The Lord's Supper as the Sign and Meal of the New Covenant

Guy Prentiss Waters, Dane Ortlund, Miles V. Van Pelt

• Editorial: Crossway
• Año: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781433558405
• Categoría: Theology & Religion
• Categoría: Christian Theology

"When he had given thanks, he broke it, and said, 'This is my body, which is for you. Do this in remembrance of me.'"—1Corinthians 11: 24

The Lord's Supper is more than a church tradition or a complex doctrinal controversy—it has practical importance to our daily lives. When Jesus instituted the Supper, it was meant to strengthen the faith of his followers by reminding them of his promises. God has always made promises to his people through covenants, and along with them given signs and meals to point to and confirm his blessings. Looking at the unity of the covenants throughout the Bible, this book will help Christians recover the practical importance of the Lord's Supper as both a sign and a meal of the new covenant blessings God has bestowed on believers in Christ.

1

Covenant Basics

In order to understand something, we have to know what it is. To grasp and appreciate the significance of the Lord’s Supper as a covenant sign and meal, we have to understand what a covenant sign and a covenant meal are. And to understand what a covenant sign and a covenant meal are, we first have to understand what a covenant is. In this chapter, we will take up the question What is a covenant? In the next two chapters, we will take up the related questions What is a covenant sign? and What is a covenant meal?

The Word Covenant?

The word covenant is not often used in modern Western society. We sometimes hear of “covenant neighborhoods” or even “covenant marriage.” For the most part, however, the term covenant is unfamiliar to many people.

In the Old and New Testaments, covenant often appears both as a term and as a concept. The term first appears in the Bible at Genesis 6:18: “But I will establish my covenant [Hebrew, berith] with you, and you shall come into the ark, you, your sons, your wife, and your sons’ wives with you.” It last appears in the Bible at Revelation 11:19: “Then God’s temple in heaven was opened, and the ark of his covenant [Greek, diathēkē] was seen within his temple.”

The term covenant is used in two basic settings in the Bible.1 Sometimes covenants are made between or among human beings. One example, well known to Bible readers, is the covenant that David and Jonathan made with one another in 1 Samuel 23:18. The Bible, moreover, can speak of the marital relationship as a covenant: “The Lord was witness between you and the wife of your youth, to whom you have been faithless, though she is your companion and your wife by covenant” (Mal. 2:14). Covenants in the Bible also appear in political contexts. Sometime after the death of Saul, David entered into a covenant with “all the elders of Israel,” and “they anointed David king over Israel” (2 Sam. 5:3).

The most important covenants in the Bible, however, are the covenants that God made with human beings. I have already mentioned the covenant that God made with Noah (Gen. 6:18). Afterward, God entered into a covenant with Abraham (Gen. 12:1–3; 15:1–21; 17:1–14). Over four hundred years later, God entered into a covenant with Abraham’s descendants (Israel) at Mount Sinai (Ex. 19:1–6). God subsequently made a covenant with David, in which God pledged to “establish the throne of [David’s] kingdom forever” (2 Sam. 7:13). The prophet Jeremiah later spoke of a “new covenant” in which God pledged to “forgive” his people’s “iniquity” and “remember their sin no more” (Jer. 31:34). The New Testament writers tell us that this new covenant came to fulfillment in the person and work of Jesus Christ (see Luke 22:20; 1 Cor. 11:25).

What Is a Covenant?

Covenants, then, course like a river through redemptive history and biblical revelation.2 Their importance to the Bible underscores the question What is a covenant? To answer that question, we may draw three observations. These three observations yield a working definition of the covenants that God made with human beings. Once we have that working definition in place, we will be able to think about how these covenants structure both the history of God’s dealings with humanity and the divinely authored record of that history, the Bible.

First, “covenant” assumes an “existing, elective relationship” between two parties and serves as the “solemn ratification” of that relationship.3 Covenants in the Bible do not create a relationship that did not exist before. They formalize a relationship that is already in place. When God, for example, made a covenant with Abraham, he did so in the context of an existing relationship with Abraham. God had called Abraham to leave Ur of the Chaldees (Genesis 11) before he entered into covenant with him (Genesis 12). Similarly, God was already in relationship with Israel when he entered into covenant with them at Mount Sinai. In each case, God’s covenant provided depth and structure to a relationship that was already in place.

These relationships, furthermore, are elective. God was not obliged to enter into relationship with either Abraham or Israel. It was God’s sovereign and unmerited choice to establish a relationship with the persons with whom he would enter into covenant (see Deut. 7:6–7). God’s covenants with human beings are never a “given,” nor are the relationships that lie back of those covenants.

Second, a covenant involves life-and-death issues.4 Part of the solemnity of a covenant is that it does not traffic in the trivial details of life. Covenants address the most important concerns of human existence. We will see below that God made a covenant with Adam in the garden (Gen. 2:15–17). God held before Adam nothing less than eternal death and eternal life: “but of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil you shall not eat, for in the day that you eat of it you shall surely die” (Gen. 2:17). The death to which Adam and his ordinary descendants are subjected through sin is not only physical or biological death. It is also eternal death (Matt. 25:46).

One of the primary blessings that Abraham enjoyed in covenant with God was justification by faith alone (see Gal. 3:6–9). In his letters, Paul explains that justification is God’s declaration that the sinner is righteous. This declaration is based solely upon the obedience and death of Jesus Christ, imputed to the sinner, and received through faith alone (see Rom. 3:21–26; 4:1–8; 5:12–21). In Christ, the justified sinner has passed from condemnation to vindication. For the person who is justified, the day of judgment will not be a day of divine wrath and the beginning of eternal punishment. It will be for him or her a day of blessing and glory. This divine promise of justification was administered to Abraham and to all his believing offspring in God’s gracious covenant with them in Jesus Christ.

Similarly, the Mosaic covenant set before Israel matters of life and death. Moses, the human mediator of the covenant between God and Israel, ratified the covenant by sprinkling the altar and the people with sacrificial blood (see Ex. 24:1–8). While the Mosaic covenant concerned itself with Israel’s experience in the Land of Promise, its concerns were not exclusively this-worldly. The Mosaic covenant was no less occupied with eternal concerns. The exchange between Jesus and the rich young ruler, for instance, shows us that the Mosaic covenant pointed the way to “eternal life” (see Matt. 19:16–22).5 Jesus, in dying on the cross, “redeemed us from the curse of the law by becoming a curse for us—for it is written, ‘Cursed is everyone who is hanged on a tree’” (Gal. 3:13, citing Deut. 21:23). Jesus’s death, which rescues us from eternal condemnation and wrath (1 Thess. 1:10; 5:9), has redeemed us from that curse to which the laws of the Mosaic covenant testified.

Third, a covenant is a sovereign administration of promises with corresponding obligations.6 God’s covenants are sovereign administrations. That is to say, God comes to human beings and imposes his covena...