What Is a Sacrament?

Throughout church history, there have been perhaps few issues that have led to as many disputes as the sacraments. We’ve seen debates over how many sacraments there are, how these sacraments operate, how they are to be performed, who is to receive them, and so on. There has been much confusion and conflict. Although we can’t go into minute detail here about all the technical theological points involved with the sacraments, we can look at some of the basic principles.

We understand that the life and worship of the church involve what we call Word and sacrament. Our churches—Protestant churches, particularly—have emphasized the preaching of the Word, whereas churches in the Middle Ages tended to feature the celebration of the Lord’s Supper; this is why the centerpiece of church architecture was the altar. Many Protestant churches instead made the pulpit the point of focus, emphasizing preaching rather than sacraments. Sometimes we tend to overreact in one direction or the other. But from the days of the Old Testament all the way through the New Testament, God has been concerned not only to speak to His people through His Word but also to communicate in other ways, including through the sacraments.

The English word sacrament comes from the Latin sacramentum, which is a translation of the Greek word mystērion. Our English Bibles translate the Greek as “mystery.” Historically, the church saw that something mysterious was involved in the liturgy of the church and in the giving of sacraments. So right from the start, we find a bit of difficulty as we try to define what a sacrament is. But in its most rudimentary form, the idea of the sacrament involves an experience of something that is sacred—something that we regard as extraordinary or uncommon, something with a special meaning or significance attached to it.

Theologians sometimes use the word sacrament in a narrow sense and sometimes in a broad sense. In the narrow sense, the term means the specific rites or ordinances that are observed in the church, which we call sacraments. In the broader sense, it refers to the many ways that God communicates to His people through object lessons, signs, or ordinary symbols that take on extraordinary meaning.

For example, early in the Old Testament, we have the record of the great deluge, the flood of Noah that destroyed the world. We know that after Noah and his family survived, God promised them that He would never again destroy the world by a flood. We are told that as a sign or symbol of God’s abiding promise to that end, God set His rainbow in the sky. He used the common, natural phenomenon of the rainbow as a sign of an uncommon, special, divine promise of His persevering and preserving providence. So every time we see a rainbow, we are involved in the sacramental life of the faith—not in the narrow, technical sense of sacraments but rather in the broader sense of external objects that are used to enhance and support the communication of the verbal promises of God.

In the Old Testament, God ordained several rites as sureties of His promise. For instance, He gave Israel the sign of circumcision, which had symbolic meaning to the people (see Gen. 17). He made a covenant with Abraham in which, in a dream, God Himself appeared in a theophany (a visible manifestation of God) as a torch moving between the torn pieces of animals that God had instructed Abraham to cut in half (see Gen. 15). God was essentially saying, “I’m demonstrating the certainty of the promise of My word.” God’s verbal promise was upheld by the non-verbal visible sign that accompanies it. The Old Testament prophets frequently used object lessons, dramatizing the word of God with a visual apparatus or sign, such as a plumb line (Amos 7) or a broken jar (Jer. 19). The idea here is taking something that is common and ordinary and using it for extraordinary, uncommon ways of giving testimony to the truth of God.

Anthropologists have studied the religious behavior of people around the world, not only in Christian environments but also in other environments such as Jewish, Hindu, Shinto, Confucian, and Muslim. They have found that all people groups that engage in religious practices, no matter what religion they’re committed to, have some concept of sacrament, or at least some concept of what we call sacred space or sacred time. Again, we find examples in the pages of the Old Testament. When Noah landed safely after the flood, what did he do? He marked the spot; he built an altar (see Gen. 8). After Jacob had his midnight dream at Bethel, he took the rock on which he had rested during the night, anointed it with oil, and named that place the House of God, because there God had appeared to him (see Gen. 28). We think, for example, of Moses’ encounter with God in the burning bush in the Midianite wilderness. God commanded Moses: “Moses, Moses! . . . Take your sandals off your feet, for the place on which you are standing is holy ground” (Ex. 3:4–5). Holy ground is ground that is now uncommon, extraordinary, filled with meaning and significance, because there an intersection took place between the divine and the human, between the Creator and the creature. God met with Moses on that spot, and so that spot became holy ground. That’s what we mean by sacred space.

My wife and I and our children and their spouses once took a trip to England, where we visited Stonehenge. To this day, nobody knows for sure how those big rocks got there and what their use was. Was it a religious thing? An astronomical thing? Experts still debate it, but the consensus is that Stonehenge was associated with religion and that it became a sacred site, a sacred place. Some of us have visited Jerusalem, a city that we call the Holy City. We sing a song, “I walked today where Jesus walked.” There is something uncanny, almost eerie about visiting those places in this world where there was the meeting between heaven and earth. We have a sense of awe as we walk over the stones of the road to Emmaus or on the Via Dolorosa where Jesus walked to His crucifixion.

