Redeemed for What?

I was reading the Exodus story in the past couple days, and was struck by a few things that I want to share here.

The story of the deliverance of Israel from Pharaoh is a type for the deliverance of the Church from sin and death.  God comes to redeem His people, his chosen ones, and to bring them into a land flowing with milk and honey.  But as we read Exodus, we find that God early on gives a specific purpose for Israel to leave Egypt.

Afterward Moses and Aaron went and said to Pharaoh, “Thus says the LORD, the God of Israel, ‘Let my people go, that they may hold a feast to me in the wilderness.’” But Pharaoh said, “Who is the LORD, that I should obey his voice and let Israel go? I do not know the LORD, and moreover, I will not let Israel go.” Then they said, “The God of the Hebrews has met with us. Please let us go a three days’ journey into the wilderness that we may sacrifice to to the LORD our God, lest he fall upon us with pestilence or with the sword.”

~Exodus 5:1-3

There are a couple times before Israel’s final deliverance that Moses and Aaron make this less drastic request of Pharaoh.  And of course, as God had told Moses He would, He hardened Pharaoh’s heart against this request.  But I want to point out that there is a particular purpose in the request itself.  YHWH tells Pharaoh to let Israel go in order that they might hold a feast to Him.

Now, as we continue reading through the Pentateuch we find that a feast has a specific purpose.  It is not just a grand ol’ time where the people of God gorge themselves and get drunk like the pagans at their feasts.  Rather, it is a solemn occasion of remembrance.  Yes, the feasts are joyous celebrations, but they are held for one purpose: worship of the One True God.  So essentially, God is telling Pharaoh to let Israel go out into the wilderness to worship, and the means by which they are to worship is the feast.

When Moses restates YHWH’s demand, he makes this even clearer.  Now  rather than call it merely a feast, he says that they must go to sacrifice to YHWH.  The feast and the sacrifice are inextricably linked.

In the same way, God has redeemed us from the power of sin and death . . . for what?  To worship.  It is the expressly given purpose of our deliverance.  It is the chief goal of man’s existence, which we can only fulfill in Christ.  And when we gather as the Church to worship, we offer the sacrifice of our songs and praises, our acclamations, and of our very selves.  And we partake in a feast to the LORD our God, which Christ gave us at his last supper before going to the cross.

There is another interesting point we can glean from the various encounters with Pharaoh.  Initially, the demand is simply that he let God’s chosen people go out into the wilderness for three days to observe the feast and the sacrifice.  But we know, of course, that Pharaoh will not comply with these demands.  Not until his nation has been destroyed by plagues and he himself lies drowned in the Red Sea.  At that point the deliverance promised by God to Israel is complete.  It is not only for a short time that He delivers Israel to observe the feast, but it is a permanent deliverance.

Just so, when God commands us to worship, we cannot do so until He has ultimately delivered us.  There is no going to worship God and then returning to Egypt.  That is an impossibility.  Sin and death as principalities are cruel and unyielding masters that will not allow us to leave for a time, worship God and then return to them.  In order to engage in true worship, we must be freed in a permanent and ultimate way with no thought of going back to the place from which we came.

I think there is some significance to the three days journey into the wilderness even though the journey never happened as first asked of Pharaoh.  It is perhaps enough that Moses stated the three days as the original demand.  Israel must go into the wilderness for three days to make sacrifice.  Christ as the ultimate representative of Israel is the final fulfillment of this.  For on behalf of His chosen people, after instituting the feast of the Lord’s Supper He journeyed into the wilderness of death for three days, Himself being the final sacrifice to atone for sin.

There is one more thing I want to bring out from this part of the Exodus story.  Sometimes Pharaoh seems to be on the verge of complying with the demand of YHWH, but he always seems to put limits on his obedience.  At one point, Pharaoh even tells Moses that he will let the people go . . . but there’s a catch:

Then Pharaoh’s servants said to him, “How long shall this man be a snare to us? Let the men go, that they may serve the LORD their God. Do you not yet understand that Egypt is ruined?” So Moses and Aaron were brought back to Pharaoh. And he said to them, “Go, serve the LORD your God. But which ones are to go?” Moses said, “We will go with our young and our old. We will go with our sons and daughters and with our flocks and herds, for we must hold a feast to the LORD.”

But he said to them, “The LORD be with you, if ever I let you and your little ones go! Look, you have some evil purpose in mind. No! Go, the men among you, and serve the LORD, for that is what you are asking.” And they were driven out from Pharaoh’s presence.

