Part 2. Why Are We Given Two Sacraments?

By requiring His disciples to "do this in remembrance of me," the Lord Jesus Christ requires faith in Himself as an essential element of the Lord's Supper. Thus the Heidelberg Catechism teaches that "Christ has commanded me and all believers to eat of this broken bread and drink of this cup in remembrance of Him." Those who are not believers, either by choice or by being uninstructed infants, are simply not to partake of the Supper. Indeed, when those who are "unbelieving and ungodly," or by implication, those who are not able to profess faith and demonstrate a godly life as would be the case with infants, are admitted to the Supper, "the covenant of God is profaned and His wrath is provoked against the whole congregation" (Heidelberg Catechism #82).

This same requirement for participants in the Lord's Supper is found in Question and Answer #97 in the Westminster Shorter Catechism. In answer to the question, "What is required to the worthy receiving of the Lord's Supper?" this Catechism answers, "...that they examine themselves of their knowledge to discern the Lord's body, of their faith to feed upon Him, of their repentance, love and new obedience..," all of which express the necessity of living faith in the participants.

The Importance on Faith

This emphasis on the presence of faith in those who participate in the Lord's Supper rests upon the fact that the Supper commemorates union with Christ through faith in Him. The Heidelberg Catechism handles the Lord's Supper with the same series of questions that it uses for Baptism, but the content of the answers is somewhat different. When asking in Question #75, "How is it signified and sealed to you in the Holy Supper that you partake of the one sacrifice of Christ..?" the Catechism answers that this ceremony is according to the command of Christ and then teaches, "and has joined therewith these promises...." The operative word in the significance of the Lord's Supper, just as it is in Baptism, is "promise." The promise in the Supper is somewhat different, though really closely related, but the Lord's Supper is a promise. The Supper promises that Christ's body was "offered and broken on the cross for me," and "that with His crucified body and shed blood Christ Himself feeds and nourishes my soul unto everlasting life... (Heidelberg #75).

The point is that through faith the participant in the Lord's Supper does spiritually participate in Christ's sacrifice and does spiritually "eat my flesh and drink my blood," as Christ commands in John 6. The Supper is the visible promise and seal (or guarantee) that this invisible thing is actually happening. Again, the spiritual union with Christ and His work is just as true and real as the physical bread and wine are to our physical senses.

Now, when asking, "What does it mean to eat the crucified body and drink the shed blood of Christ?" the Heidelberg Catechism points directly to faith. "It means not only to embrace with a believing heart all the sufferings and death of Christ and thereby to obtain the forgiveness of sins and life eternal...." The Lord's Supper commemorates union with Christ through faith, or in the words we have just quoted, "embracing (Him) with a believing heart." Thus, while commemorating union with Christ, just as Baptism does, the Supper commemorates union with Christ as the other side of the coin, through the human action of faith, rather than through the divine action of regeneration. And this is why there are two sacraments.

While there is a great and fundamental unity between the two sacraments, which is commemorating union with Christ, they are clearly distinct in the means of union with Christ which they commemorate. Again, one commemorates union with Christ by the action of God, the other by the resulting action of man. When we confuse the two sacraments, we either make them entirely divine as does hyper-Calvinism, thus treating man as a "stock and a block," or we make them entirely human, as does Roman Catholicism, thus giving man the ability to save himself by using the Supper more and more frequently and indiscriminately.

