Devotional 146: The Efficacy and the Unworthy: Effectual Only to Believers

The Confession Read

The sacraments of the old testament, in regard of the spiritual things thereby signified and exhibited, were, for substance, the same with those of the new.

— Westminster Confession of Faith, Chapter 27, Section 5

Introduction

Consider a boy standing in his father's house. The title-deeds of a great estate are already his; the servants bow to him as their future lord; the whole inheritance awaits the day of his majority. And yet, for all that, he is kept under tutors and governors, taught his letters by a schoolmaster, and treated in some outward respects very much like a servant until the time appointed of his father. The apostle Paul draws this very picture when he speaks of the church of God. "Now I say," he writes, "that the heir, as long as he is a child, differeth nothing from a servant, though he be lord of all; but is under tutors and governors until the time appointed of the father." Here is the key that unlocks the whole relation between the two testaments. The child and the man are one and the same person. The inheritance never once changed hands. The estate was never lost and then recovered. What changed was only the administration of the household during the heir's minority: the tutors, the governors, the schoolmaster, and at last the full possession of everything that was his from the first. This is precisely what our Confession teaches in a single, deceptively quiet sentence about the sacraments. The sacraments of the old testament, those rites of circumcision and the passover that God gave to His people in the days of shadow, and the sacraments of the new testament, that washing of baptism and that feast of the Lord's Supper which Christ has given to us, are not two different religions, two different covenants, or two different ways of being saved. They are, in regard of the spiritual things thereby signified and exhibited, for substance the same. The sentence we study today is short, but the truth it guards binds the two testaments together. If it is true, then Abraham and Moses and David were saved by the same Christ who saves us, fed by the same grace that feeds us, and washed in the same blood that cleanses us. If it is true, then the Old Testament is not a strange and distant country where a different God spoke a different gospel, but the childhood of the very household in which we now sit at table. Let us then take up the sentence slowly, phrase by phrase, and let Scripture decide whether it is so.