~Exodus 10:7-11

Pharaoh will allow Israel to go . . . but only the men.  It is as if Pharaoh says, “Isn’t that enough?  Your covenant heads may go and worship and sacrifice.  The children need not.”

No doubt some will point out that he simply wished to keep the children behind as a guarantee that his slaves would actually return.  And as far as Pharaoh is concerned this is probably true.  But I think there is more than just that going on here.  Moses will not concede these limits put on God’s demands, and he gives the reason.  The whole family unit must be allowed to go.  The men, the young and old, their sons and daughters must go . . . why?  For we must hold a feast to the LORD.

What does this tell us about how God regards the children of believers in relation to worship?  Simply this: they must be included in the worship of God’s people, and in the feast.  It is not right for the parents to worship and leave the children aside.  God wants even the little ones to observe the feast and the sacrifice.  The old and young, our sons and daughters alike must be taught to worship.  It is for this reason that He redeems the little ones as much as the men (the covenant heads) from sin and death, just as He would not accept that Israel’s little ones should be left in the hands of Pharaoh.

Anamnesis: “Make Present,” or just “Remember”?

There are basically two ways of translating “anamnesis,” which is the word Christ uses in the institution of the Lord’s Supper when he says “do this in remembrance of me,” or “do this as my memorial.”

They mean basically the same thing, but the emphasis is different.  In any case, tied to the word anamnesis is the issue of remembering.  In a Eucharistic or Old Testament sacrificial context, it is the remembering of what God has done for his people and offering of oneself to him in return.  It is thanksgiving.

But what does it mean to remember?  Is remembrance a mere cognitive exercise, or is there something more to it?  Of course today, when we use the word, we generally mean simply to bring a past event to mind.  But is this a Biblical view of remembrance?

In his milestone work, The Shape of the Liturgy, Dom Gregory Dix modified the Roman Catholic suggestion of re-sacrifice¹ in the Eucharist to something a little less offensive to the Biblical mind.  Or much less so.  He defines remembrance as the act of making present.²

According to Dix, when the church remembers the sacrifice of Christ in the Eucharist, they are recalling it not only to mind, but also to present effect.  Remembrance brings the effects of a past event to bear on the present.  It identifies one directly with those people for whom that past event was a present reality.

Of course, since the popularization of this view, Roman Catholics have been using it to stump their Protestant friends who accuse them of viewing the Eucharist as a re-sacrifice.  “Why, no we don’t!  We believe it is simply a making present of the past sacrifice.”

Well, yeah, that’s true as far as it goes, but that’s only because they changed their tune.  Of course, they still believe it means to make physically present . . . though not locally, and that is where we go down the rabbit trail of medieval categories.

But aside from the dissonance, what about the basic melody of this new tune?  Is it any more pleasant than the last?  Let’s take a look.

First there is the language of how God himself remembers.

Genesis 9:15
I will remember my covenant that is between me and you and every living creature of all flesh. And the waters shall never again become a flood to destroy all flesh.

Exodus 2:24
And God heard their groaning, and God remembered his covenant with Abraham, with Isaac, and with Jacob.

There are many other similar examples.  And there is one interesting example that seems to have a very strong relation to God’s presence.

Numbers 10:9
And when you go to war in your land against the adversary who oppresses you, then you shall sound an alarm with the trumpets, that you may be remembered before the LORD your God, and you shall be saved from your enemies.

We should realize by now that Biblically speaking, remembrance is more than a cognitive recollection.  God certainly does not need to be cognitively reminded of his people or covenants.  He knows all, and he does not forget.  We should also note that when God remembers, it is always a catalyst to action.  The remembrance and the resulting action are so inseparable as to be one and the same.

So what about human remembrance?  How does God command us to remember?

Deuteronomy 15:15
You shall remember that you were a slave in the land of Egypt, and the LORD your God redeemed you; therefore I command you this today.

Was this command for that generation of the Exodus only?  This is after the forty years wandering in the wilderness.  An entire generation perished because of unbelief.  Most of those to whom Deuteronomy was given never saw slavery in Egypt.  How can they then rightly remember that God delivered them?  This is a question made all the more stark when we consider that the memorial sacrifices and feasts were to be observed by Israel continually.  Was the celebration of Passover by succeeding generations a mere cognitive exercise or was it an act of identification with God’s deliverance?

I read this passage a couple weeks ago, and found it quite interesting.  Pay attention especially to the pronouns.

Deuteronomy 26:3-10
“And you shall go to the priest who is in office at that time and say to him, ‘I declare today to the LORD your God that I have come into the land that the LORD swore to our fathers to give us.’ Then the priest shall take the basket from your hand and set it down before the altar of the LORD your God.

