2.04.02. Christ and the sacraments - the sprit and the body

II. CHRIST AND THE SACRAMENTS— THE SPIRIT AND THE BODY.

“ Now the Lord is that Spirit: and where the Spirit of the Lord is, there is liberty.”— 2 Corinthians 3:17.

HE minLstry of Moses was glorious in comparison with the utter darkness of the heathen world, and with the feebler light of earlier revelation; but much more glorious is the ministry whereby the Spirit now takes of the things of Christ and shows them unto us. While he was receiving the message from God, and uttering it to the people, a supernatural light illumined the countenance of the lawgiver; but as soon as he had delivered the prophecy, he veiled his face, so that the people did not see its brightness long or continuously.

Only glimpses of the light were shown; and then the revelation stopped short — the rest hidden by a veil. But this was not the only obstacle: a veil, opposite, and yet corresponding, was spread over the hearers’ minds and hearts. When it was no longer a speaker’s voice to be heard, but the Scriptures of the Old Testament to be read, the veil remained on the readers’ hearts. The hardening of their heart constituted the blinding veil that prevented them from fully comprehending the Scriptures, and their testimony to Christ. Their descendants remained in the same state at the date of this epistle; and until this day the same veil, at the reading of the Old Testament, remains, not apoealypsed, not revealed, when it (Old Testament ritual) is done away in Christ. The veil that then hid the speaker’s countenance, has now been put on the readers’ hearts. They cannot, when they read the Old Testament, perceive how the outward ordinances pass away, and leave Christ the substance and inner spirit of them all. This veil prevents them from seeing the glory that shines in the Old Testament — its prophetic word, and prophetic sacrifices. They cannot discover that the letter is done away, by the full unfolding of the spirit; that the promises, however rich and precious, fall away of their own accord, when the Promised One has come.

Even unto this day, says Paul, the veil is upon their heart, when Moses is read; when that heart of theirs shall turn to the Lord, the veil shall be taken away. It is when they behold in living faith the Lamb of God, that they understand the meaning of the appointed sacrifices. “ We have found him, of whom Moses in the law, and the prophets, did write, Jesus of Nazareth “ (John 1:45). The shell, hard and encompassing, holds firm in spite of influences from without, until the kernel within comes to its time, and, affected by prepared conditions, swells and bursts out into manifestation and life. The Lord is the spirit that lies in the Old Testament, under the folds of its sacrifices, giving them life. When the eye of the soul is opened to behold the beauty of the Lord, the observer comes to understand aright, both the spirit that animates the body, and the body that clothes the spirit — to imderstand both the Christ whom the sacrifices promised, and the sacrifices that promised Christ. When it is intimated that Christ is the spirit of all ordinances, the intimation is not meant to disparage these ordinances, which constituted for him a hody until the fulness of time. The period of his ministry on earth was brief. He manifested himself the Saviour before he bebecame incarnate, and after he had ascended to heaven. On both sides of the cross were sinners suffering, and love from the face of Christ crucified beamed in gracious offer either way, reaching earth’s utmost ends — penetrating to Adam backward, and down to his latest child. In order that Christ, before and after his sojourn on earth, might make himself known to men, it behoved him to adopt a body palpable to human sense. Accordingly, before he was born in Bethlehem, and after he ascended from Olivet, he presented himself to faith clothed in certain forms and symbols, that touched human senses, and so made way into human souls.

He knows what we are, and what we need. He not only filled the fountain of grace on high; he also prepared suitable channels through which it might flow to the needy.

Divine truth revealed must have respect to its objects as well as to its Author, It must, in its nature, be like CJod; but it must also be, in its form, like man. People object to certain details in the Bible, averring that they seem far below the Divine: they are; and that because it was necessary to bring them down to the human. Our knowledge comes to us in the first instance through the bodily senses; and how shall God, a Spirit, be made known to us? The method adopted in the covenant, and manifested in the Scriptures, is — in order to bring us up to his nature he bowed down to ours. In order that we might know and receive the Lord, the spirit, God has from the beginning prepared for that spirit a body, which brings saving truth within the reach of embodied men.

“While God in his ordinances condescends to our low estate, a tendency is always manifest in the divine dispensations to advance from the lower to the higher. The more carnal ordinances came first; afterwards, the more spiritual. The New Testament is an advance upon the Old; and a yet greater advancement awaits the Church. Things are prepared for them that love God — things which eye hath not seen yet, nor ear heard. In the meantime, however, it is only what the eye can see or the ear hear that can be made known to us. Revelation must assume some bodily shape ere it can be intelligible to men in the body.