Scripture Foundation

The apostle Paul settles the whole matter in a single passage, and he does so in language so bold that we might easily pass over it without noticing what it claims. Writing to the Corinthians, he draws the veil back from the history of Israel in the wilderness: 1 Corinthians 10:1-4 — "Moreover, brethren, I would not that ye should be ignorant, how that all our fathers were under the cloud, and all passed through the sea; and were all baptized unto Moses in the cloud and in the sea; and did all eat the same spiritual meat; and did all drink the same spiritual drink: for they drank of that spiritual Rock that followed them: and that Rock was Christ." Mark what the apostle dares to say. He calls the passage of Israel through the Red Sea a baptism, and he calls the manna and the water from the smitten rock a spiritual meat and a spiritual drink. He does not say that Israel had something merely like our sacraments, something faintly resembling them. He says they were baptized, and he says they did all eat the same spiritual meat and drink the same spiritual drink. The word pneumatikon, which we render "spiritual," does not mean immaterial, as though the manna were some ghostly food. It means given and applied by the Holy Spirit, and therefore charged with a heavenly significance. The manna fed the body, but as a sacrament it signified and exhibited Christ, the true Bread come down from heaven. And then Paul presses the point to its sharpest edge: "that Rock was Christ." The petra, the rock which followed them through all their wanderings, was not finally a stone at all. It was a type, a sacramental sign, behind which stood the Son of God Himself. Christ was as truly present to the Old Testament church, and as truly the substance of her sacraments, as He is present to us at the font and at the table. This is the first stone in our foundation: the old covenant sacraments did not point to some lesser blessing, but to Christ Himself. The same truth appears when Paul sets the old covenant sign of circumcision directly beside our baptism. Writing to the Colossians, he speaks of what circumcision always signified: Colossians 2:11-12 — "In whom also ye are circumcised with the circumcision made without hands, in putting off the body of the sins of the flesh by the circumcision of Christ: buried with him in baptism, wherein also ye are risen with him through the faith of the operation of God, who hath raised him from the dead." Here the apostle treats circumcision and baptism as two administrations of one and the same thing. The circumcision he speaks of is acheiropoiētos, made without hands, the inward cutting away of the body of sin by the circumcision of Christ. And what is that inward circumcision but the very reality which baptism seals? Baptism, he says, is a burial with Christ and a rising with Him through faith. The outward sign changed, but the inward grace is identical. Circumcision signified the cutting off of sin and the covenant engrafting into the people of God; baptism signifies the washing away of sin and the same engrafting into Christ. The finger of the one covenant pressed upon the child in the old dispensation and the water of the same covenant falls upon the child in the new, and both declare one thing: a sinner must be separated from the pollution of his flesh and brought into union with the risen Christ. The apostle can move from circumcision to baptism in a single breath precisely because, in regard of the spiritual things signified, they are the same. Thirdly, consider the passover. Paul writes to the same Corinthians in the same epistle, as he urges them to purge out the old leaven of malice and wickedness: 1 Corinthians 5:7 — "For even Christ our passover is sacrificed for us." The passover lamb was not a mere picture of some future deliverance which has no connection to us. It was the sacrament under which the old covenant church fed upon the very Christ who was to come. When the Israelite householder slew the lamb and sprinkled its blood upon the doorposts, and then sat down with his family to eat the roasted flesh, he was doing, in type and shadow, exactly what we do at the Lord's table: he was feeding upon Christ slain, by faith, for the remission of sins. The pascha, the passover, finds its substance in none other than our Lord. And if Christ is our passover, then the passover and the Supper are not two feasts but one feast celebrated at two different hours in the history of redemption, the one by anticipation, the other by remembrance, and both by a real spiritual feeding upon the same Lamb. Fourthly, the writer to the Hebrews states the principle in plain terms that brook no dispute. He has just recounted how the generation that came out of Egypt perished in the wilderness through unbelief, and then he turns to his readers and says: Hebrews 4:2 — "For unto us was the gospel preached, as well as unto them: but the word preached did not profit them, not being mixed with faith in them that heard it." What a staggering sentence. Unto them, the church of Moses, the gospel was preached, as well as unto us. Not a gospel, but the gospel. The same good news of salvation by grace through faith was proclaimed to the Old Testament church that is proclaimed to us. The verb euangelizomai, to preach the gospel, is the very word the New Testament uses for the preaching of Christ crucified. And Paul presses the point even further back, before Moses, before Sinai, to the father of the faithful himself, when he says in his letter to the Galatians that "the scripture, foreseeing that God would justify the heathen through faith, preached before the gospel unto Abraham." The Greek word there is proeuangelizomai, a word found nowhere else in the New Testament, meaning to preach the gospel beforehand. God evangelized Abraham. God preached the gospel to Abraham. And if the gospel was preached to Abraham and to Moses and to the church in the wilderness, then the sacraments which sealed that gospel in the old dispensation must have carried the same spiritual substance as the sacraments which seal it in the new, for a gospel and its seals cannot be torn apart. These four passages, then, form one unbroken chain. The old covenant sacraments signified and exhibited Christ: Christ the Rock, Christ the true Circumcision, Christ the Passover, Christ the content of the gospel preached beforehand. And therefore, in regard of the spiritual things thereby signified and exhibited, they were for substance the same with ours.

