Participating in the sacraments connects you to God's covenant people in all ages.
1 Corinthians 10:1–4 (ESV)
1 For I do not want you to be unaware, brothers, that our fathers were all under the cloud, and all passed through the sea, 2 and all were baptized into Moses in the cloud and in the sea, 3 and all ate the same spiritual food, 4 and all drank the same spiritual drink. For they drank from the spiritual Rock that followed them, and the Rock was Christ.
Listen to passage & devotional:
Belgic Confession of Faith, Article 33: The Sacraments
We believe that our good God,
mindful of our crudeness and weakness,
has ordained sacraments for us
to seal his promises in us,
to pledge his good will and grace toward us,
and also to nourish and sustain our faith.
He has added these 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,
confirming in us
the salvation he imparts to us.
For they are visible signs and seals
of something internal and invisible,
by means of which God works in us
through the power of the Holy Spirit.
So they are not empty and hollow signs
to fool and deceive us,
for their truth is Jesus Christ,
without whom they would be nothing.
Moreover,
we are satisfied with the number of sacraments
that Christ our Master has ordained for us.
There are only two:
the sacrament of baptism
and the Holy Supper of Jesus Christ.
Summary
In the 7th-8th grade Bible class I teach each week at Worthington Christian School, we've been learning about how the Bible often uses a literary device called typology to point to Jesus from the Old Testament. Today's New Testament passage is a perfect passage to demonstrate how typology works.
Paul describes the Israelites who escaped from Egyptian slavery as being under the cloud and that they all passed through the sea. If you're familiar with this narrative, you remember that the people followed God, who appeared as a pillar of cloud (and fire at night), and their dramatic escape from Pharaoh as they crossed the Red Sea on dry ground.
Paul next mentions their diet. They of course ate the manna that descended from heaven and the quail that God provided, and often their water would spring forth from a rock in the middle of an otherwise parched and dry desert. But Paul inserts a surprising word to describe this food and drink: It wasn't merely sustenance to keep them alive physically, it was spiritual food and spiritual drink. The rocks that miraculously bursted forth with water was none other than Christ Himself.
So all of those elements: the Red Sea, the pillar of cloud, manna and springs of water were all types pointing us to Christ and signifying how these were not just ethnic Hebrews wandering across the wilderness, but were marked as God's people in the same exact way you are!
Dig Deeper
People often despair at the myriads of denominations the church has splintered into over the last two millennia. But the remarkable thing is the massive amount of doctrinal agreement between the various groups - on paper, at least (this might not seem so because at present so many individual groups have deviated far from what their denominations actually profess to believe).
So the biggest discrepancies between various aspects of the Church aren't necessarily in what we believe but more so in how we express those beliefs (especially in public worship). And there's no bigger example of this than in how each church handles the sacraments; not only in how to perform them, but even in how many sacraments there are!
Part of the difficulty is the vagueness with which the Bible describes them. Today's passage is the only one that mentions both sacraments simultaneously, and it does so in a somewhat cryptic way. Often the Biblical instructions seem short on detail. Who, exactly, ought to be baptized, and when? How much water must be used, and what words should accompany it? What did Jesus mean when He took bread and wine and said "This is my body and blood?" These are questions we'll wrestle through over the next couple weeks.
One thing that stands out over these past few weeks as we've looked at church polity is that as Reformed churches, we seek to do everything the Bible commands and nothing it doesn't as we shepherd and govern God's people. We take that same sola scriptura principle to our understanding to the sacraments: We adhere to the only two that Christ our Master has ordained for us.
ACKNOWLEDGE WHO GOD IS: Our Father, who has gathered us in as His covenant people;
ALIGN YOUR LIFE WITH GOD'S WILL: Pray that you will not be stubborn and rebellious as His people were long ago as you wander through the wilderness on the way to the Promised Land;
ASK GOD FOR WHAT YOU NEED:
Read the New Testament in a year! Today: John 15
