The Lord's Supper: Important Distinctions - Brian Taylo
I dearly love the Lord’s Supper. To be able to approach the Table and partake of the bread and wine rejoices my heart greatly. I have not always held to a Reformed view of the Supper (as I do now). Yet, even in my “Zwinglian” days, I treasured my participation in this means of grace (though I certainly would not have referred to it as such then). Despite my underdeveloped theological understanding, especially related to the efficacy of the Supper for my spiritual growth, the Lord still blessed my participation by his spiritually feeding me his body and blood. For, thankfully, our participation in the Supper centers upon our faith in Christ and the promises of God attached to this sacrament, and not upon our advanced theological acumen. Still, now that the Lord has enriched my understanding of what he is doing in the Supper, as I do participate in this sacrament by faith, my appreciation and enjoyment of this means of grace has only been amplified. I now wish to aid others in their developing a more robust and reformed (i.e., biblical) understanding of the Lord’s Supper. To do so, I wish to clarify certain facets of the Supper by making important distinctions, so as to provide for a better understanding and participation in this means of grace.
One necessary distinction we need make concerns the sign and the thing signified by the sign. The sign is the bread and wine, which signifies the body and blood of Christ. That distinction is fairly clear, Yet, building upon that, we must likewise, secondly, distinguish between the one who serves the sign and the one who serves the thing signified by the sign. A lawfully ordained minister serves the sign of bread and wine, but it is Christ who serves the thing signified by the sign. Christ, in a secret and spiritual way, does feed his people, who have believed upon him, his body and blood for our spiritual nourishment. We must make sure to keep this distinction clear. The Lord does not serve us the bread and wine, as in a corporal manner. We partake of the sign, the bread and wine, in a corporal or physical manner. We partake of the body and blood in a spiritual and invisible manner, as it is Christ giving himself to us through the Supper.
This leads to our third distinction. We must distinguish between how we receive the sign and how we receive the thing signified by the sign. We receive the sign by our hand and mouth. That is, as already noted, in a physical manner. This is not how we receive the body and blood of Christ. We receive the thing signified by the sign by faith. Our sister confession, the Belgic Confession, beautifully words this facet of the Supper:
To represent to us this spiritual and heavenly bread Christ has instituted an earthly and visible bread as the sacrament of his body and wine as the sacrament of his blood. He did this to testify to us that just as truly as we take and hold the sacraments in our hands and eat and drink it in our mouths, by which our life is then sustained, so truly we receive into our souls, for our spiritual life, the true body and true blood of Christ, our only Savior. We receive these by faith, which is the hand and mouth of our souls.
It is by faith that we lay hold of Christ, offered to us in the Supper. As I have faith in Christ, I can rest assured that Christ feeds and nourishes my soul to everlasting life.
To summarize and provide further insight into these matters, I will end with a quote from Robert Bruce:
You may be quite sure that if you are faithful, Christ is as busy working inwardly in your soul, as the Minister is working outwardly in regard to your body. See how busy the Minister is in breaking the bread, in pouring out the wine, in giving the bread and the wine to you. Christ is just as busy, in breaking His own Body unto you, and in giving you the juice of His own Body in a spiritual and invisible way. Preserve this distinction then and you may assure yourself that by faith Christ is as fully occupied with your soul in nourishing it, as the Minister is outwardly with your body. Keep this, and you have the whole Sacrament.