Devotional 144: The Number of Sacraments: Baptism and the Lord's Supper

The Confession Read

The grace which is exhibited in or by the sacraments rightly used, is not conferred by any power in them; neither doth the efficacy of a sacrament depend upon the piety or intention of him that doth administer it: but upon the work of the Spirit, and the word of institution, which contains, together with a precept authorizing the use thereof, a promise of benefit to worthy receivers.

— Westminster Confession of Faith, Chapter 27, Section 3

Introduction

In the year 311, in the province of Africa, a quarrel broke out that would set altar against altar for more than a century. The persecution of the emperor Diocletian, the fiercest the church had ever known, had just ended, and the question burning on every tongue was what to do with the traditores — the men who, under threat of death, had handed over the sacred books to be burned, and who had since repented and crept back into the fold. Could a bishop who had once been a traditor still consecrate, still ordain, still baptize? The Donatists answered no, and they answered with a zeal that split the African church in two. A minister who had denied the faith, they argued, could not possibly convey the grace of God; a sacrament administered by unholy hands was no sacrament at all. Against them rose Augustine with a question that has never lost its edge: When an unworthy man stands at the font, whose is the baptism — the minister's, or Christ's? That question is the very heart of the sentence now before us, for the Westminster divines are here doing two things at once. They are shutting the door against a double error, and they are opening a door upon a double comfort. The error they shut out is the notion that grace hides in the water or the bread, or in the holiness of the man who handles them. The comfort they open is this: that the power of your baptism and your supper rests neither upon a piece of matter nor upon a fallible man, but upon the work of the Holy Spirit and upon the word of Christ's own institution, a word that carries a command and a promise. And that, beloved, is a doctrine worth more to a trembling soul than all the gold of earth. Consider a physician of great skill, who compounds a remedy that alone can cure a deadly fever. He hands the sealed vial to a boy, a boy who is himself sick with that very fever, careless, of doubtful character, unsteady on his feet. The boy carries the vial to the bedside, breaks the seal, and pours the medicine into the mouth of the dying patient, and the patient recovers. Now tell me: did the patient recover because of the boy's virtue, or because of the medicine's power and the physician's skill? The boy added nothing to the cure but a pair of hands. He might have been saint or scoundrel, and the medicine would have done its work just the same. So it is with the sacraments. The grace is Christ's, the power is the Spirit's, the institution is God's; the minister is but the errand-boy who carries the sealed vial to the bedside. Let us learn this doctrine well, for upon it hangs nothing less than the peace of your conscience at the font and at the table.