Such, accordingly, were all the ordinances of the Ancient Church, and such all the revelations that were made under the earlier dispensations. Christ, their spirit and life, was in them; but those things in which the life was lying were bodily things. The bondage in Egypt, and the redemption thence by the blood of the lamb; the open way through the Red Sea to Israel, and the burjdng of their oppressors beneath its flood; the journey through the wilderness, and the rest that lay beyond; the manna from heaven, and the water from the rock; the deadly wound by the bite of a serpent, and the healing by a look, — all these had Christ in them, and all were employed to make Christ known. The permanent institutes, as well as the passing events, were bodies prepared for containing and conveying that one blessed spirit. The unblemished lamb, and its blood on the doorposts; the one fair mitre on the high priest’s brow, and the twelve precious stones on his breast, — that signifying Christ’s holiness before Gtod, and this Christ’s imperishable love to his people; all the sacrifices and types that were written in the laws of Moses, and reverently observed throughout the generations of Israel, were bodies prepared for bringing Christ near to men. All these were handles let down from heaven, whereby the perishing might grasp their Saviour. Christ put these garments on in those ancient days, that his people, when bowed down by disease, might be enabled to touch their hem, and so live. Christ was within those bodies, their quickening spirit. Believers like Abraham saw him thereby long before he came in the flesh. It was his delight thus to reach them, and give them life; it was their delight thus to reach him, and get life. The song, “ My beloved is mine, and I am his,” is an old, old song, and a very sweet one to those who have an ear to hear what the Spirit, out of the ordinances, saith unto the Churches. But though these bodies were precious, as vehicles for containing and presenting Christ, they were worthless wanting him. A body with the life is good. When the spirit animates the body, the body clothes the spirit, and enables it to reach its object. But a body when the spirit has fled is useless, and worse. Itself is dead, and it kills others. Such are ordinances, even those of divine appointment, when Christ, their spirit, is not in them, or is not owned.

It is no disparagement to God’s wisdom in the construction of the human body, that it becomes corrupt and corrupting when the soul has fled. The human body is a wonderful work; but it is most wonderful as the home of a human soul. When the soul has departed, it is of no further use; we are fain to bury it out of sight, God’s work though it be. Such are the ordinances of religion when Christ is not in them. Their deadness and loathsomeness when their life is lost, is no reflection on the wisdom that ordained them. They were never meant to be, in themselves and for their own sakes, either beautiful or good; they are obedient and loyal, and so they part with all their glory when the King goes away.

There is a strong tendency in us to cling to the mere body of a religious ordinance and let its spirit go. This error appeared early in the Churches of Galatia. They turned from Christ, who is the spirit of the ordinances, to the old ordinances destitute of Christ. Returning to the elements of the world, they distrusted Christ, and leant on circumcision. How vehemently Paul cried out to them, “ O foolish Galatians, who hath bewitched you? Having begun in the Spirit, are ye now made perfect in the flesh?”

They were leaving the animating Spirit, and going back to the dry bones of the dead. As sensible ordinances were appointed for communicating Christ to faith before the incarnation, so also after the Lord had ascended into heaven, he has appointed ordinances in which he their spirit will dwell, and where his people will find him. The Scriptures of the New Testament, like those of the Old, are bodily things, suited to bodily senses. They are words and letters. If they have not a spirit in them they are dead; and the dead cannot give life. Christ is the soul that animates them; and if we do not find him in the Bible, we find nothing there. As a human body with the life in it is the most beautiful object in nature, and a human body when the life has gone the most forbidding, so I suppose the Bible is to one class the most attractive of all books, and to another the most forbidding because to the one it is a dead letter, and to the other it is a body all glowing with Christ its life. The Jewish scribes of our Lord’s day spent much time in handling the Scriptures, but the letter in their hands was a body dead, and their schools had the thick noisome air of a dissecting-room. “ Ye search the Scriptures/’ said the Lord to those learned Jews, “ for in them ye think ye have eternal life; and they are they which testify of me. And ye will not come to me, that ye might have life.” They stolidly manipulated the carcass, and rejected him who came to be its spirit and life.

They embraced the dead because the look of the living reproved them. But the sacrament of the Supper is in a peculiar manner and in an eminent degree the body whereof Christ is the inner living spirit. As men often missed the spirit of the old dispensation, so they miss the spirit of the Lord’s Supper now. If we do not by faith realize Christ at his table, it will be no more to us than a Jewish passover would be.

