Sacraments are visible signs and seals of God’s sovereignly established covenant relationship with His people. The Lord appointed certain visible signs to indicate essential truths about His covenants with man. In the covenant of works, as in the covenant of grace, there are visible signs that may be considered sacraments (e.g., the tree of life and the rainbow). The promises of the covenant of grace are the same under each of the major outward administrations of the covenant of grace, the old covenant and the new covenant. Therefore, although there are different sacraments under the old and new covenants because each is a different outward administration of the covenant of grace, the two sacraments under each of those covenantal administrations signify and seal the same promises of God. Under the old covenant, the two sacraments were circumcision and the Passover. In the new covenant, baptism and the Lord’s Supper are the only two sacraments instituted. Each of these sacraments serves as a tangible sign of the same reality of redemption through the shed blood of Christ and the sealing of the Holy Spirit. The Protestant and Reformed understanding of the sacraments differs from the teaching of the Roman Catholic Church on the number and nature of the sacraments.
The word sacrament comes from the Latin sacramentum, which conveys the idea of consecration. Francis Turretin noted the difficulty of explaining the meaning of the word: “Although it cannot be perfectly defined . . . By many it is said to be ‘a sign of a sacred thing,’ as Augustine, who says, ‘Signs, when they pertain to sacred things, are called sacraments’ . . . The definition of the Scholastics is: ‘A sacrament is the visible form of invisible grace.’”
When Scripture refers to the sacrament of circumcision, it refers to it as a sign and a seal of God’s promise of redemption (Rom. 4:11). Working back from this biblical description, Reformed theologians have concluded that all sacraments in redemptive history are signs and seals of God’s covenantal promises to His people in the various covenantal arrangements belonging to the progress of revelation. A sign points beyond itself to the nature of what is promised in the covenantal arrangement. A seal authenticates and confirms the promise by attesting to the authority of the one making the promises in the covenantal arrangement.
The Westminster Confession of Faith provides a definition of a sacrament in the new covenant administration of the covenant of grace:
Sacraments are holy signs and seals of the covenant of grace, immediately instituted by God, to represent Christ and His benefits, and to confirm our interest in Him: as also to put a visible difference between those that belong unto the church, and the rest of the world; and solemnly to engage them to the service of God in Christ, according to His Word. (WCF 27.1)
In the garden, God condescended to enter into the covenant of works with Adam. He stipulated, signified, and sealed the promise of life by setting apart the tree of the knowledge of good and evil and the tree of life. Many people have considered the tree of life to be a sacrament, including John Calvin, who wrote that “the tree of life was for [Adam] a sacrament, just as baptism and the Supper are for us.”1
In the progressive unfolding of the covenant of grace, God gave numerous sacraments. Under the Noahic covenant, the Lord set the rainbow apart as a sacrament to signify and seal His promise of mercy. The presence of the rainbow signifies the mercy of God. The sign of the Abrahamic covenant was circumcision. Having noted the significance of circumcision as a sign and seal of God’s promise of redemption in Christ (Rom. 4:11), Paul calls Christ’s death on the cross a circumcision and refers to the regeneration of believers as circumcision of the heart (Col. 2:11). The sacrament of circumcision carries over from the Abrahamic covenant to function as a sacrament in the Mosaic covenant, also called the old covenant. The Lord also instituted the Passover as a sacrament of the Mosaic covenant, as it was a sign of the promise that God would remove His judgment from His people based on the blood of the sacrificial lamb. The Apostle Paul notes that the Passover was typical of Christ when he says, “Christ our Passover was sacrificed for us” (1 Cor. 5:7).
In the new covenant, baptism and the Lord’s Supper fulfill and replace circumcision and the Passover. Circumcision and Passover were bloody in nature because they were signifying the bloodshed to come. Baptism and the Lord’s Supper are not bloody in nature because the blood of Christ has been shed. Nevertheless, all these sacraments point to the person and work of Christ and seal God’s promises to His people.