“And you shall make response before the LORD your God, ‘a wandering Aramean was my father. And he went down into Egypt and sojourned there, few in number, and there he became a nation, great, mighty, and populous. And the Egyptians treated us harshly and humiliated us and laid on us hard labor. Then we cried to the LORD, the God of our fathers, and the LORD heard our voice and saw our affliction, our toil, and our oppression. And the LORD brought us out of Egypt with a mighty hand and an outstretched arm, with great deeds of terror, with signs and wonders. And he brought us into this place and gave us this land, a land flowing with milk and honey. And behold, now I bring the first of the fruit of the ground, which you, O LORD, have given me.’

Notice how the perspective shifts in the act of remembrance.  The one offering thanksgiving here moves from a sort of separation between himself and his fathers to the point where speaks of himself and his fathers as one identity.  “A wandering Aramean was my father . . . he went down into Egypt” becomes “the Egyptians treated us harshly . . . the LORD brought us out of Egypt with a mighty hand . . . and gave us this land.”

See how the identity of Israel as a people converge into one identity.  What God did for the fathers he did for the one who offers thanksgiving.  The suffering of the fathers is to be remembered as the suffering of the one who makes sacrifice, so that the deliverance of God might be known for all generations.

How does this apply to us?  Well, if Abraham is our father, we must do the same.  The deliverance of Israel we must recognize as our own.  The word of the prophets called us to repentance.  And finally, Jesus died and rose again for us.  When we celebrate the Lord’s Supper, we make present that reality in the sense that we identify ourselves with the sacrifice of Christ.  In remembrance, the Holy Spirit really (spiritual realities are real no less than the physical) applies to us the effects of the sacrifice.

Benjamin Warfield, in speaking of the Lord’s Supper, wrote this:

Assuredly, for example, the sacrificial feast is not a repetition of the sacrifice; and equally certainly it is something more than a mere commemoration of the sacrifice: it is specifically a part of the sacrifice, and more particularly this part—the application of it. . . . Precisely what our Lord did therefore . . . he, the true Passover, the Lamb of God, that takes away the sin of the world—was to establish a perpetual sacrificial feast, under universal forms, capable of observation everywhere and at all times . . . All who partake of this bread and wine, the appointed symbols of his body and blood, therefore, are symbolically partaking of the victim offered on the altar of the cross, and are by this act professing themselves offerers of the sacrifice and seeking to become beneficiaries of it. That is the fundamental significance of the Lord’s Supper.  Whenever the Lord’s Supper is spread before us we are invited to take our place at the sacrificial feast, the substance of which is the flesh and blood of the victim which has been sacrificed once for all at Calvary . . . ³

So then, with Dix, we might affirm that remembrance is indeed a making present to us the reality of Christ’s one sacrifice, and with Warfield, who it appears would agree with that, we say that it is the application of the sacrifice to the one who partakes.

Anamnesis, then, is the recollection to us the realities of the past in such a way that they may no longer be thought of to be a mere past reality brought to mind, but a present one as well.

There are more things to look at in this.  For instance, how our celebration of the Supper brings us to God’s remembrance, and so into his presence.  I don’t want anyone to think I overlooked that.  Dix deals with this at length, and to properly address Dix, we have to consider that sense of the word.  But this is enough for one post.  I’ll probably look at this again.

Names and Roman Weddings

“Ubi tu Caius, ego Caia.”
“Wherever thou art Caius, there I am Caia.”

I first came upon this phrase when reading Quo Vadis, and thought it was the sweetest thing ever.  After having given it some thought, I like it even more.  These are the words that were spoken by a Roman bride at her wedding, probably in response to the groom’s question, “What is your name?”

After the bride’s response, the groom would then (ideally) sweep her off her feet and carry her across the threshold into his home.

I think the phrase is pretty much the most succinct and, at the same time, possibly the most romantic one I have ever heard or read of in a wedding.  But there are specific reasons I find it so, which transcend mere sentimentality.  Those Romans were not much for bandying about words.  Not like the Greeks, in any case.  The less said the better, if it got the point across.  And these words are loaded.

We are all familiar with the traditional wedding vows, and the Roman one is much like them.  One might even find that our modern form originates here in part.  In this phrase, the bride vows to go and to be wherever her husband is, whenever he is.  Eternity is implied.  The phrase encapsulates the marriage vow (at least the bride’s side of it) into five words in the Latin.

It is also a symbolic renaming.  The bride declares that she is taking the name of her groom.  In this case, not literally.  There were dudes not named “Caius” who got married in Rome.  The name Caius/Caia (or Gaius/Gaia) means happiness and rejoicing.  An appropriate description of a wedding, intended to portend the fortunes of the new couple.

