Saved to Eat Together

You have probably noticed that we make a lot of the doctrine of the Trinity. It’s in our name, a symbol of the Trinity is on the front of our bulletin. We begin and end the service each Lord’s Day “In the name of the Father, and the Son, and the Holy Spirit”. We sing at least two songs each week that are oriented around the Trinity. We confess our common faith by means of one of the great ancient Trinitarian creeds each Sunday. The Trinity is a big deal. Why?

Because if God is the creator of all things (which he is) and he made us in his image (which he did) then the fact that God is a Trinity must be pretty important, and we have concluded that we ought not to say that we believe in the Trinity, and then act like it doesn’t matter.

Because it does matter! The God into whose presence we have come this morning, the God who has redeemed us and called us to be his special people, out of all the peoples on the earth, the God who became incarnate in the Lord Jesus Christ, died on the cross, was raised from the dead, and has ascended into heaven, has from all eternity been in loving fellowship, as the three persons of the Godhead, Father, Son and Holy Spirit, One God yet three persons, blessed forever. It is not only that God is One God and Three Persons, but that these three persons love each other, completely, sacrificially, exhaustively. Each has been seeking the glory of the other, rather than their own. The Father loves the Son, and exalts him. The Son delights in and obeys the Father, and glorifies him. The Spirit testifies to both the Father and the Son, and rejoices in them both.

If God is Triune, and we are made in God’s image, then we must conclude that “it is not good for man to be alone”. We are, at our very core, social beings. But as we saw in the passage we considered today, the world is not as it should be, and this is nowhere more evident than in the fragmented nature of the world in our relationships to one another. The proof, if you needed any, that the world is fallen, is to be found in the fact that the God who made us is fundamentally social, yet we, apart from his grace, are socially destructive and isolated. And if salvation is the restoration of the world as it was meant to be, then we must also conclude that salvation entails the restoration of relationships. In other words, we cannot possibly talk about being saved, all the while maintaining that our salvation is a wholly individual thing without reference to anyone else. If God is saving us, then salvation is a social event with social effects. This is why the church, from the church fathers to the Reformers, from Augustine to Calvin, and even our Westminster Confession of Faith has consistently insisted that “there is ordinarily no salvation outside of the church.” This is also why the main thing we do each Lord’s Day, the thing that informs and shapes all of our lives, is the Lord’s Supper. It makes perfect sense, you know. Our salvation consists in part in the restoration of our relationship to one another, so what do we do? We come at the Triune God’s bidding to sit down to a meal together. The main thing is a social event, a feast, a celebration with food. So come, join together in a meal with God and one another, and become the picture of the restored world that God has called you to be. Be healed by the life giving nourishment of the feast—not because there is some magic power in the bread or the wine, but because the Holy Spirit has drawn us into God’s presence. God will turn your mourning into gladness, God will give you comfort, because right here—this table—is the way things were meant to be.

This is the Lord’s table…