What the Divines Meant

The sentence we are studying was written by men who had been compelled by hard controversy to think with precision about the relation between the two testaments. The Westminster divines sat in the Assembly through the years of the English Civil War, and in writing this short section they were answering errors that pressed upon them from two sides at once. On the one side stood the Church of Rome. Rome had long taught that the sacraments of the old law were of a lower order than the sacraments of the new. The Council of Trent, which had closed some eighty years before the Assembly sat, taught that the old sacraments were, in the language of the schools, only types and figures of grace, which did not themselves confer the grace they signified, whereas the new sacraments contain and confer grace upon those who do not put an obstacle in the way. The old covenant, on this view, was a dispensation of mere carnal and temporal blessings, a religion of the flesh, while the new covenant is a religion of the Spirit. This doctrine had a long pedigree in Roman teaching, and it served a purpose: it made the new covenant priesthood and its sacraments appear indispensable, and it justified the sacrifice of the mass as something wholly beyond anything the old economy possessed. On the other side stood a company of errors more recent and, in some respects, more subtle. There were the Socinians and various enthusiasts, who reduced the old covenant sacraments to bare and empty ceremonies, national badges with no spiritual content whatever. And there were those in the Anabaptist and enthusiast camp who spoke of the old covenant as a covenant of works, a covenant of law and letter, in which the people of Israel sought salvation by their own obedience and knew nothing of grace or of Christ. On this reckoning, the old testament was not a different administration of the same covenant of grace, but an altogether different covenant, a covenant of merit, and its sacraments were the seals of a failed and legal way of salvation. Against both these errors the divines wrote a single sentence, and every phrase in it carries weight. Consider the phrase "the spiritual things thereby signified and exhibited." The divines deliberately insist that the old covenant sacraments did not merely signify, they exhibited; they did not merely point forward, they actually administered and conveyed the grace they represented to those who received them by faith. The word "exhibited" is the hinge on which the whole sentence turns. Rome had said the old sacraments could not exhibit grace; the Socinians had said they could not even signify it. The divines answer with one stroke: they both signified and exhibited. And then the climactic phrase: "for substance, the same." The word "substance" is drawn from the precise vocabulary of scholastic theology, and it is chosen with care. The old and new covenant sacraments agree in substance, in the essential reality they convey, which is Christ and His benefits. They differ only in accidents, in the outward administration: in the sign itself, in the time of their institution, in their number, in their clearness, and in their extent. Circumcision and baptism differ as a picture-book differs from the printed page; but the story told is the same story, and the inheritance promised is the same inheritance. Hodge, commenting on this section, presses exactly this distinction. The sacraments of the two testaments, he observes, are not to be thought of as different in kind, as though one conveyed a carnal and the other a spiritual blessing. They are one and the same in the spiritual things signified, and the difference lies wholly in the outward form and the degree of clearness. The old covenant was the same covenant of grace, administered under types, obscurely, to a church still in her minority; the new covenant is the same covenant, administered in the fulness of time, openly, to a church come of age. Shaw makes the same point in his Exposition, where he insists that the difference between the old and new dispensations is not a difference of substance but of administration, and that Abraham's faith and ours lay hold of the same Christ. The divines were also guarding the door against a subtle error which the very word "new" in the phrase "new testament" might suggest. Some of their contemporaries read the promise of a new covenant in Jeremiah and concluded that the new covenant was a wholly different covenant from the old, as different as a second foundation is from a first. The divines answer by insisting that the new covenant is new only in its administration, not in its substance. The covenant of grace is one, from the first promise in Eden to the last saint saved on earth. It had but one Mediator, one condition, one promise, one way of justification. The old sacraments sealed that covenant to Abraham and to Moses; the new sacraments seal the same covenant to us. This is why the sentence we study is not a piece of antiquarian curiosity but a vital truth of the gospel: it teaches us that there has never been but one way of salvation, and that the blood of Christ, shed once for all, availed for the saints who lived before the cross no less than for those who live after it.

