Devotional 143: The Efficacy of Sacraments: Grace Offered and Sealed by the Spirit

The Confession Read

There is, in every sacrament, a spiritual relation, or sacramental union, between the sign and the thing signified: whence it comes to pass, that the names and effects of the one are attributed to the other.

— Westminster Confession of Faith, Chapter 27, Section 2

Introduction

Four words have rent the church of Christ more deeply than almost any other sentence ever spoken. "This is my body." In an upper room, on the night in which He was betrayed, the Lord Jesus took bread, broke it, and handed it to eleven trembling men with those words upon His lips. From that single sentence have flowed the fiercest controversies of two thousand years: transubstantiation and memorialism, gilded altars and bare tables, the adoration of the host and the denial of the cup. How can bread be a body? How can a cup be a covenant? How can water wash away a soul's defilement? Beloved, the answer to every one of these questions lies in a single doctrine, and that doctrine is the subject of the brief sentence now before us. The Westminster divines call it the sacramental union, the spiritual relation between the sign and the thing signified, by which the names and effects of the one are attributed to the other. Consider a coin struck in the royal mint. It is, in substance, nothing but a disc of silver, and no one imagines that the silver has become the king. Yet when that coin bears the king's image and superscription, we call it "the king's money," and it carries the king's purchasing power to the ends of his realm. The name of the king, and the authority of the king, are attributed to a piece of metal that remains, in itself, only metal. Why? Because of a real relation that binds the metal to the monarch who struck it. Something very much like this, though infinitely more sacred, happens in the sacraments. The water remains water, and the bread remains bread, and the wine remains wine; yet because Christ has appointed them, and because the Holy Spirit joins them to the grace they signify, they are called by names that belong to something greater than themselves. The bread is called His body. The cup is called the new testament in His blood. Baptism is called the washing of regeneration. Do not think this a matter for scholars alone. It touches the very heart of your communion with Christ. For if the sign and the thing signified are joined, then at the table Christ truly gives Himself to the believer, and at the font the grace of cleansing truly meets the soul, not in the element but through it, by the Spirit, to faith. And if the union is denied, then the sacrament dissolves into an empty gesture, and the richest comfort of the church evaporates. Let us approach this doctrine with reverence and with joy, for it is the hinge upon which the whole mystery of the sacraments turns.

