The Administration of the Ordinances by B. E. CONNERLY

Review and Herald Publishing Association · Takoma Park Station, Washington, D. C. · Mar 7, 1912

The Administration of the Ordinances

By B. E. CONNERLY

B. E. CONNERLY

THAT which will be of greatest spiritual value to the individual members in the celebration of the ordinances is careful preparation. We must study often and well the scriptures bearing on this subject; for we are warned against partaking of these emblems of our Lord’s broken body and shed blood in an unworthy manner. We are ever to remember that it is the Lord’s table, and that we do this in remembrance of him.

At these successive feasts we are to gain a deeper and ever deeper experience in the things that pertain to God and eternal life. At these consecrated seasons for thanksgiving there may be a query on the part of some as to who is worthy and who is not worthy to sit at the Lord’s table. Let all understand that no one, not even elders or deacons, has the power or should exercise the prerogative of discriminating between clean and unclean. Our Lord served a traitor, and in our churches all are served who desire to partake, unless in the case of open sin which should be publicly rebuked. “But let a man examine himself.” Thus the responsibility of the blessing or the curse rests on the individual communicants.

The house of worship and all auxiliaries should be made ready on time. All social differences should be amicably settled, all unpleasant domestic concerns properly adjusted; then, in joyful anticipation, we may await the hour when we shall participate in the ordinance that so vividly commemorates the great price paid for our ransom from the thralldom of sin.

The basic idea in the Lord’s Supper is that Christ at Calvary completed that oath-bound covenant with the Father by the sacrifice of himself to restore a lost world to its Edenic perfection. Sacrament means a sacred vow or oath, and it has been the custom since time immemorial to conclude engagements, treaties, or oaths with a feast. It was so in the case of Isaac and Abimelech, Laban and Jacob, and when Samuel anointed Saul king over Israel.

How fitting it is that at this season we renew our covenant with Christ! Faith is strengthened, hope is revived, and in imagination we are carried back to that “large upper room,” and surround the festive board, and hear the gracious words that fall from his lips. We get a new glimpse of our salvation. Amid this scene we bow and reverently renew our baptismal vow that Calvary’s unresisting Victim shall not have died in vain, that his blood shall be our sacrifice.

But what are these emblems, so simple in appearance yet with so mighty a significance? What is this wheaten loaf and this fragrant cup that point so forcibly to our Lord’s humility? And what is the meaning of such a sacrament that even the saints must wash one another’s feet ere they may sup at this lordly feast? Do not mistake here. A traitor has deceived the world. This bread and wine possess no merit, no efficacy in themselves. Nothing in all the realm of nature could so well represent our Saviour’s spotless life. They are his own chosen emblems of that mighty expiatory act, the scenes of Calvary, and are the most fitting symbols of that great triumph that he is to celebrate when he comes again as King of kings and Lord of lords.

It was the fourth and last Passover supper during our Lord’s ministry. The disciples had prepared for the occasion. The Lord desired to spend the few remaining hours in quiet together with his loved ones. Events of momentous importance were about to take place. Here the Son of God as man’s representative stands at the crucial point of transition between two great dispensations. The Saviour presents himself a final offering for sin, and forever causes to cease that crimson stream of sacrificial blood which had stained the altars of the patriarchs since the days when our first parents had, in sorrow at the barred entrance of their lost Eden home, offered their sacrifices which prefigured his death.

These holy convocations are for the benefit of all the congregation. One might be excused for absence from Sabbath-school or the weekly discourse, but what excuse could be presented for failure to participate with the brethren at the Lord’s table?

Another thought to bear in mind at these seasons is that Jesus said, “The hand of him that betrayeth me is with me on the table,” and the perfidious act of Judas is typical of that greater betrayal by an apostate church. We believe that church elders should occasionally rehearse to their congregations the manner in which the Papacy has prostituted the sacrament. It was in the second century that the church began to look upon the emblems of our Lord’s suffering as possessing intrinsic merit. Later, as the apostasy developed, the people began to look with a degree of reverence and awe upon the little loaf and the contents of the cup, and to believe that these agents possessed efficacy in themselves for the putting away of sin. It required only the superstition of the dark ages to complete that mysterious “transubstantiation” that taught the people to see in the simple elements of bread and wine the real body and blood of Christ. Contemporaneous with these acts, Rome changed the inexpensive communion table for a jeweler, the unleavened cake for the host, the simple earthen cup for a golden chalice, the plate for the revered monstrance, the simple garment for the silken robes of the tonsured priest—in fact, exchanged the simple yet solemn service of the Lord’s Supper for the idolatrous “sacrifice of the mass.”

Thus the betrayal is complete. “They crucify to themselves the Son of God afresh, and put him to an open shame.” The agonizing scenes of Golgotha are eclipsed by the idolatrous eucharistic procession. That vicarious Sufferer spilled his blood in vain if the elevated “host” is efficacious for the sins of both the living and the dead.

That the sacrifice of the mass is wholly expiatory has long been fundamental with the Romanists, and on this hypothesis all other dogmas rest. The idolatry of paganism never attained such alarming proportions. No pagan priest could have been persuaded to hold a little wafer aloft, and then declare it able to atone for sin; much less could he have been made to believe that by uttering a few Latin words over this same insignificant wafer, it could be changed into the body of Christ, and then to offer it as a sacrifice for the sins of the world in place of the true sacrifice.

When our people are fully informed of the “depths of Satan” in leading this apostasy of the last days, in perverting this ordinance into the most shocking idolatry the world has ever known, they will readily see how necessary it is that we as reformers raise it again to its proper place in the church.