Scripture Foundation

We begin, as we must always begin, where the Spirit has spoken, and the Spirit has spoken with a clarity that leaves the proud minister no ground to stand on. Turn first to the church at Corinth, which was tearing itself apart over exactly the error this section condemns. Some had set Paul against Apollos, some Apollos against Cephas, as though the grace of God flowed through the channel of this man or that, and the worth of their baptism depended upon the eloquence of the one who had administered it. Paul answers them with a word that ought to be written over every pulpit and every font in Christendom. In 1 Corinthians 3:5-7 he writes: "Who then is Paul, and who is Apollos, but ministers by whom ye believed, even as the Lord gave to every man? I have planted, Apollos watered; but God gave the increase. So then neither is he that planteth any thing, neither he that watereth; but God that giveth the increase." Mark the flat, almost brutal, honesty of it. "Neither is he that planteth any thing." Paul, the apostle who had seen the Lord, the man whose pen carried the very breath of inspiration, confesses that he is, in himself, nothing at all: nothing in the work of salvation, nothing in the conferring of grace, nothing but an instrument in the hand of a God who alone gives the increase. The farmer sows, the gardener waters, but the life that springs from the seed is God's own, and no piety in the sower, and no unworthiness in the gardener, can either hasten it or hinder it. If the apostle himself would have us think of him as a mere planter and waterer, how much less ought we to rest our hope upon the character of the man who dips his hand in the water or breaks the bread before us? Paul presses the same point again, and this time he names the office we are considering. In 1 Corinthians 4:1-2 he writes: "Let a man so account of us, as of the ministers of Christ, and stewards of the mysteries of God. Moreover it is required in stewards, that a man be found faithful." Two Greek words here repay the closest attention. The first is oikonomos, which we render "steward": the trusted slave set over a great house, whose business it is to hand out to the household the bread and wine that belong not to him but to his master. The steward does not create the feast; he distributes it. He is not the source of the provision; he is its servant. The second word is mysterion, "mystery": the sacred secret of the gospel once hidden and now revealed, the whole counsel of God concerning our redemption. And here is the comfort of the text: the minister is a steward of another man's treasures, and his faithfulness is required, but his own wealth is not. A steward may be poor, may be tired, may be a cracked vessel of clay; but the bread he serves is the master's bread, and the hungry soul who receives it at his hands is fed, not by the steward, but by the householder whose bounty it is. Now observe where the confession locates the efficacy of the sacrament, and see how exactly the Scriptures agree. The efficacy is "the work of the Spirit," and the Spirit is a wind that blows where He will. Our Lord Himself sets this before us in John 3:8, in words spoken to a master of Israel who thought he understood the ways of God: "The wind bloweth where it listeth, and thou hearest the sound thereof, but canst not tell whence it cometh, and whither it goeth: so is every one that is born of the Spirit." The pneuma, the Spirit, is here likened to the wind, and the point of the comparison is sovereign freedom. The wind is not summoned by the farmer's prayers or bound by the priest's holiness; it blows where it pleases, when it pleases, upon whom it pleases. So the Spirit, in the new birth and in the sealing of the sacraments, is not at the beck of any man. The minister may open his mouth and pour his water, but unless the wind of the Spirit blows, the soul is not quickened, and no grace is conveyed. The one who plants and waters is nothing; the God who gives the increase, by His Spirit, is everything. And lest we think the grace of the sacrament somehow hidden in the elements themselves, our Lord gives us a parable that cuts to the root. In Mark 4:26-28 He says: "So is the kingdom of God, as if a man should cast seed into the ground; And should sleep, and rise night and day, and the seed should spring and grow up, he knoweth not how. For the earth bringeth forth fruit of herself; first the blade, then the ear, after that the full corn in the ear." Here is a farmer who casts his seed and then goes to bed, and while he sleeps, the seed springs and grows, and he knows not how. The growth does not come from the farmer's wakefulness, nor from his virtue, nor from his will. The earth brings forth fruit of herself, which is to say, by a power God has hidden in the seed and in the soil, a power wholly independent of the man who scattered it. So it is with the word of the kingdom, and so it is with the sacraments that seal it. The minister sows and sleeps; the Spirit quickens in the dark; the grace springs up by a power the minister neither commands nor fully understands. God has not entrusted your salvation to the sleeplessness of any man. One text more, and it shows us what the divines meant by the "word of institution," for the efficacy of the sacrament, they teach, rests upon that word which contains a precept and a promise. Hear the words of our risen Lord in Mark 16:16: "He that believeth and is baptized shall be saved; but he that believeth not shall be damned." Here, in a single sentence, are both the parts the confession names. The precept: "be baptized." The promise: "shall be saved." And between them the hinge upon which the whole turns: "he that believeth." The command authorizes the ordinance and gives it its standing; the promise attaches saving benefit to it; and the believing receiver, the "worthy receiver" of our confession, is the one to whom the benefit is promised. The grace does not lie sleeping in the water, waiting to be rubbed off on any skin that touches it. It comes by the word, and it comes to faith. Mark this well, for it is the very soul of the doctrine, and the ground of your assurance.