Scripture Foundation

We must begin, as always, where the Spirit has spoken, and the Scriptures are full of the very language our confession describes, signs called by the names of the things they signify. Turn first to the ancient covenant, where God Himself speaks of a fleshly mark as though it were the covenant itself. In Genesis 17:13 the Lord commands Abraham concerning circumcision, and then declares, "My covenant shall be in your flesh for an everlasting covenant." Here is the astonishing thing. Circumcision is a cutting of the body, an outward and physical rite. Yet God does not say, "a sign of my covenant shall be in your flesh"; He says, "my covenant shall be in your flesh." The name of the inward thing, the covenant of grace, is given to the outward sign. The mark in the flesh does not become the covenant any more than the coin becomes the king; but so close is the relation God has established that He speaks of the one as the other, and would have His people do the same. The same pattern appears at the Passover, and here the language is even bolder. In Exodus 12:11 Moses commands Israel concerning the lamb, "Thus shall ye eat it; with your loins girded, your shoes on your feet, and your staff in your hand; and ye shall eat it in haste: it is the LORD's passover." And when the children ask the meaning of the rite, the father is to answer in Exodus 12:27, "It is the sacrifice of the LORD's passover, who passed over the houses of the children of Israel in Egypt." Observe what has happened. The passover was a great deliverance, the angel passing over the blood-marked houses while the firstborn of Egypt died. Yet the lamb upon the table is not merely a reminder of that deliverance; it is called the passover itself. "It is the LORD's passover." The name and the effect of the deliverance are attributed to the slaughtered lamb. Not because the lamb's flesh mysteriously became the angel's passing over, but because God appointed the lamb to be so joined to the deliverance that to eat it was to partake of the deliverance it proclaimed. Now come to the upper room, where our Lord takes up this very manner of speaking and lifts it to its height. In Matthew 26:26-28 we read: "And as they were eating, Jesus took bread, and blessed it, and brake it, and gave it to the disciples, and said, Take, eat; this is my body. And he took the cup, and gave thanks, and gave it to them, saying, Drink ye all of it; For this is my blood of the new testament, which is shed for many for the remission of sins." Here the small word "is," the Greek estin, has become the most disputed word in all the world. What did the Lord mean when He held up bread and said, "This is my body"? Rome answers that the bread ceases to be bread and becomes the literal substance of Christ's flesh. The rationalist answers that the words are a mere figure, and that "this is my body" means only "this represents my body." But the confession, and the whole Reformed tradition, steers a third course between the two. The words are not a bare figure, for Christ truly gives Himself; yet neither are they a physical change, for the bread remains bread. They are sacramental words, in which the name of the thing signified is attributed to the sign, because a real union has been established between them by the Spirit. Paul hands us the same language in 1 Corinthians 11:24-25, where he records the institution and then speaks of the cup in words that would be nonsense if the sacraments were bare signs: "This cup is the new testament in my blood." A cup is a vessel of earthenware or metal. The new testament is the everlasting covenant of grace, sealed by the death of Christ. Yet Paul does not say "this cup represents the new testament"; he says, "this cup is the new testament." The name of the covenant is attributed to the cup. And in the same breath he tells us what this union accomplishes: "this do ye, as oft as ye drink it, in remembrance of me." The union between cup and covenant is so real that in the drinking, the believer has communion with the crucified Christ who is the substance of the covenant. Nor may we pass over the sixth chapter of John, where our Lord presses this very language to its utmost, and at the same time guards it against every carnal abuse. In John 6:53-56 He declares, "Verily, verily, I say unto you, Except ye eat the flesh of the Son of man, and drink his blood, ye have no life in you. Whoso eateth my flesh, and drinketh my blood, hath eternal life; and I will raise him up at the last day. For my flesh is meat indeed, and my blood is drink indeed. He that eateth my flesh, and drinketh my blood, dwelleth in me, and I in him." Here the language of eating and drinking is attributed to the receiving of Christ Himself, so close is the union between the believer and his Savior. Yet lest any should suppose He meant a carnal tearing of His flesh with the teeth, He adds the words that are the key to the whole chapter: "It is the spirit that quickeneth; the flesh profiteth nothing: the words that I speak unto you, they are spirit, and they are life." The eating is real, but it is spiritual; the union is true, but it is not carnal. This is precisely the balance our confession holds, and it is the balance the whole Reformed church has learned to keep. The same truth governs the other sacrament. In Titus 3:5 Paul declares that God "saved us, by the washing of regeneration, and renewing of the Holy Ghost." Baptism is a washing with water. Regeneration is the inward work of the Spirit by which a dead soul is made alive. Yet Paul binds them together with a phrase, "the washing of regeneration," in which the name and effect of the inward work are attributed to the outward sign. So close is the union that Scripture itself can say, in Acts 22:16, "Arise, and be baptized, and wash away thy sins, calling on the name of the Lord." Does water wash away sin? By no power in itself. But baptism, as the sign and seal appointed by God, is so joined to the remission of sins that the command to be baptized is the command to be cleansed, and the soul that comes in faith receives, in and through the sign, the very cleansing the sign proclaims. One text more, and it is perhaps the clearest of all, because it both affirms the union and guards its limits. In 1 Peter 3:21 the apostle writes: "The like figure whereunto even baptism doth also now save us (not the putting away of the filth of the flesh, but the answer of a good conscience toward God,) by the resurrection of Jesus Christ." The Greek word rendered "like figure" is antitypon, an antitype, a thing that corresponds to and answers another. In the flood, Noah and his household were saved through water; baptism is the antitypon, the answering reality. And now note the balance, for it is exactly the balance of our confession. Baptism "doth also now save us"; the effect of salvation is attributed to the sign. But the apostle immediately checks any carnal reading: it is "not the putting away of the filth of the flesh." The water does not save by washing the skin. It is "the answer of a good conscience toward God," that is, the inward reality of a cleansed heart reaching up to God in faith, through which the salvation comes. Sign and thing signified are joined, but never confused; the name and effect are attributed, but the outward element does not become the inward grace. Put all this together, and you will see that our confession is not reading a theology into the Bible, but drawing a theology out of it. God has spoken of circumcision as His covenant, of the lamb as His passover, of bread as the body of Christ, of the cup as the new testament, of baptism as the washing of regeneration. In every case the language is the same: the outward sign is spoken of as the inward grace, because God has established a spiritual relation between them. To deny this language is to rewrite Scripture. To overpress it is to turn a spiritual relation into a carnal one. The confession's task is to state exactly what the Bible means, and it does so in the words that now lie before us.