Since the sacraments point to redemption in Christ, there is a dual promise of curse and blessing in them. If someone failed to keep God’s covenant in the Old Testament, he would be “cut off” from the Lord and His people. The bloody cutting away of the flesh in circumcision signified the threat of being cut off from God as well as the promise of having the filth of our sinful hearts cut away. Similarly, the Apostle Paul referred to the Red Sea crossing as baptism (1 Cor. 10:1–2), helping us to understand that it signifies the principle of judgment through salvation, for the Egyptians were judged and drowned by the waters even as the Israelites passed through them safely. As Jesus took the judgment of His people in His own body on the tree, He could preemptively describe His death as a baptism (Luke 12:50).
Although the Roman Catholic Church maintains that there are seven sacraments for the new covenant church, Protestant and Reformed theologians have insisted that Scripture teaches only two sacraments in the new covenant era, baptism and the Lord’s Supper. The Protestant Reformers understood that a proper administration of these two sacraments is one of the three marks of a true church. Reformed theologians also distinguish their teaching about the sacraments from a Roman Catholic view of them since they reject Rome’s insistence on an ex opere operato (i.e., by the working of the work) functioning of the sacrament wherein the sacraments convey grace as long as one does not consciously resist them. Rather, Reformed theology teaches that the exercise of personal faith in Christ is necessary in the right use of the sacraments. Additionally, the Reformed insist, contra Rome, that the sacraments can never rightly function apart from the Word of God and that they are dependent on the preaching of the Word for their efficacy. For the Reformed, Word and sacrament always belong together in worship.
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John Calvin, Sermons on Genesis: Chapters 1–11, 339. ↩
When we speak of the sacraments, we are usually referring specifically to baptism and the Lord’s Supper, those signs and seals instituted by Christ to remember His death and His work in cleansing His people from sin. But theologians also use terms such as sacrament or sacramental in a broader sense. Such terms can be applied to many ways in which God has communicated to His people through object lessons, through signs or ordinary symbols that take on extraordinary meaning. For example, we have the rainbow, which was the sign given to Noah that the Lord would never destroy the earth again with a flood. He used that common, natural phenomenon of the rainbow as a sign of an uncommon, special, divine promise of His persevering and preserving providence. Now, every time we see a rainbow, we are involved in the sacramental life of the faith, not in the technical sense of sacraments, but rather in the sense of the broader meaning of external objects that are used to enhance and support the communication of the verbal promises of God. Old covenant believers also had circumcision as a visible reminder that they had been cut out of the world to be the Lord's holy people. . . . Perhaps the preeminent sacramental celebration under the old covenant was the Passover, the meal that was eaten to commemorate God’s deliverance of the Israelites from Egyptian slavery. Here we see the sign joined to the Word of God, as is to be the case whenever a God-ordained sacrament is celebrated. As the meal was being eaten, the families in Israel were to retell the story of the exodus, to recount the divinely sent plagues and God’s message to Israel through Moses that were part and parcel of the liberation from Egypt.
R.C. Sproul
Tabletalk magazine
Throughout history, God has confirmed His covenant promises by sacraments, material signs pointing to the reality of His promises. As signs, they are appropriate to the realities they represent. The sacraments are, first, signs for God—of what He does rather than what we do. Thus, in the Noahic covenant He announces, "When I bring clouds over the earth and the bow is seen in the clouds, I will remember my covenant" (Gen. 9:14–15). The Noahic sacrament, the rainbow, is a sign first for God and points us to His action. This is true for the sacrament of the tree of life in the garden of Eden and in its eschatological (end-times, ultimate) fulfillment (Gen. 2:9; 3:22–24; Rev. 22:2, 18–19); for the Passover, which commemorated deliverance from Egypt; for circumcision, which pointed to the new heart to be given in Christ; and, by extension, for the sacraments of the new covenant.
Robert Letham
Tabletalk magazine