Theological Depth

The doctrine enshrined in this single sentence belongs to the very heart of Reformed theology, and our fathers in the faith have taught it with a remarkable unanimity across three centuries. It is worth our while to sit at the feet of four of them, and to hear each one add his own note to the same chord. Calvin addresses the question directly in the Institutes, where he labors to show that the fathers under the law had Christ, and had Him truly. He is concerned to answer those who imagined that the ancient people were fed only upon earthly promises and earthly figures. Against them Calvin insists that the sacraments of the old covenant were not empty signs, but true means of grace by which the ancient church held communion with Christ. The fathers, he writes, did not merely gaze upon shadows; they partook of the substance which those shadows concealed. Christ was set before them in the rock and in the manna, in the blood of the passover and in the water of the smitten rock, and by faith they fed upon Him no less truly than we feed upon Him in the bread and the wine. The difference, Calvin says, is a difference of clearness, not of reality: they fed upon the same Christ, though He came to them wrapped in types and shadows, while He is set before us in the unveiled record of His incarnation and passion. Turretin brings to the matter the precision of the systematic theologian. In his treatment of the sacraments he distinguishes carefully between the substance of the covenant of grace and the mode of its administration. The substance, he argues, is one and unchangeable: it is God in Christ reconciling sinners to Himself, offering and conferring grace by the Spirit. The administration, however, has varied: before the incarnation it was obscure and typical, after the incarnation it is clear and spiritual. On this ground Turretin can affirm both things at once, that the old sacraments were truly efficacious, conferring the same grace as the new, and yet that the new are more excellent in the manner of their administration. The old and new are not two covenants, but one covenant under two economies, and their sacraments are the seals of the same covenant in two different forms. This is the very distinction our Confession compresses into the words "for substance." To these two voices we may add one nearer our own day, whose whole method was given to tracing the unity of Scripture. Geerhardus Vos, who taught biblical theology at Princeton, devoted his career to showing that the Old Testament is not a collection of unfulfilled promises waiting in vain, but the living, growing organism of revelation, in which the gospel is present from the first in seed form and unfolds by stages into full flower. Vos insists that the Old Testament believer possessed Christ by anticipation, that the sacraments of the old covenant were the organs through which the grace of the coming Redeemer was applied, and that there is an organic continuity, not a breach, between the old and the new. The covenant of grace, he writes, is one covenant, and the history of redemption is the history of that one covenant unfolding. This is the biblical theology which stands behind our Confession's single sentence. One further voice may press the truth home to the conscience. The Scottish pastor Thomas Boston, in his reflections on the covenant of grace, loved to insist that the covenant made with Adam after the fall, revealed to Abraham, and sealed in the blood of Christ is one and the same covenant from first to last. He would have us understand that when we sit at the Lord's table we are doing in the clear light of fulfilment what Abraham did in the shadows of promise, and that the faith which justified Abraham, which was counted to him for righteousness, is the very faith by which we are justified. There is, Boston says, one covenant, one Mediator, one gospel, one family; and the saints of the old testament are not strangers to us, but elder brothers in the same household, waiting with us for the same inheritance. Out of all this one consequence follows, and it is worth naming plainly. If the sacraments of the old testament were, for substance, the same with those of the new, then there has never been but one church of God, and one way of salvation, from the garden to the glory. The blood of bulls and goats could never take away sin; but the faith which laid hold of the Christ whom those sacrifices prefigured did take away sin, even in the days before the cross. The old covenant saint was not saved by a different mercy, a provisional mercy, a mercy that God would later revoke or complete by some other means. He was saved by the same blood, the same righteousness, the same Spirit, the same grace that saves us. The cross, though it lay in the future, cast its efficacy backward upon every believing soul who ever lived, even as it casts its efficacy forward upon us who live two thousand years after it. There is one Lord, one faith, one baptism, one gospel, one covenant; and the sacraments, old and new, are but the seals of that one covenant pressed upon the same believing people in the successive ages of the world.