What the Divines Meant

When the Westminster divines wrote this section, they were not spinning a subtle speculation for the delight of scholars. They were standing between two great armies of error, and their sentence is a careful, deliberate peace between them. On the one side stood Rome, teaching transubstantiation, that in the mass the bread and wine cease to be bread and wine and are converted into the literal body and blood of Christ, to be adored as God. On the other side stood the memorialists, who so feared idolatry that they reduced the sacraments to bare signs, empty badges that merely remind the mind and do nothing to convey Christ to the soul. Between these two stood the divines, and the doctrine of the sacramental union was their answer to both. Robert Shaw, in his Exposition of the Confession, sets out the matter with clarity and force. He explains that the divines were affirming a real, but spiritual, relation between the sign and the thing signified. Against Rome, they insisted that the sign does not become the thing signified in substance; the bread is not transubstantiated into flesh, and the water does not become the blood of Christ. Against the memorialists, they insisted that the sign is not cut off from the thing signified either, as though the bread were related to Christ's body in the same loose way that a photograph is related to a departed friend. Rather, there is a genuine union, a union so real that the Scripture itself speaks of the sign as though it were the thing, and attributes to the sign the names and effects of the grace it signifies. Shaw is at pains to point out that this is exactly why the church has always spoken of baptism as "the washing of regeneration" and of the bread as "the body of Christ," not by a loose figure of speech but by a true sacramental predication grounded in the divine appointment and the Spirit's working. The historical weight of this matters, and we do well to ask what the divines were answering. Rome's error was to collapse the sign and the thing into one another, so that the sign was swallowed up in the thing and the bread simply ceased to be. The memorialist error was to tear them utterly asunder, so that the sign floated free of any heavenly reality at all. The Lutheran error, which the divines also rejected, was to compound the two without conversion, holding that the body of Christ is locally present "in, with, and under" the bread, so that both bread and body occupy the same place. Against all three, the confession affirms a union that is neither a physical change, nor a local inclusion, nor an empty symbolism, but a spiritual relation. It is a union, the divines teach, that is effected not by the nature of the element, nor by the will of the minister, but by the Spirit of God, who joins the earthly sign to the heavenly grace so that the believing soul receives both together. And here is the phrase that has troubled some and comforted multitudes: "whence it comes to pass, that the names and effects of the one are attributed to the other." The divines are describing what the grammarians would later call sacramental predication. Because God has joined the sign to the thing signified, Scripture speaks of them as one, and so may we. The name of the body is given to the bread; the name of cleansing is given to the water; the effect of the covenant is given to the cup. This is not deception, and it is not metaphor in the loose modern sense. It is the way God Himself speaks, and the way the church must learn to speak after Him. The divines are teaching us, in short, that we may trust the language of Scripture at the Lord's table and at the font, because that language rests upon a real relation established by God.