What the Divines Meant

When the Westminster divines composed this section, they were not idle speculators, but pastors who had watched souls destroyed by two opposite errors, and they wrote to save the flock from both. The sentence falls naturally into two negatives and a positive, and we do well to take each in turn. The first negative is this: the grace exhibited in the sacraments "is not conferred by any power in them." Here the divines are repeating, in its briefest form, a protest the Reformed church had learned to make against Rome's teaching that the sacraments work ex opere operato, by the mere outward performance of the work itself, as though grace were a property of the water and the bread, to be ladled out to every recipient regardless of faith. We have touched this already in our study of the first section, and we need not tarry long upon it here. The point is simply this: the water of baptism and the bread of the supper have no power in themselves to do anything for the soul. They are creatures, not creators. To suppose that grace is bottled up in the font is to confound the sign with the thing signified, and to fall back into that old superstition the Reformation was raised up to cast down. But the second negative is the one the divines press with special urgency, for it was the error of their own day as much as of Augustine's: "neither doth the efficacy of a sacrament depend upon the piety or intention of him that doth administer it." The error here is the Donatist error, the error that would make the worth of your baptism hang upon the worthiness of the man who performed it. In the century before the Assembly, the Romanists had taught that the intention of the priest to do what the church intends is necessary to a valid sacrament, and there were tender consciences in every parish who lay awake wondering whether some inattentive or secretly impious priest had, by a wandering mind or a corrupt heart, undone their baptism altogether. The divines answer with a mercy that ought to be music to such souls: the efficacy of the sacrament does not depend upon the minister's piety, nor upon his intention. He is a steward, not a storehouse; a hand, not a heart; a channel, not a fountain. The grace is not his to give or to withhold; it is Christ's, and it flows through him to the believing soul whether he be a saint or a hypocrite. Robert Shaw, whose Exposition has been our faithful guide through this chapter, sets the matter with his usual clarity. He reminds us that the minister is no more than the instrument and the dispenser of ordinances which derive all their efficacy from a source infinitely higher than himself. A minister may preach and baptize with a corrupt heart, as Judas preached and, we have reason to think, baptized with his fellow-disciples, and yet the word and the sign may be made effectual to the salvation of those who receive them in faith. Shaw would have us notice that the Lord did not recall His commission from the eleven because one of them was a devil. The ordinance stands in its own dignity, sealed by its own Author, and is not defiled by the unworthiness of the man who happens to administer it. And now the positive, which is the crown of the whole: the efficacy of the sacrament rests "upon the work of the Spirit, and the word of institution." Two things, and two only, stand beneath the grace that the sacrament conveys. The first is the work of the Spirit, that sovereign wind who quickens whom He will, and without whom the water is only water and the bread only bread. The second is the word of institution, the word by which Christ appointed the ordinance, and the divines are careful to tell us what that word contains: "together with a precept authorizing the use thereof, a promise of benefit to worthy receivers." A precept and a promise, a command and a blessing, and these are the two pillars upon which the sacrament rests. The precept is Christ's authority, "Do this"; the promise is Christ's bounty, "for the remission of sins," "shall be saved." Strip away the precept and the sacrament is a will-worship of man's devising; strip away the promise and it is a dry command with nothing to give. Hold them together, and you have an ordinance full of power, because it is full of Christ. And mark that last phrase, for it is the hinge of the whole section: "to worthy receivers." Who are the worthy receivers? Not the sinless, for there are none such; not the meritorious, for we are saved by grace alone. The worthy receiver is the believer, the soul who comes to the sacrament not trusting in his own worthiness but in Christ's, and who receives the sign with a faith that lays hold upon the thing signified. To such a receiver the promise belongs; upon such a receiver the Spirit's work descends; and for such a receiver the sacrament becomes, in very deed, a means of grace. The unworthiness of the minister cannot rob him of it, and the worthiness of the minister cannot add a single drop to it, for the whole efficacy is of God, from first to last.