The Work of the Spirit

There is a further point made by the Heidelberg Catechism concerning the Lord's Supper about the work of the Holy Spirit. This too is stated in the Heidelberg Catechism. "Eating the crucified body and drinking the shed blood of Christ" is also described as "being more and more united to His sacred body by the Holy Spirit, who dwells both in Christ and in us, that although He is in heaven and we are on earth, we are nevertheless flesh of His flesh and bone of His bones, and live and are governed forever by one Spirit, as member of the same body are by one soul." Notice, first of all, that this work of the Holy Spirit commemorated in the Lord's Supper is not regeneration, but a continuing indwelling of the Spirit that supports our union with Christ and draws us ever closer to Him spiritually. Like a marriage in which the husband and wife are just as much married when a thousand miles apart as when they are touching each other, (indeed in that physical separation their mutual love may even grow), so it is with the Christian and His Savior. His love for and obedience to Christ will grow even though Christ's physical body is out of reach in heaven. Indeed, Christ's spiritual body is manifested in the Church (1 Cor. 11:52; 1 Cor. 12:27), and our attitude toward the Church speaks volumes about our faith or lack of faith in Christ. "Discerning the Lord's body," especially in the context of 1 Corinthians 11, must then include knowing that that body is not present physically in the bread and wine, but is present spiritually in the other Christians with whom we are participating, in addition to remembering that His physical body was offered and broken for me on the cross.

It remains to demonstrate from Scripture that the Lord's Supper commemorates union with Christ through faith, and that this is not just a nice little stack of cards erected by our Reformed and Presbyterian fathers. The first Scripture we must examine is John 6, where the Lord Jesus Christ speaks very specifically about "eating my flesh and drinking my blood" as being necessary for our salvation. We need to see that here in John 6 the central subject is salvation through faith in Christ; this is mentioned specifically no less than seven times in verses 29, 35, 36, 40, 47, 64 and 69. Secondly, we need to note the parallel between believing in Christ and "eating and drinking Christ." We see this particularly in verses 47 and 54 where "believes in me" in verse 47 is replaced with "eats my flesh and drinks my blood" in verse 54. This, plus the fact that Jesus goes directly from commanding faith in Himself to the necessity of "eating my flesh and drinking my blood," indicates clearly that we eat his flesh and drink His blood by exercising saving faith.

The capstone of Christ's teaching in John 6 is found in verses 63 and 64. When the Jewish listeners began to think in terms of eating and drinking Christ physically, really quite in the way that Roman Catholics and Lutherans do, Christ sharply rebukes them and set them straight. When the Jews said, "How can this man give us His flesh to eat?" and some of His disciples said, "This is a hard saying, who can receive it?" Jesus said, "It is the Spirit who makes alive, the flesh profits nothing...." Even if we could eat and drink Christ physically, it would do us no good! Speculating about the physical presence of Christ in the Lord's Supper is then unbiblical foolishness. And thinking that physically eating bread and drinking wine is going to help us in itself, as do those who would give the sacrament to infants or who think that the more often we get that bread in our mouths the more saved we will become, is even worse foolishness.

What Christ means by, "It is the Spirit who makes alive," He goes on to explain clearly. He says, "the words that I speak to you, they are Spirit and they are life, but some of you do not believe." It comes down to, "eating my flesh and drinking my blood is believing in me through my word." Eating Christ's flesh and drinking His blood is a spiritual exercise accomplished by faith - faith worked in us by the Holy Spirit's use of the Word, just as the Reformed confessions teach.

Now, Christ also teaches us in John 6 that "eating my flesh and drinking my blood" means union with Himself. He teaches this virtually in so many words when He says in verse 56, "He who eats my flesh and drinks my blood abides in me and I in him." Thus while the Lord's Supper itself is not even mentioned in the book of John, Christ's teaching here in John 6 clearly tells us that we are united to Christ by faith, and that this union with Christ by faith is what He means by "eating my flesh and drinking my blood."

Nevertheless, John's gospel is not the only Scripture that states this teaching of union with Christ by faith. The apostle Paul tells us in Gal. 3:26-27, "For you are all sons of God through faith in Christ Jesus, for as many of you as were baptized into Christ have put on Christ." Now, it goes without saying that to "put on Christ" means to be united with Christ, and as Paul says, this happens by being "baptized into Christ" (this is parallel with the teaching of Rom. 6:1-4 and 1 Cor 2:13). Coupled with the whole New Testament's teaching that Christians are what they are and have what they have by being "in Christ," there can be no doubt what Paul has in mind, especially in the light of Gal. 3:26. This expression "in Christ," appears some 72 times in the New Testament in various connections, but most often as shorthand for what it is to truly be a Christian.