Li the remarkable discourse which is reported in the sixth chapter of John’s Gospel, Jesus taught clearly and fully that himself is the bread on which a soul must live. That discourse does not contain the institution of the Lord’s Supper. It is an exposition by the Lord himself, while he stood among the disciples, of the central saving doctrine which the Supper afterwards expressed and commemorated It is not his body but himself that he represents as the bread of life. At the beginning he said, “ I am that bread of life; “ and at the close he repeated, “ He that eateth me shall live by me.” In the light of that discourse observe the relation between our text and the ordinance of the Supper. “ This is my body... this is my blood;... take; eat... drink ye all of it;... this do in remembrance of me.” In all this you have the body; but to eat bread and drink wine will not save, will not profit a soul. Where is the spirit of the body? The Lord is that spirit. The Supper is indeed a body, — a sort of channel appointed for conveying Christ to the believing, — but it cannot by itself contribute an atom of influence to the procuring of pardon, or the purifying of the heart. The Lord is the spirit; and if they who come to the body do not seek and find by faith that spirit, the body will profit them nothing, divine institute though it be. This question is entirely independent of that which concerns the right administration of the sacrament. Suppose it to be administered by apostles, and in exact conformity with the Lord’s will, still it can impart nothing to the unworthy receiver. His evil heart of unbelief has refused Christ, and there is none other who can be the spirit of the ordinance. The bread and wine are but beggarly elements. As the lead of a water-pipe, although most perfectly fitted for conveying water from the fountain to the lips of the needy, cannot in any measure contribute to allay his thirst, so the Supper, although divinely ordained and purely administered, can do nothing for a sinner who closes the door of his heart against the Saviour Christ.

We do not deny to the Supper a place when we refuse to give it the place of the Saviour. The body, which is nothing when dead, is a great thing when living. It is not only that the soul inhabiting the body is great: the body is great when a soul inhabits it. In like manner, it is not enough to say that, though a Christless sacrament is nothing, Christ himself is great. That is true; but more than that is true. While the ordinance is dead and worthless, if Christ its spirit be not apprehended, the ordinance is most precious when the believing partaker seeks through it communion with the Lord. When he makes himself known to a longing heart, that heart loves him; and loves, too, in its own place, the channel through which he comes.

Recall to mind the design of Christ’s departure from the disciples, and the process of weaning through which they were put. They loved the Master, with a fond, adoring love. When they were tossed on a stormy sea and ready to perish, the only want they felt was the absence of their Lord: “ It was now dark, and Jesus was not come to them.’’ But while their love was grateful to his heart, he knew that sense with them was growing too rank, and was choking the more feeble, more precious faith. Carried away in a flood of personal love that lay in the senses, Peter passionately opposed the dying of the Lord: ’• Far be this from thee.” There Satan got an advantage over Peter. But Peter’s love to the person of the Lord, as seen by the bodily eyes, was the cover under which the old serpent lurked while he dealt this blow.

Knowing what was in man, the Lord prepared to go out of his people’s sight as soon as his atoning work was dona The faith of these Galileans would have been smothered outright under the ample folds of their love to the man Christ Jesus, their personal friend. When he departed, they remained glued to the ground and gazing up to heaven. The ministry of angels was needed and employed to tear them from the spot, and turn their minds another way. But the ministry of angels, though fitted to take them away from their needless looking into the sky over Olivet, was not fitted positively to lead them to the perception and enjoyment of Christ, the spirit of word and ordinances. The ministry of angels ceased, and a more glorious ministry succeeded it. The Holy Ghost came upon them; and his mission was to glorify Christ. They were wrenched away from sensible, human companionship with Jesus, as infants are torn from their mother’s breast. They were led by the Spirit to Christ; and although Christ was now bodily removed, he was still manifested to them under bodily forms. In the sacrament of the Supper they found Christ with less of tumult and distraction than they would have experienced if he had again appeared in the flesh. As the result of the Lord’s ascension and the Spirit’s ministry, we learn that in mutual love and sacramental communion they did eat their meat with gladness and singleness of heart. “ This is my body...this do in remembrance of me” — “Lo, I am with you.” The Lord became the spirit in the body of their sacrament. They lived on the same Saviour; but now their life in him was more purely a life of faith. This body which he has left is as fit to nourish us as his personal, visible presence on earth would be. We may now praise him for having weaned his Church in those days: he has given us food convenient for us; he hath done all things well. Let the Lord be the spirit of our sacrament, and we shall feed on him by faith, with less distraction than if he should return to show us either the marks of former suffering on his hands, or the signs of present glory on his countenance. By his reappearing in bodily form, we should be flooded by tumults of human passion; — either crying out, “Depart from me; for I am a sinful man, O Lord,” or “falling at his feet as dead.” In these tumults flickering faith would be overlaid and quenched.

