“So this day shall be to you a memorial; and you shall keep it as a feast to the LORD throughout your generations. You shall keep it as a feast by an everlasting ordinance” (v. 14).

“So you shall observe the Feast of Unleavened Bread, for on this same day I will have brought your armies out of the land of Egypt. Therefore you shall observe this day throughout your generations as an everlasting ordinance” (v. 17).

“And it shall be, when your children say to you, ‘What do you mean by this service?’ that you shall say, ‘It is the Passover sacrifice of the LORD, who passed over the houses of the children of Israel in Egypt when He struck the Egyptians and delivered our households” (vv. 26-27a).

Notice how God has chosen to act towards His people. Be astonished, even. The Passing Over, the event that Passover commemorates, does not occur until after these instructions (vv. 29-32). What kind of God is this? He establishes a memorial before He has yet done the thing memorialized.

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In the same way, also, Christ, on the night He was to be betrayed, took the bread and the cup, and established a new memorial that signified His death before He died. Christ memorializes the End of all sacrifices before He became the end. The Lord’s Supper: The New Passover.

We worship a God who establishes memorials before He brings all things to pass. Have faith, then.

The church fathers referred to the sacraments as “means of grace”. By this they meant that the sacraments are ways in which God delivers grace to His children, the saved.

This description is most useful because it places the emphasis of the source of grace firmly upon God and not upon some innate magic in the actions of eating bread and wine or being dunked in some body of water. But the danger here is that one could infer from this description that because the sacraments are merely the means of grace it is correct to view them as purely symbolic actions.

And this is true to an extent, but it is true in the same way that it would be appropriate to refer to food as a “means of nourishment”. Think about that for a moment if you will.

The only reason that a man may eat bread or cheese or meat or fruit and receive nourishment from it, is because Jehovah, the Almighty God of Heaven has chosen to bless food with this property. And if in his good pleasure, he should choose to withhold this grace, a man could eat all day and receive no benefit to his body.

It is in this same way that baptism and communion are means of grace. It is not that they are somehow completely different acts from eating, but they are acts of obedience that God has chosen to bless.

And this is comforting. It means that in the same way that food begins to affect us before we eat it, in the same way that we take pleasure in its preparation, in its consumption, and in that feeling of fullness that follows our feasts, so communion and baptism are both physical and spiritual things. The plainness of the bread, the sweetness of the vine, the thoughts and ideas that we associate with these simple elements, and all this contrasted with the knowledge of Christ’s deity and His humanity, his beaten flesh, his bloodied head, and what his crucifixion was accomplishing for us and for the entire world, all of this is part of what we are partaking.

So communion is not ‘merely’ a symbol, except in the sense that all things are symbolic. And communion is a means of grace, in the same way that all the gifts of our Heavenly Father are means of his most tender love for us.

Think of this the next time you break the bread and drink the cup.

As always, feedback is appreciated.

Bell uses this verse as part of his justification for the following statement:

As a Christian, I am free to claim the good, the true, the holy, wherever and whenever I find it. I live with the understanding that truth is bigger than any religion and the world is God’s and everything in it.

This quote is troubling to me, in part because I wonder where Bell is going with it, and in part because I wonder what he uses to determine what is truth. I honestly don’t know the answers to those questions though, as I don’t have the book.

I can tell you what I fear. I fear that because Christianity can be perceived as an incredibly simple thing, because it can be seen as the Bible taught in Sunday school with flannel graph and cookies, or as the Bible taught in the most shallow of churches, or as the “we wear culottes and dresses made of homeliness and our children are taught that 1 + 2 = the Trinity” brand of religion that the world likes to portray and unfortunately does exist; I fear that because it can be perceived this way by the world, Bell is going ahead and taking this as the definition for Christianity and then saying, “There is truth out there outside these walls, there are Buddhists who are wiser than some of these simple Christians. Perhaps we can sit with them, and glean what they know. Perhaps through their perspective we can come to better know our Lord.”

If that is what’s being said, I’d recommend to Jamie that she put the book down and not return to it. It seems to me that regardless of his intentions, and in the end it is his intentions that worry me, Bell is playing games with words.

Christianity is not a man made thing, it is defined by the one whose name it bears, and as a result, there is no truth outside its walls. There are to be sure, people who do not know Jesus Christ, who possess some of his truth, who have come to know some of the Words of God. And if God brings such a one into your life, and if you see some thing you have never seen before and you take it to the revealed Word of God and see that it is true, then thank God humbly for His revelation. But don’t believe that you have traveled outside the walls of Christianity to learn it. Or that you must seek other non-believers to know God better.