Now, notice the parallelism between verses 26 and 27 of Galatians 3. Both verses say the same thing in a different way (a typical case of "Hebrew parallelism," such as the common expression "answered and said," when in English either "answered" or "said" would be sufficient). We know that this is parallelism because of the word "for" at the beginning of verse 27. "For" is a causative connective, it connects two phrases or sentences just as does the word "because." In other words, we are "sons of God through faith," because "we have put on Christ by being baptized into Him." Thus we have both means of union with Christ, faith and spiritual baptism brought into parallel with each other. Together these verses tell us that we are "united to Christ by spiritual baptism and therefore are the sons of God," and, "we are united to Christ by faith and therefore are the sons of God." It is telling that the Holy Spirit would place these two means of union with Christ in such close proximity and parallel that we cannot doubt that they are two sides of the same coin, that coin being the union with Christ by which we are saved!

The Word and the Sacraments

Any time we deal with the sacraments, it is important to remember that they are secondary, or dependent, means of grace. The sacraments do not by themselves work faith in our hearts, and much less do they communicate salvation by themselves. As Martin Luther well put it, "without the Word, the sacraments are empty ceremonies." The sacraments do communicate God's grace and do provide a strengthening of our faith, but, as the Reformed and Presbyterian creeds always point out, only when they are received by true faith. What needs to be clear is that this "true faith" is worked in our hearts by the Holy Spirit using the Word of God, and only the Word of God. As the apostle Paul says in Rom. 10:17, "Faith comes by hearing and hearing by the Word of God." The formulation of this truth is also very careful in the Heidelberg Catechism, which answers the question, "...where does this faith come from?" with "The Holy Ghost works faith in our hearts by the preaching of the holy gospel, and confirms it by the use of the holy sacraments" (Q&A #65).

That this understanding of the Word of God as the primary means by which He communicates saving faith to us is argued by Scripture itself. When Paul is teaching about justification through faith alone in Romans 4, he specifically asks the question, "does this blessedness (of justification) come upon the circumcised only, or upon the uncircumcised also?" (verse 9). His answer, using Abraham's life as his proof, is that you do not have to be circumcised to be saved. In fact, he says that righteousness was imputed to Abraham "Not while he was circumcised, but while he was uncircumcised" (verse 10). Furthermore, the sacrament of circumcision was given to Abraham as "a sign" and "seal of the righteousness of the faith which he had while still uncircumcised" (verse 11).

Since Baptism in the New Testament replaces circumcision, it is clear that Baptism also does not save us. In fact, this is clearly why Paul says "Christ sent me not to baptize, but to preach the gospel...." The thief on the cross next to Christ was most certainly saved, although neither baptized nor a participant in the Lord's Supper. You cannot be saved by the sacraments, you can be saved without the sacraments, but you cannot be saved without the word.

This truth about the primary place of the Word of God is demonstrated in a number of other ways in Scripture. For example, neither the Gospel of John nor the book of Romans even mention the Lord's Supper, which would be a great dereliction if it were necessary to our salvation, or if it were a primary means of grace. Yet both books constantly make us responsible to believe the word of God with all our hearts. This truth is also taught indirectly when Paul tells us that it is possible to "eat and drink judgement to (our)selves" when the Lord's Supper is received in an unworthy manner. This would not be possible if the Supper brought grace to everyone who chews the bread and drinks the cup (which is interestingly the Roman Catholic conception - they are extremely careful not to let the rats and insects eat the "host").

The upshot of all of this is that the Reformed and Presbyterian creeds have it right, and the historic practices of the churches that hold these creeds are also right. There simply is no need to change them, indeed changing them demonstrates a real ignorance of, or obstinacy, against Scriptural teaching.