He gives us the sensible sign, that in it we may receive himself by faith as our Saviour, with less distraction than if his eyes as a flame of fire were opened and bent upon our company. We should gladly accept any body wherein he pleases to present himself; and if there be less in these symbols themselves to carry ns away than there would have been in the transfigured presence of the Lord descending on our mount, all the more complete should be the inner worship of the soul, while we cleave to the Lord the spirit in these bodily memorials of his death.

Tell me the sweetest scene of mingled moral and material beauty that may be seen on earth. It is an infant satisfying itself abundantly from a living mother’s breast. Tell me now the saddest sight that eye hath seen or ear hath heard of. It is that which they say has sometimes been seen in the wake of war or of pestilence — an infant unconsciously sucking a mother dead. If that process continue long, the child will draw death from that which was formed to be a well of life. The letter of the ordinance is dead if Christ be not known and tasted. The letter, when the spirit has departed, is not only dead, but deadly: “ The letter killeth.” But the same letter, when the Lord is its spirit, is life, and gives life. The tendency to go back to the dead letter in the sacrament of the Supper is, of course, seen in its grossest form in modern Rome. But even that deepest error of the Romish superstition has a more terrible meaning to ns at this day than formerly, because of a movement — broad, deep, and rapid — in the Church of England to follow in the wake of Rome. Opposite and equal to the revival movements upward to the Lord that have been experienced in our day, other movements have emerged, — movements of men’s spirits gravitating downwards like lead, from Christ the spirit of the Supper to the form from which Christ has departed. This gravitation downwards affects us all, except in as far as the Holy Spirit is given to quicken and elevate.

Whereas all the sacrifices of the Old Testament, being symbols, ceased when the one Sacrifice was offered, they multiply their sacrifice of the Mass, as they call it, to ten thousand times ten thousand — thus returning to the shadows again. Their wafer and their wine-cup, they say, have become the body and blood of Christ — the very body that was nailed to the cross, and the blood that flowed from his wounds. It is the most adventurous imposture that ever human heart invented. But even although it were true, what gain would accrue from it? Although the wafer and wine which the devotee swallows were the body and blood of Christ — which they are not — what better would he be of swallowing them? It is the spirit that giveth life; bodily service profiteth little. The Lord, the spirit, is not there; he has gone away offended, leaving the dead letter for the dead worshipper. The second clause of the verse intimates that “Where the Spirit of the Lord is, there is liberty.”

I know not a shorter or surer method of illustrating the liberty that prevails wherever the Lord, the spirit, is recognized by faith, than to point out the bondage which crushes the people wherever the spirit of the sacrament is lost, and its body resorted to as a charm. The converse of the clause is strictly true and eminently appropriate to the times, — “ Where the Spirit of the Lord is not, there is slavery.” Human spirits are too high in nature and too capacious for worshipping any other than God. When men, as individuals or as communities, let Christ slip from the grasp of their faith, and fasten on some corporeal thing, whether a superstitious ceremonial or a human priesthood farewell to liberty. It becomes, on the one side, an iron tyranny; and, on the other, the cringing of a slave. The Pharisee would lose peace of conscience if he should eat with unwashen hands. A modem bondsman, a sincere worshipper in his way, will count that he has committed a sin against God, which must be atoned for by a painful or degrading penance, if by some accident he has tasted a kind of food on one day of the week which he might eat lawfully on any other. A man of education and refinement in this country will eat meat with peace of conscience at a certain season of the year if an aged priest at Kome shall give permission, but would count that he had incurred the displeasure of God if he should eat meat at that season without such permission. There is no imaginable depth of degradation which the master of a soul may not impose — which a soul enslaved will not endure. Woe to human spirits when they let go Christ and submit to a carnal ordinance or a fellow-man!

Take all the advantage that can be obtained — and it is great — from the union and organization of Christians, as a brotherhood of God’s children; take instruction and accept fellowship wherever you can obtain them pure and useful, — but subject your soul to none but Christ. When in reading the Scriptures, in prayer secret or social, in the worship of the great assembly, or in the act of showing forth the Lord’s death, you seek and get communion in spirit with the living Saviour ever present, you enjoy a sublime freedom.

You walk at liberty before God as a dear child, consciously reconciled through the blood of the covenant; you will walk at liberty through life, calling no man master, and not trembling before shifting shadows or rustling leaves; you will walk at liberty through the swelling Jordan, when you approach the border line, and get an abundant entrance into the rest that remaineth.

If the Son make you free, you shall be free indeed; — free from the fear of man; free from the snares of the devil; free from the condemnation for sin; free from the terrors of conscience; free from the sting of death; free from the clog of a mortal body; free from the confusion of a consuming world: freed hy the Lord; free witk the Lord.