Theological Depth

Let us now descend deeper, for this doctrine, small as the sentence is, touches the hidden springs of our communion with God. Calvin treats the sacramental union with a warmth and precision that still reward careful reading, and his account is the fountain from which the divines drank. In the fourth book of his Institutes, he insists that the sacrament is not a bare sign, but a seal by which Christ truly communicates Himself to the believer. Yet he is equally insistent that the manner of this communication is spiritual, not carnal. Christ's body, he argues, is in heaven, seated at the right hand of the Father, and it is not dragged down to earth to be enclosed in bread. How then does the believer receive Christ at the table? By the Holy Spirit, who bridges the infinite distance between heaven and earth, and lifts the soul up to Christ, so that the believer truly feeds upon His body and blood. Calvin's memorable phrase is that the Spirit is "the bond" of this union, the same Spirit who united the divine and human natures in the womb of the Virgin unites the believer to Christ through the elements. The bread is not changed, and Christ is not moved; but by the Spirit's secret power, the believing communicant truly partakes of Christ, and the sign is so joined to the reality that the one is called by the name of the other. Against the Roman doctrine he protests that it binds Christ to bread and destroys the true humanity of the ascended Lord; against the memorialist he protests that it leaves the soul to feed on empty air and robs the church of her richest comfort. Turretin, with his customary exactness, gives this doctrine its most careful statement, and it is worth hearing him on the word "union." He distinguishes three senses in which a thing may be united to another: by a physical or local union, as soul and body are united in one person; by a moral union, as a king and his authority are united to the seal that bears his name; and by a spiritual or mystical union, as Christ and the believer are one by the Spirit. The sacramental union, Turretin argues, is of the second and third kind, never the first. The bread and the body are not locally or physically joined, as Rome and the Lutherans in their different ways would have it; but there is a real, moral, and spiritual relation between them, established by the institution of Christ and effected by the Holy Spirit, so that to the believing receiver the bread truly conveys and seals the body of Christ. This is what he means by unio sacramentalis: a union proper to the sacraments, distinct from every union in nature, in which the sign is related to the thing signified not by a change in its substance, but by a change in its relation. It is a subtle point, but it is the very point that saves the sacrament from being either an idol or an empty shell. John Owen brings this doctrine home to the soul with a tenderness that the logicians sometimes lack, and his is a voice we should not pass over. In his discourses on the sacraments, Owen insists that the whole question of the sacramental union is, at bottom, a question about the believer's union with Christ. He argues that the sacraments are seals and pledges of that union, and that the closeness of the sign to the thing signified is a picture of the closeness of Christ to His people. When the Lord says of the bread, "This is my body," He is not performing a magical change; He is covenanting with His people in the most intimate way, promising that He will be as truly theirs as the bread and wine are truly in their mouths. Owen warns us against two faults that lie close at hand: a carnal curiosity that pries into the "how" of the union and loses the sweetness of the union itself, and a cold unbelief that receives the sign while never laying hold of the Savior. The believer's business at the table, Owen says, is not to analyze the bread but to feed upon Christ, not to dispute the manner of the presence but to enjoy the reality of it. The soul that does so will find that the doctrine of the sacramental union, which is so tangled in the schools, becomes, in the believing heart, a plain and precious thing. A. A. Hodge, in his commentary on the Confession, compresses the doctrine into its clearest logical form, and his summary has been a help to many a teacher. He observes that the section is making a single, careful assertion. There is a relation between the sign and the thing signified. That relation is spiritual, not physical; it is a relation established by God's appointment and effected by the Spirit. And from that relation follows the fact that the names and effects of the one are attributed to the other, which is to say, Scripture's manner of speaking about the sacraments is not loose or careless, but precise and true. Hodge notes that this doctrine is the exact middle term between two false extremes, and he sets it out in a memorable contrast: the Romanist identifies the sign with the thing; the memorialist separates the sign from the thing; the Reformed doctrine unites them without confusing them. To unite without confusing, to attribute without identifying: this, Hodge says, is the whole art of the confession's statement, and it is the art that must govern every faithful minister who handles the holy things of God. B. B. Warfield adds a note that deepens our wonder at the doctrine. He observes that the sacramental union is of a piece with the whole way God deals with His creatures. God is a God who stoops to the material. He made us bodies as well as souls, and He saves the whole man, body and soul, through a Christ who came in the flesh. The sacraments are not an alien intrusion of matter into a purely spiritual religion; they are the natural expression of an incarnational faith. Warfield presses the point that the sacramental union is not a curiosity to be catalogued but a window into the very method of redemption: God uniting the visible and the invisible, the earthly and the heavenly, the sign and the grace, until at last, in the resurrection, the two shall be perfectly one. Seen in this light, the bread and the cup are not a problem to be solved but a promise to be received; they are the Spirit's own pledge that what is now joined in sign shall one day be joined in glorious reality.

