This article is the thirty-fourth installment in our series "Christian, What Do You Believe: The Belgic Confession of Faith." Find the whole series here.
A husband and wife once met with a counselor. The wife explained that while the husband said he loved her, he never touched her. He never held her hand or hugged or kissed her. She believed her husband loved her, but she couldn’t sense it. And that troubled her.
We are sensory people. Our senses contribute to our knowledge. You might suppose that a cake on a restaurant menu tastes good. You could probably even nearly prove it by reading the ingredients and understanding the preparation procedures. But that’s not the same as tasting it.
The relationship between what we know and what we sense also applies to spiritual things. This is crucial for understanding Scripture’s teaching on the sacraments. God “has added [sacraments] to the Word of the gospel to represent better to our external senses both what he enables us to understand by his Word and what he does inwardly in our hearts” (BC 33). The sacraments are vital to our spiritual growth because, like the preached word, they convey the gospel of free grace and can cultivate a richer sense of God’s love for us.
What Are the Sacraments?
“Mindful of our …weakness … Christ our Master has ordained for us … the sacrament of baptism and the Holy Supper.” These two ceremonies represent, seal, and apply to believers Christ and all his benefits.
To understand these ordinances, we have to go back to the Old Testament. The Lord made a covenant with his chosen people: To Abraham God said, “I will be God to you and to your offspring after you” (Gen. 17:7). This good promise was hard for Abraham to believe—who could expect the Creator to declare his friendship to fallen people? Moreover, Abraham had no offspring. So God commanded Abraham and his future male descendants to be circumcised—to put a literal mark on their flesh—as “a sign of the covenant between me and you” (Gen. 17:11). This procedure would be a constant reminder of God’s promise to his special people. Later, God added the Passover as a symbol of his covenant of friendship. He was sending an angel of death into the land of Egypt to judge Israel’s captors. But he would not touch the homes of those who believed his promise and spread the blood of a sacrificial lamb on their door frames; the blood was a “sign” for them (Exod. 12:13).
Christ instituted the New Testament sacraments to be built on these two institutions. Jesus insisted that his disciples be marked by the sign and seal of baptism which replaced circumcision (Matt. 28:19; Col. 2:11). He also commanded the church to celebrate the Lord’s Supper instead of the Passover as a memorial of his atoning death and promise to return (Matt. 26:26–30; John 1:29). The bloody Old Testament symbols would no longer do; they looked forward to the sacrificial blood which Christ would shed. But like Old Testament believers, we, too, need symbols of God’s constant love for us. Like circumcision, the sacrament of baptism signifies and seals one’s entrance into the covenant of grace. Like the Passover, the sacrament of the Lord’s Supper signifies and seals one’s continuation in the covenant of grace.
How Do the Sacraments Work?
There are different views of what a sacrament does. Some people think they impart grace the way a vitamin conveys nutrients. In the Roman Catholic Church, grace flows through the bread, wine, and water and can only be cancelled by willful unbelief or egregious sin. By contrast, the radical wing of the Reformation viewed the sacramental elements as mere reminders of what Jesus has done and of the believer’s commitment to follow him. The confession rejects both the objectivism of the Roman Catholic Church—that the mere performance of the sacrament imparts grace—as well as the subjectivism of the radical reformers—that the sacraments are only pledges of human action.
Instead, like the gospel, sacraments are both a message from and an activity of the risen Christ (Rom. 1:16–17). Sacraments are sensory presentations of the gospel. Augustine called them “visible words,” a different way of saying the same thing. Symbols make words tangible—like wedding bands that call to mind marriage vows. And words make pictures intelligible—Nebuchadnezzar’s vivid dreams needed Daniel’s words of explanation. Both the words of the gospel and the pictures of the sacraments work together to communicate God’s gracious intentions toward his people.
More specifically, sacraments are visible signs and seals of God’s internal and invisible promises and his “pledge of goodwill and grace toward us.” Abraham received “the sign of circumcision, a seal of the righteousness of the faith” (Rom. 4:11). As signs, sacraments help us see God’s invisible promises—his promise to never again destroy the earth with a flood was made visible by his rainbow, “the sign of the covenant between me and the earth” (Gen. 9:13). As seals, sacraments confirm the authenticity of God’s promises, like the official seal on an important document.
By portraying and confirming God’s gracious promises in Christ, the sacraments “nourish and sustain our faith.” God uses the sacraments to “[work] in us through the power of the Holy Spirit.” They are not automatic dispensers of grace. Neither are they mere pictures of grace. When we doubt that God is a loving Father, Christ a willing Savior, and the Spirit a perfect comforter, the sacraments help us “taste and see that the Lord is good” (Ps. 34:8).
Since the beginning, believers have known that their walk with God is helped by a sacrament-fed consciousness of God. We are poor people with many troubles. We are filled with great fears and prone to guilt and shame (Ps. 34:4–6). God’s promises aren’t weak, but our faith is. Through the sacraments, God speaks to us in a different language and helps satisfy our desire to sense him. Through the sacraments, your sense of God can deepen your trust that he truly loves you.
So use the sacraments as a means of spiritual growth. As you see, smell, touch, and taste the bread and the wine, and as you hear the gospel word, remember and believe that Christ died for you.
Footnotes
See Westminster Shorter Catechism, Q/A 92.