Theological Depth

Let us descend deeper still, for this doctrine, brief as the sentence is, is loaded with the weight of a thousand years of pastoral wisdom, and the great divines of the church have left us treasures in this vein. Augustine is the fountain here, and no account of this section can pass him by, for he it was who stood against the Donatists and taught the church to rest her sacraments upon Christ and not upon man. His argument is as simple as it is unanswerable. The minister, he says, is only the visible instrument; the true minister of the sacrament is Christ Himself, who baptizes with the Holy Ghost, and it is from Him, and not from the unworthy hand that dips the water, that the grace proceeds. Hence his famous dictum, repeated through his writings against the Donatists: when Peter baptizes, it is Christ who baptizes; when Judas baptizes, it is Christ who baptizes. The water is Christ's, the word is Christ's, the institution is Christ's; the man who stands at the font lends nothing to the work but a pair of lips and a hand. Augustine did not deny that an unworthy minister sins in his ministration, and sins grievously; but he insisted that the minister's sin is his own, and does not leak into the ordinance, any more than a dirty channel can defile the pure water that flows through it. This is the exact doctrine of our confession, and it was bought at the price of a century of schism, which is perhaps why the divines state it with such firm and settled calm. Calvin takes up Augustine's torch and carries it into the very heart of the Reformation. In the fourth book of the Institutes he labors to comfort the weak conscience, and he does so precisely at this point. Suppose, he says, that the man who administered your baptism was a hypocrite, or a man who afterward fell away, or even a man who was never truly converted at all. Is your baptism on that account void? By no means. The efficacy of the sacrament is not lodged in the man, but in the promise and in the Spirit; and though a wicked minister cannot profit you, yet he cannot prejudice you either, provided you receive the ordinance in faith, looking not to the instrument but to the Author. Calvin saw the Anabaptists of his day falling into the very Donatist snare, refusing to receive any baptism but the one administered by their own pure and duly-called ministers, and he branded it as a theft of God's prerogative, as though a man could be more or less baptized according to the worthiness of the one who dipped him. The minister is a servant, Calvin insists, and the servant's unworthiness cannot annul the master's gift. Turretin, with his customary precision, gives us the vocabulary to state the distinction without confusion, and it is worth the hearing. He observes that there are two opposite errors against which this section guards, and he names them both. On the one side stands the error of Rome, that the sacrament confers grace ex opere operato, by the work done, apart from the worthiness of either minister or receiver. On the other side stands the error of the Donatists and their modern heirs, that the efficacy depends ex opere operantis, upon the worthiness of the one who works: the minister, and in some hands even the recipient. Against both, Turretin argues, the Reformed church affirms that the efficacy of the sacrament is neither in the bare work nor in the worker, but in the Holy Spirit and in the word of Christ's institution, received by faith. The opus does not save, and the operator does not save; the Spirit saves, through the word, to faith. This is the golden mean, and Turretin holds it so steadily that neither error can pull the church into its ditch. A. A. Hodge, in his commentary on the Confession, compresses the section into its sharpest form and draws out a consequence we too easily forget. He notes that the divines are here answering a question of terrifying practical urgency: how can a poor sinner be sure that his baptism and his supper are worth anything at all? The answer, Hodge says, is that the ground of his assurance lies wholly outside himself and outside the minister, in the promise of God and the power of the Spirit. This, he adds, is the glory of the Reformed doctrine, that it lays the foundation of sacramental certainty in the unchangeable faithfulness of God, and not in the shifting sands of human worthiness. For if my baptism depended upon the piety of the man who performed it, I could never be sure of it, since I can never read another man's heart; and if it depended upon my own worthiness, I could be sure of nothing, for my worthiness is only Christ's. But because it rests upon the word of God, which cannot lie, and upon the Spirit of God, who cannot fail, I may come to the font and to the table with a confidence that is founded on the rock. Hodge would have us see that this section is not a piece of arid school-divinity, but the very charter of a believer's peace. There is a lesson in the very order of the divines' words, and it would be a pity to miss it. They place the Spirit and the word together, the Spirit first, the word second, for these are the two hands by which God conveys grace to His people, and the one never works without the other. The word without the Spirit is a dead letter, a sound that beats upon the ear and does nothing for the soul; the Spirit without the word is a power without a promise, and we should have no ground on which to wait for Him. But when the two go together — when the word of institution is read and preached and believed, and the Spirit breathes upon it — then the sacrament becomes a true means of grace, and the sign becomes a seal, and the promise is made good to the worthy receiver. This is the whole mystery of the matter, and it is a mystery we are invited not to analyze but to enjoy.