But no matter the given names of the couple, the symbolism remains.  The bride declares that she will henceforth be identified with her husband, as she has been identified with her father until this point.  In fact, by using the name Caius/Caia, she pledges not only her physical presence but her heart and her emotions as well.  Wherever he rejoices, there she also will find her joy.

To a Christian, what does this mean?  Can we possibly learn anything from the pagan Romans?  Sure, why not?  In the same way that the bride pledges her life to her groom and takes his name upon herself, we also have pledged our lives to Christ and taken His name.

The Church is the Bride of Christ, and every one of the baptized community is a member.  From the point of our entrance into that body to now, and until Christ returns, we should ever be saying:  “Wherever thou art Christ, there I am Christian.”

In fact, we do something like this every week before we come to the Lord’s table, our earthly foretaste of the Lamb’s marriage supper.  When the officiant asks the congregation: “Christian, in whom do you believe?” we respond, “I believe in one God the Father Almighty . . . And in one Lord Jesus Christ . . . And in the Holy Spirit.”

“In whom do you believe?” is a question very much like “What is your name?”  For we become identified with that in which we believe.  Our Credo is an affirmation of our baptism into the name of the Triune God.  And having confessed Christ and having declared our identity in Him as a body, we are then welcomed to the wedding feast at His table.

Regulative Principle and Weekly Communion, with some thoughts on the Calendar

There are many good and Biblical reasons for Christians to gather at the Lord’s Table in Communion to celebrate Eucharist every week.  But for this post I just want to focus on the reasons for doing so based on the Reformed Regulative Principle of worship.  In particular, I want to use a common objection to the Church Calendar and reapply it to the issue of the regular celebration of the Eucharist.

A great deal of emphasis in discussion of Regulative Principle is placed on what is not commanded for worship, and the prohibition of those things.  But I think we often overlook what is commanded when we look at the subject of Lord’s Day worship.

In regards to the Sabbath law of the fourth commandment, the Reformers were particularly concerned that any day might become more important than the Sabbath rest.  This is a legitimate concern in some ways, especially regarding discussions of the Church Calendar.  How many nominal Christians go to worship only on Easter and Christmas?  Or, even if they regularly attend, how many become more fervent at those times of year than at others?

Is Pascha or Christmas inherently any more holy of a day than a Lord’s Day in the middle of “ordinary time”?  I would argue not, and I’ll probably want to address my reasoning for that at a later date.

But in looking into those questions, another thing struck me.  If we want to take care not to elevate any day over the Sabbath, or even one Sabbath day over another, then what does this say for the widespread tradition of celebrating communion only monthly, or in some cases, even quarterly or annually?  Does this not elevate those Sabbaths above all others?  Have you ever seen in a church service bulletin the reminder: Next week is communion Sunday.  Please prepare your heart during the week and make certain to attend.

Even if the intent is not to elevate those days above others, doesn’t this lend itself to the idea that those days are more holy (set apart) than other Sabbaths?

My intent is not to condemn those who do not celebrate communion weekly as “Sabbath breakers.”  We all fall short in many ways, and we all must serve and worship God to the best of our understanding.  I only want to suggest that perhaps . . . just perhaps the Regulative Principle of worship that so many Reformed Christians hold to, if followed consistently, requires that the Lord’s Supper be celebrated every week in order to maintain equality of holiness from each Lord’s Day to the next.

Furthermore, I believe that if communion were viewed as indispensable and central to each worship service, a great part of the tendency some feel to inappropriately elevate Church Calendar days would simply evaporate.  Because every Lord’s Day would be holy to the Lord, a day in which we meet Christ in His Word and dine with Him at His table.

I’ll conclude with this quote from the Westminster Confession of Faith:

Chapter XXI.V
The reading of the Scriptures with godly fear, the sound preaching and conscionable hearing of the Word, in obedience unto God, with understanding, faith and reverence, singing of psalms with grace in the heart; as also, the due administration and worthy receiving of the sacraments instituted by Christ, are all parts of the ordinary religious worship of God: beside religious oaths, vows, solemn fastings, and thanksgivings upon special occasions, which are, in their several times and seasons, to be used in an holy and religious manner.

Note those practices that are “ordinary religious worship” as distinct from those that are “beside.”  To use my earlier definition of the word “ordinary,” I would say that the practices listed as such—reading of Scripture, preaching, hearing of the Word, singing of psalms, and due administration of sacraments—are to be regular weekly occurrences in the worship of each Lord’s Day.