Spreading the Feast

Instruction and Meditations for Ministry at the Lord's Table

Howard Griffith

• Publisher: P Publishing
• Year: 2015
• Print ISBN: 9781629951768
• eBook ISBN: 9781629951775
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Christian Rituals & Practice

A helpful resource for those who administer communion, especially those who celebrate weekly. Howard Griffith provides a brief theology of communion, sample invitations, and twenty-eight pastoral meditations.

Part One

Foundations

Chapter One

Theology

This is a book about ministry at the Lord’s Table, not a systematic theology. But, of course, everyone has a theology, and the Meditations for the Lord’s Table, offered in part 2, express one too. I need to explain a number of points about the gospel, the sacraments, the covenant, and the Lord’s Supper—points that I assume in what I write below. Since I mean these talks to be practically and pastorally beneficial to many, I have tried not to be too wordy. (I recognize that I raise a number of complex theological points. A full discussion is beyond the scope of this book.9)

I write as a Reformed theologian and pastor, reading Holy Scripture in the line of John Calvin and the Reformed confessional tradition. As John Calvin wrote, “The sacraments take their virtue from the Word, when it is preached intelligibly.”10 That means that I understand the Lord’s Supper as a sign and seal of our faith-union with Jesus Christ.11 Richard B. Gaffin spells out the three aspects of union with Christ in Paul’s writings: predestinarian union (salvation planned in eternity), redemptive-historical union (salvation accomplished by the Son of God, once, for all time, for the entire church, in his death and resurrection), and existential union (salvation applied to the individual, in his own lifetime, by the Holy Spirit). The Meditations here are spoken to those who share this threefold union with Christ—that is, to professing believers. Let me unpack that further.

Gospel

As I understand the apostle Paul, the heart of the gospel is union with the once crucified, now resurrected, Jesus Christ, by faith alone.12 Guilty and helpless in themselves, believers, by God’s gracious action, nevertheless receive what is now Christ’s as the result of his saving death and resurrection. In an important summary statement, Paul wrote, “Because of him you are in Christ Jesus, who became to us wisdom from God, righteousness and sanctification and redemption” (1 Cor. 1:30). It is a rich idea, as well as a beautifully simple one. When we are joined to him by faith, we receive the riches of his saving work.

Paul writes in 1 Corinthians 15:1–4 that at the center of his gospel (the things “of first importance”) is Jesus Christ in his death for our sins and his resurrection on the third day, both as the necessary fulfillment of the Old Testament Scriptures. Jesus Christ and what God accomplished through his ministry, once, for all time, is the basis of salvation. Fulfilling all the promises of the biblical covenants, God established the new covenant in Jesus’ blood. This is the final, superlative, and unsurpassable expression of God’s covenant bond with his people.

Paul’s phrase “for our sins” summarizes our need. Since birth, we have each been guilty of the transgression of God’s law, of rebellion against our rightful Creator and Lord. God’s righteous reaction to our sins is holy wrath. However, our guilt also entails our corruption and aversion of heart to God’s holy person and his standards. Thus, as Paul puts it, we and all of humanity are completely helpless—guilty, enslaved, and perverse in our rebellion against him. Our first father, Adam, willfully put us in this position (see Rom. 5:12–21). However, God is rich in mercy, and on account of his free grace he sent his eternal Son to save us by his death and resurrection.

Whatever we needed—and we needed everything—Jesus Christ accomplished for us in these climactic events. Paul summarizes this by writing that Christ “was delivered up for our trespasses and raised for our justification” (Rom. 4:25). The Father raised him up and exalted him to his right hand in his ascension into heaven. From there Christ bestowed the Holy Spirit on the church, on the day of Pentecost, as his personal representative (Acts 2:32–33). Today the Spirit gives us life by working faith in us and so uniting us to our living head. He indwells and overcomes the resistance of rebels, sweetly drawing them to the Savior.