Puritan Application

Let us bring all of this now to the conscience, where every doctrine must finally rest if it is to do us any good. Here are five points to search the heart. First, learn to rest in the reality of Christ's presence at the table, and stop tormenting yourself over its manner. How many tender souls have been thrown into doubt because they could not explain how Christ could be present in the supper! They have heard the disputes of the schools and concluded that the whole thing is either an idol or a riddle, and so they have stayed away from the table, or come to it with a distracted and divided mind. Beloved, the confession would release you from this snare. It does not ask you to understand the manner of the union; it asks you to believe the fact of it, on the word of Christ. He said, "This is my body," and He is not a man that He should lie. Come, then, not to dissect the mystery but to receive the mercy. Feed upon Christ by faith, and leave the "how" to Him who alone can work it. As Owen said, the believer's business at the table is not to analyze the bread but to eat the Savior. Second, beware of making the sacrament an idol by overpressing the sign, or a hollow form by denying its grace. These are the two ditches on either side of the narrow way, and the confession steers between them. On the one hand, do not bow to the bread, do not imagine that the water cleanses by its own power, do not think that the mere receiving of the elements can save you apart from faith. The sign is not the thing signified; to trust the sign is to miss the grace. On the other hand, do not despise the sign as though it were a trifle. The sign is not nothing; it is God's appointed instrument, joined by the Spirit to the grace it seals. The soul that reverences the bread too little is as much in error as the soul that reverences it too much. Keep the middle path: receive the sign with reverence, and rest in the Savior alone. Third, honor the manner in which God speaks of the sacraments, and learn to speak of them after Him. The confession teaches that the names and effects of the one are attributed to the other, and this is no small matter. It means we may call baptism "the washing of regeneration," and the bread "the body of Christ," without fear of superstition and without slipping into error. There is a false modesty abroad that would strip the sacraments of their proper names, as though to call the bread Christ's body were already to become a Romanist. But this is to be more cautious than Scripture. The Spirit Himself, who inspired the Bible, saw fit to say that baptism saves us, that the cup is the new testament, that circumcision is the covenant. If we would be taught of God, let us not be ashamed of His language, but use it with the same reverent care with which He gave it to us. Fourth, let the doctrine of the sacramental union teach you to value the Spirit without whom the union is nothing. It is the Holy Spirit who joins the sign to the thing signified; apart from His working, the bread is only bread, and the water is only water, and the whole ordinance is but a shadow without substance, a vessel left empty of the treasure it was made to carry. This should drive us to our knees before we come to the table or bring a child to the font. Do not come to the sacrament trusting in the element, but come crying for the Spirit. Pray, as we shall presently, that He would make the outward sign effectual, that He would lift our souls to Christ, that He would seal to us the very grace the sign proclaims. The sacrament without the Spirit is a dry well; the sacrament with the Spirit is a spring of living water. Seek the Spirit, and the union He alone can forge will become your comfort. Fifth, and above all, let the sacrament lead you to Christ Himself, for He is the substance of every sign. The bread is not given that you might rest in bread; it is given that you might feed upon the One who is the Bread of Life. The water is not given that you might trust in washing; it is given that you might be cleansed by the One whose blood alone can purge the conscience. The cup is not given that you might admire the wine; it is given that you might drink of the new covenant in His blood. Everything in the sacrament points away from itself and toward the Savior. And so let every participation in these holy things end, not in a satisfied glance at the elements, but in a glad surrender to the Christ whom they set forth. He is the thing signified; He is the grace conveyed; He is the whole treasure. Rest in Him, and the sacraments will have done their work.

Prayer

O Lord our God, we adore Thee for the wisdom of Thy condescension, that Thou hast not left us to an invisible grace, but hast given us visible signs, and hast joined them to the things they signify by Thy Spirit and by Thy word. We bless Thee that bread may be called the body of Christ, and water the washing of regeneration, because Thou hast appointed it so. We confess, O Lord, that we have too often erred on either hand. We have sometimes trusted the sign as though it were the thing, and sometimes despised the sign as though it were nothing. Forgive us, and teach us the narrow and holy path that unites without confusing, and attributes without identifying. Grant, we beseech Thee, that Thy Spirit may ever accompany these ordinances, that the outward sign may never be to us a dead letter, but a living channel of the grace it seals. Lift our souls to Christ at His table; wash our consciences at the font; seal to our hearts the new covenant in His blood. Teach us to speak of Thy sacraments as Thou dost speak of them, with reverence and with faith, and let us never be ashamed of the language of Thy Word. And lead us at last, through every sign, to the Savior whom the signs set forth, that feeding upon Him now by faith, we may at length behold Him face to face, and need no sign forever. We ask it all in the name of Him who said, "This is my body," and who gave Himself for us, even Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.