Puritan Application

Let us now bring the doctrine down to the conscience, where alone it can do us any good, and let us search our hearts by it. First, rest your assurance upon Christ and His promise, and never upon the man who serves the ordinance. There are souls among you, I doubt not, who have been tossed about by this very snare. Perhaps the man who baptized you afterward fell into open sin, or denied the faith, or was discovered to be a hypocrite, and the enemy has whispered to you ever since that your baptism was a sham and your profession a lie. Beloved, silence that whisper with this section of your confession. The grace of your baptism did not live in that man's heart; it lived in the promise of God and the power of the Spirit. He was a steward, and stewards may prove false, but the householder's bounty is not diminished by a faithless servant. Look away from the minister, and look to Christ, who alone is the true baptizer, and whose gifts are not defiled by the hands that carry them. Second, and on the other hand, do not despise the ministry because the minister is weak, for that is the opposite snare and it is every bit as deadly. It is a poor spirit that refuses the medicine because the errand-boy is sick, or rejects the letter because the postman is rude. The treasure of the gospel is committed to earthen vessels, and God has chosen to carry His grace to men through men, that the excellency of the power may be of God and not of us. Honor the office, even when you cannot admire the man. Pray for your ministers, who bear a weight of glory and of weakness together; and when you come to the table, come looking for Christ in the supper, not for an angel in the one who serves it. Third, let the doctrine teach you how to receive worthily, for here the confession gives you the key to that long-debated word. To receive worthily is not to receive sinlessly, for then none could ever come. It is to receive believingly: to come with your eye upon the promise and your emptiness stretched out to be filled. "He that believeth and is baptized shall be saved." Faith is the hand that receives; and a trembling hand that stretches out to Christ is worthier in the sight of heaven than the proud hands of a self-satisfied sinner who thinks he brings something of his own. Come, then, not boasting of your worthiness, but resting on His; and the sacrament will be to you what it was designed to be, a seal of the righteousness which is by faith. Fourth, seek the Spirit before you seek the sign, for apart from His work the ordinance is a body without breath. The water cannot cleanse you, the bread cannot feed you, the wine cannot cheer you, unless the Spirit of God accompanies them; and the Spirit is not at the command of any man, but blows where He will. This should drive you to your knees before you come to the table or bring a child to the font. Do not come trusting in the elements, and do not come trusting in the minister, but come crying for the Spirit, that He would quicken the sign, and lift your soul to Christ, and seal to your heart the very grace the sacrament proclaims. The farmer sows and sleeps, and the increase is God's; so do you sow your prayers and your attendance, and leave the increase to Him who alone can give it. Fifth, and last of all, let the whole doctrine point you past every instrument to Christ Himself. The minister is nothing, that Christ may be everything. The element is nothing in itself, that the grace it carries may be seen to be wholly of God. And this is the secret purpose of the whole ordinance: to humble the pride of man, and to exalt the free and sovereign grace of God, so that no flesh should glory in His presence. When you have learned to see through the minister to Christ, through the water to the Spirit, through the bread to the body broken for you, then you have learned the heart of the sacrament, and the heart of the gospel too. For it is the whole method of God's dealing with us, from first to last, that we should be brought to an end of ourselves, that we might find our all in Him.

Prayer

O Lord our God, we bless Thee that the efficacy of Thy sacraments hangs not upon the frailty of men, but upon the sure word of Thy promise and the sovereign work of Thy Spirit. We thank Thee that no unworthy minister can undo what Thou hast sealed, and that no worthy minister could add one drop to what Thou hast given; for the whole work of our salvation is Thine, from first to last. We confess, O Lord, that we have too often leaned upon the instrument and forgotten the Author, too often rested our hope upon the hand that served us and not upon the Christ it held forth. Forgive us, and teach us to look through every sign to the Savior, through every minister to the Master. Grant, we beseech Thee, that Thy Spirit, who is the very life of these ordinances, may ever breathe upon them as we use them; that the water of baptism may seal to our hearts the washing of regeneration, and the bread and wine of the supper may be to us the communion of the body and blood of Christ. Give us faith, that we may receive worthily; give us humility, that we may come as empty sinners to be filled; and give us peace, that we may rest our whole assurance upon the word that cannot lie. And when at last the signs are done away and the earthly instruments are needed no more, bring us, through every means of grace, to Thyself, in whom is the fountain of all grace, there to behold Him whom the sacraments set forth, even Jesus Christ our Lord, in whose name we pray. Amen.