The term “head” brings into view that Christ is our representative before God.13 As the “second Adam” and the “last Adam,”14 he acted in the place of God’s elect people to meet the twofold demand of the covenant broken in Adam. In our place and for us, in other words, Jesus obeyed his Father in all things and suffered death as our substitute. By this death he turned away God’s righteous wrath. In Jesus’ obedience, God provided an obedience that meets the demands of his law. God provided satisfaction for the righteous demand of his offended justice through Jesus’ suffering and death. God then raised him bodily from the grave on the third day.15

Paul, in his apostolic, God-breathed proclamation, interprets Jesus’ resurrection as his “redemption” from the consequences of our sins. Jesus did not, of course, need to be redeemed himself, since he had no sin (see 2 Cor. 5:21). This is what God accomplished in him for us. Paul uses the ideas of “justification” (e.g., Acts 26:18; Rom. 3:24, 26, 28, 30; 4:2, 5, 25), “adoption” (Rom. 8:15, 23; Gal. 4:5), and “sanctification” (Rom. 6:19, 22; 1 Cor. 1:2, 30; 6:11; Eph. 5:26) to describe the saving benefits that believers receive. These benefits belong to believers because they belong first to Christ as resurrected. Sin, alienation, and death were Christ’s portion, as (and only because) he suffered “for us.” But when God raised him up, he declared Jesus the “Righteous One” (Acts 22:14). In other words, God justified Christ. Unlike us, he was not guilty, and that is what God declared by the action of raising him from death (1 Tim. 3:16).16 He was declared righteous by the act of resurrection.

Likewise, the Father “adopted” Christ, or, in Paul’s words, declared him “Son of God in power” by his resurrection (Rom. 1:3–4). Weakness and suffering had been his experience and his burden as he came into our cursed world to save us. Glory was his as God’s eternal equal. Though he was the eternal Son of God, he took on our weakness when he took our flesh in Mary’s womb. That weakness, and indeed accursedness, reached its nadir in his sufferings on the cross. But God put all that behind his Son when he raised him in power. Weakness, accursedness, and death now have no power over him. Last, though he never committed sin, nor was ever inclined to do so, Jesus came under sin’s domination, or power, in his death. Sin oppressed him like an evil lord. But, again, God delivered him from that power by raising him. Now sin has no power whatsoever over him (see Rom. 6:10).17

That is gospel good news, because when we simply trust in him, we too receive life from the dead—we are justified, adopted, and sanctified. These gifts show that as believers we are united with the resurrected Christ.18 We have received the judicial verdict “righteous” (Christ’s righteousness “counted” as ours). Every sin is forgiven. Likewise, we have been adopted into the Father’s family. And we also have been freed from sin’s power. Every benefit of the grace of God is found in union with the resurrected Christ. Christ is all in all. “The risen, exalted Christ is what he now is, with his benefits in their saving power.”19 God has dealt with our guilt decisively (see Rom. 4:6–8). God has removed the alienation, welcoming us forever as his children (see Gal. 3:26). We know him as our Father. God has given us new power over the remains of sin in this life (see Rom. 6:10–12). We are no longer enslaved to sin.

These riches, to be had by faith in the resurrected Christ, are, with him, the content of the Christian gospel. The Lord’s Supper seals that gospel to our hearts.

Sacraments

“Sacrament” is the word used by the historic church to describe circumcision, the Passover, baptism, and the Lord’s Supper, “signs and seals” of God’s gracious covenant relationship.20 Circumcision and Passover were Old Testament rites, baptism and the Supper the continuing rites of the new covenant. God himself authored, or instituted, sacraments as instruments alongside his Word to communicate his grace to his covenant people.21 In the view of the Protestant churches, “grace” in Scripture is not a “material something” (something “in” us22), but God’s personal and unmerited favor, sovereignly exercised toward the guilty, transforming the whole person.23 “I will have mercy on whom I have mercy, and I will have compassion on whom I have compassion” (Rom. 9:15). By grace, God calls us into union with Christ and, in that union, justifies and sanctifies.24 It is pure gift; therefore, only God can show this saving grace to people, and only he can specify how he will do it. The Bible tells us that he does this by the Word and by sacraments.25

After their fall into sin, amazingly, God did not cease speaking to our first parents, Adam and Eve. Rather, he reversed their new, sinful allegiance to Satan, renewing his relationship with them, and promised them mercy in the redeeming work of Christ (Gen. 3:15). They believed this promise. Thus we have the first instance of saving grace, revealed and effective for sinful people....

Table of contents

• Contents
• List of Meditations
• Introduction
• Part One: Foundations
• Part Two: Meditations at the Lord’s Table
• Bibliography