We must remember that it is the exception and not the rule for an unbeliever to know the truth of God. Consider what Christ says to them:

I know that ye are Abraham’s seed; but ye seek to kill me, because my word hath no place in you. I speak that which I have seen with my Father: and ye do that which ye have seen with your father. They answered and said unto him, Abraham is our father. Jesus saith unto them, If ye were Abraham’s children, ye would do the works of Abraham. But now ye seek to kill me, a man that hath told you the truth, which I have heard of God: this did not Abraham. Ye do the deeds of your father. Then said they to him, We be not born of fornication; we have one Father, even God. Jesus said unto them, If God were your Father, ye would love me: for I proceeded forth and came from God; neither came I of myself, but he sent me. Why do ye not understand my speech? even because ye cannot hear my word. Ye are of your father the devil, and the lusts of your father ye will do. He was a murderer from the beginning, and abode not in the truth, because there is no truth in him. When he speaketh a lie, he speaketh of his own: for he is a liar, and the father of it. And because I tell you the truth, ye believe me not.
(John 8:37-45)

It is shocking when those whose father is the devil, speak the truth. We should not be surprised that they are deceived, nor that they seek to deceive us as well, for they know not God.

As I said, I don’t know where Bell is going with his arguments. I’ve certainly run into plenty of authors and speakers who make similar cases for the flexibility of truth. If I’ve judged wrong, maybe someone can set me straight.

The word mundane comes from the Latin word mundis, and means of the world or earthly and by implication, it has come to mean boring, banal, and unexciting. And that’s significant, because mundane has another meaning as well, one that backtracks a bit and unwinds itself, a meaning that in some ways, diminishes the borders of the word, and in other ways, sets it up as a ruler over an incredibly populous kingdom. Intrigued? The word mundane means of the world, and before you say, “you just said that”, let me explain that it means of the world in the sense that it does not mean, of heaven.

Mundane is a border word. It is half of a dichotomy. It is a line drawn through the middle of our minds. It is a firmament. It is a kingdom. And like all great kingdoms, it does not allow dual-citizenship. Nor does its counterpart, for Heaven is the other kingdom, the other country that borders the mundane, the demesne whose edges begin where mundanity leaves off. And it is concerning the nature of this border that the lie consists.

You have heard the phrase, “beauty is in the eye of the beholder”, and if you are like me, you have believed it. You have more than likely also believed by implication, that mundanity is in the heart of the partaker. That what one man loves, another hates; what one finds joyous, another finds dull and uninteresting; what one says is glorious, another says that it has no glory in it at all. And while this seems true to our relativistic minds, it is ultimately a lie.

Heaven is like light and the mundane, like darkness, in that just as light does not begin where darkness fails, but quite the other way around, so does Heaven draw out the borders of its kingdom and then gives to mundanity what terrain it has refused. Don’t be fooled though, this doesn’t make the borders of the mundane any less real. Or to be more specific, when we declare what we find to be mundane or heavenly, we are not, as we are tempted to think, changing the borders of those great kingdoms, but we are instead, declaring where it is we dwell.

We see this sort of thinking throughout Scripture, here for instance:

If we say that we have fellowship with him, and walk in darkness, we lie, and do not the truth: But if we walk in the light, as he is in the light, we have fellowship one with another, and the blood of Jesus Christ his Son cleanseth us from all sin. If we say that we have no sin, we deceive ourselves, and the truth is not in us. If we confess our sins, he is faithful and just to forgive us our sins, and to cleanse us from all unrighteousness. If we say that we have not sinned, we make him a liar, and his word is not in us.
(1 John 1:6-10)

And the mundane deception is no different. It is about the misidentification of the earthly with the heavenly. It is calling evil, good and it is what we begin to do when we grow weary in well doing. It is what C. S. Lewis spent so much time writing about. It is, I think, worth thinking about.

And so it is written, The first man Adam was made a living soul; the last Adam was made a quickening spirit. Howbeit that was not first which is spiritual, but that which is natural; and afterward that which is spiritual. The first man is of the earth, earthy: the second man is the Lord from heaven. As is the earthy, such are they also that are earthy: and as is the heavenly, such are they also that are heavenly. And as we have borne the image of the earthy, we shall also bear the image of the heavenly. Now this I say, brethren, that flesh and blood cannot inherit the kingdom of God; neither doth corruption inherit incorruption.
(1 Corinthians 15:45-50)