Puritan Application

A truth of this magnitude must not be left in the study. It bears directly upon the way you read your Bible, the way you come to the table, and the way you face both your doubts and your dying. Let me press it home in four or five particulars. First, read your Old Testament as Christian Scripture, for that is what it is. The temptation of our age is to treat the Old Testament as a museum of ancient religion, a record of a primitive and semi-barbarous faith which has been superseded. Nothing could be further from the truth. The Old Testament is the childhood of the church to which you belong. Its patriarchs and prophets were Christians in the days of shadow, laying hold of the same Christ by the same faith. When you read of Abraham offering Isaac, of the passover lamb, of the water from the rock, of the bronze serpent lifted in the wilderness, you are not reading about some other religion; you are reading about your own salvation, administered under figures. Therefore feed your soul upon the Psalms, where David sings of a Savior he had not yet seen with the eyes of flesh. Read the prophets, and hear them testify beforehand of the sufferings of Christ and the glory that should follow. Do not despise the old testament, as though the new had made it obsolete; rather, mine it for Christ, for He is on every page, and the same faith that saves you will be kindled afresh by what you find there. Second, rejoice in the clearness of the new testament, and let it move you to gratitude and to diligence. You live in the age of fulfilment; the saints of the old covenant lived in the age of promise. Abraham saw Christ's day afar off and was glad; you behold it accomplished. The gospel is preached to you, as Paul says, without a veil over your eyes, in the open ministry of the Word and the simple sacraments of the new covenant. What will you answer for this advantage? If the old testament saint fed upon Christ through a glass darkly, and yet loved Him and followed Him unto death, how much more ought you, who see Him face to face in the Word, to love Him with a warmer heart and follow Him with a firmer step? To whom much light is given, of him much love will be required. Let the very clearness of your dispensation make you ashamed of your coldness, and let it stir you to a devotion at least equal to that of Abraham, who believed God in the dark. Third, let the unity of the covenant humble you and enlarge your heart at the table and at the font. When you bring your child to the waters of baptism, you are doing what Abraham did when he circumcised Isaac; you are pressing the seal of the one covenant of grace upon the seed of the faithful, and taking your place in a line that runs unbroken back to the father of the faithful. When you sit down at the Lord's Supper, you sit at the same feast which Israel celebrated in the passover, and you sit with Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, with Moses and David and all the prophets, as guests at one table. This ought to fill you with a deep and tender sense of the communion of saints. You are not a solitary believer, cut off from the people of God; you are the heir of an ancient covenant, a citizen of a kingdom whose foundations were laid before the mountains were brought forth. Let this enlarge your love for the whole church, and let it teach you to feel yourself a debtor to the saints of the old testament, upon whose shoulders you stand. Fourth, and this is the searching point, do not rest in the outward sign, for the old testament itself proves that the sign without the substance is death. Paul reminds the Corinthians that "with many of them God was not well pleased: for they were overthrown in the wilderness." All Israel was circumcised; all Israel was baptized unto Moses in the cloud and in the sea; all Israel ate the spiritual meat and drank of the spiritual Rock; and yet the carcasses of most of them fell in the wilderness. The sign was theirs, and the substance was not, because the word was not mixed with faith in them that heard it. Hear this, you who have been baptized and who come to the table, and yet whose hearts have never known the circumcision made without hands. The water on your brow and the bread in your mouth will not save you; they will only testify against you. Not all who are of Israel are Israel. The thing you must have is the thing the sign points to: a heart renewed, sin cut away, faith laying hold of Christ. Seek not the sign only, but the Savior to whom the sign points, lest you eat and drink, like Israel, to your own judgment. Fifth, and finally, let this truth comfort you in the hour of doubt and in the hour of death. Your salvation does not rest upon the age in which you live, nor upon the administration under which you were brought, but upon the Christ to whom every sacrament, old and new, has always pointed. The Rock that followed Israel follows you still; the Christ who was preached to Abraham is preached to you; the Lamb who was slain for the remission of sins before the foundation of the world is your Lamb, your passover, your righteousness. You may look back across the whole of redemptive history and see one unbroken purpose of grace, one covenant, one Savior, one church, and know that you are held within it. And when you come to die, you may say with the dying Jacob, "I have waited for thy salvation, O Lord," and with the aged Simeon, "Lord, now lettest thou thy servant depart in peace," because you and they have hoped in the same Christ, and the same grace that carried them home will carry you home at the last.

Prayer

O Lord our God, who art the same yesterday, and to-day, and for ever, we bless Thee for the one covenant of grace which Thou hast made with Thy people in every age. We thank Thee that Abraham believed Thee, and it was counted unto him for righteousness, and that the same faith is ours who have not seen, and yet have believed. We praise Thee, O Christ, who wast the Rock in the wilderness, the true Bread from heaven, the Passover Lamb whose blood delivers from death. Thou wast set before Thy ancient people in shadow and type, and Thou art set before us in the open ministry of the Word. Grant that we, who behold Thee with unveiled face, may love Thee with an unveiled heart. Forgive us, we pray, for despising the old testament, for reading it as a record of a strange religion rather than as the childhood of our own household. Forgive us for resting in the outward sign while our hearts remain uncircumcised. O Spirit of God, work in us the circumcision made without hands, cut away from us the body of sin, and make our baptism and our communion to be, not a testimony against us, but a true sealing of the grace we confess. Unite us, we beseech Thee, to the whole company of the faithful, to Abraham and Isaac and Jacob, to Moses and David and the prophets, and to the great multitude which no man can number, out of every kindred and tongue and people and nation. Make us to feel ourselves heirs of one covenant and guests at one table, until faith is swallowed up in sight. And when our hour of death shall come, grant us the faith of Jacob, to wait for Thy salvation, and the peace of Simeon, to depart in quietness, because our eyes have seen the salvation which Thou hast prepared before the face of all people. We ask it in the name of Him who is the same, and whose years shall not fail, even Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.