Now, the Bible doesn’t authorize any sacralization of those stones or those streets. But that’s part of our common response as human beings. When you were a child and you were distressed for some reason or another, perhaps you had a favorite place that you went for solace or for comfort, a place you sought when you wanted to be alone—in a tree house or in a closet or in your bedroom—someplace that had special significance to you. Part of our human experience is taking that which is ordinary and imbuing it with special significance because of its association with something transcendent, something supremely important.

We see that human practice developing throughout the pages of Scripture. For instance, there is the Old Testament celebration of the Passover. The Passover was a key redemptive-historical event in the life of Israel, when God, in liberating His people from slavery in Egypt, caused His judgment to fall on Pharaoh and the Egyptians, so that God slew the firstborn son of every Egyptian family, including the son of Pharaoh. God had instructed His people to mark the doorposts of their houses with the blood of a lamb, the Passover lamb, so that when the angel of death came to the land and saw that a house was marked with the blood of the lamb, the angel of death passed over and the children of Israel were spared. Immediately after this event, they were liberated by the exodus.

In the history of Israel, the exodus stands as an event of paramount importance. So God instituted an annual celebration—the Passover feast for His people. He gave explicit instructions on how the Passover was to be observed—the specific food and wine that were to be used at this meal and the discussion that was to take place. It was not simply an empty celebration; the sacrament was also wedded to the Word. God essentially said: “Every year unto all generations at this time, you are to gather and celebrate this event. When your children ask you, ‘Why are we doing this?’ you will tell them how I rescued you from bondage and how I spared you from judgment in the Passover” (see Ex. 12:24–27). This became deeply rooted in the religion of Israel. It became so important to Israel that shortly before the death of Christ Jesus, as He entered into His passion and began to feel the initial pangs of His torment, He said that He earnestly desired to celebrate the Passover one more time with His disciples before He left this world (Luke 22:15). That meal celebrates not just a place but a sacred time.

We have moments in our lives that we say were formative in the shaping of our lives. We celebrate birthdays every year. We celebrate Good Friday, Easter, Christmas—observances not commanded in the Scriptures. The Bible doesn’t say that we’re supposed to celebrate Easter or Christmas, and some Christians protest the celebration of those events for one reason or another. The reason, however, that the church celebrates those specific occasions is that they mark, in our memory, sacred time. Good Friday was the day on which our Savior died, on which the atonement was made—the most important day in human history. Then we mark the day of resurrection. We mark the day of Christ’s birth, the day of His ascension, and the day of Pentecost. These are not sacraments in the narrow, technical sense, but they are sacramental in the broad and general sense in which I’m speaking because they involve an observation of sacred space and sacred time. In one single word, these places and times are regarded as holy. The term holy chiefly refers to that which is other or different, that which is uncommon, that which rises above the normal and the mundane. I believe we miss something in the life of the church and in the life of the Christian if we fail to understand the deep significance of these historic moments, places, and signs.

For example, consider the Lord’s Supper. On the night on which He was betrayed, Jesus took the Old Testament sacrament of Passover and filled it with new meaning and new content, saying, “This is my blood of the covenant, which is poured out for many for the forgiveness of sins” (Matt. 26:28). He attached a new significance to an ancient rite. At this point, the bread no longer represented the unleavened bread that was eaten in haste as the people were preparing to leave Egypt and go to the promised land; instead, it symbolized the body of Christ. “This is my body, which is given for you,” He declared in the midst of that feast (Luke 22:19).

Let us remember that Jesus instituted this sacrament, and that He did so in the middle of participating in the old sacrament. He did it for much the same reason that the ancient nation of Israel did. He said, “Do this in remembrance of me” (Luke 22:19). Jesus knew His people. He knew that sometimes our faithfulness is only as strong as our recollection of our most recent blessing at the hands of God. But we come down from those mountaintop experiences, and we tend to forget what God has done for us in the past. We tend to want to live from blessing to blessing, always needing to be replenished with the assurance that God is with us. I think that the disciples could have forgotten many things that they learned from Jesus—His teachings, His example. It is as though Jesus said: “Whatever else you might forget, don’t forget what’s going to happen tomorrow. Don’t ever forget My death. I want to seal this into your memories forever, so that as often as you eat of this food and drink of this cup, you show forth My death until I come.” So from that point on, the Lord instituted a special ceremony, a special event, to commemorate the most sacred time that God had wrought in human history.