, the outward sacrament becomes a feast of assurance; where He has not, it remains a body without a soul. And so the doctrine drives us at last to our knees, praying that He who seals the promise in the sacrament would seal it in our souls.

Puritan Application

Let us now bring all of this down to the conscience, where doctrine must always end if it is to do us good. Here are five questions to search the heart. First, do you honor the sacraments as divine institutions, or have you despised them as mere human ceremonies? The confession tells us they are "immediately instituted by God." They are not the church's invention, to be set aside when convenient or neglected when the heart grows cold. A man who treats baptism as an empty family custom, or who stays away from the Lord's table month after month with no grief, is not merely breaking a church rule; he is slighting an appointment of his Savior. Christ said, "this do in remembrance of me." Ask yourself plainly: have you done it? And if not, what reason will you give to the One who instituted it? Second, do you receive the sacraments as seals of God's promise, or as grounds of your own merit? Here is the test that divides true faith from every counterfeit. The Roman error trusts in the act; the true believer trusts in the Christ whom the act sets forth. When you come to the table, is your eye upon the bread, or upon the body it signifies? Is your hope in the doing, or in the Savior the doing points to? Watson's word should ring in our ears: the sacrament is not the will itself but the seal upon it. Come, then, not to earn, but to receive; not to make yourself an heir, but to be assured that in Christ you already are one. There is no comfort in a sign if you have no interest in the thing signified. Third, do you feel the weight of the vow you have taken? The divines say the sacraments "solemnly to engage them to the service of God in Christ." Have you forgotten that you are under oath? The word sacramentum was a soldier's pledge unto death. In baptism you were enlisted under the banner of Christ; at the table you renew that enlistment. Does your life answer to the vow? A soldier who wears the uniform but never fights brings disgrace upon his commander. Let the Christian ask himself: since I was sealed, have I served? Since I last sat at the table, have I walked in newness of life, or have I slipped quietly back into the ways of the world from which I was separated? Fourth, do you prize the visible difference the sacraments make? In a day when the world and the church grow daily more mingled, the sacraments still draw a line. They mark out a people who belong to God. This is not pride, but fidelity. The baptismal water and the covenant table say to a watching world, "These are Mine, saith the Lord." Do you live as one so marked? Is there anything in your speech, your business, your home, your Lord's Day, that would let a neighbor know you have been baptized into Christ? Or have you so blurred the line that no one could tell the difference between you and the world? Fifth, and last, have you learned to lean upon the Spirit without whom the outward sign is empty? Calvin's warning must not be lost on us: the sacrament without the Spirit is a body without a soul. It is possible to be baptized with water and yet know nothing of the washing of regeneration; possible to eat the bread and drink the cup and yet never feed upon Christ by faith. Do not rest in the outward thing. Let every sacrament you receive drive you afresh to prayer, that He who appointed the sign would give the grace, and that the seal upon the ordinance would become a seal upon your soul. The water and the bread will one day pass away; but the Spirit's witness, and the Christ to whom it witnesses, abide forever.

Prayer

O Lord our God, how gracious Thou art, that Thou hast not left us to a bare and distant word, but hast stooped to our weakness and given us visible signs and seals of the covenant of grace. We bless Thee that water and bread and wine should be made to speak of Christ and His benefits, and that these earthly things should be lifted up to confirm to us our interest in Him. We confess, O Lord, that we have too often received these holy things carelessly, as though they were common, and have forgotten the sacred oath we took upon ourselves. We have trusted the sign when we should have trusted the Savior, or neglected the sign as though it were nothing at all. Forgive us, and teach us to honor what Thou hast appointed. Grant, we pray Thee, that Thy Holy Spirit may ever accompany the ordinances, that the seal without may be joined to the seal within, and that our souls may be washed in the blood of Christ, nourished by His body, and made to grow up into Him in all things. Bind us afresh, O Lord, by these covenant tokens, to a life of holy service, that being marked as Thine we may live as Thine, and that the world may see the difference Thou hast put between Thy people and itself. And when these earthly signs are no more, bring us at last to the marriage supper of the Lamb, where faith shall give place to sight, and we shall see Thy face and live, through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.