Sacramentology: The Nature and Efficacy of the Sacraments
God is Spirit, and yet the first work of His hands was matter. He who cannot be seen, touched, measured, or exhausted by any category of the human mind chose to make a world of earth and water, of dust and fruit and flesh; He chose to hover over it, and in the fullness of time He chose to wear it. This is the paradox with which Christianity begins, and every honest theology must reckon with it before it says anything else. It is also the paradox that a great part of the modern Church has declined to reckon with, and the consequences of that refusal are written across the weakness of our common life.
There are millions of Christians in the world, and most of them are sincere and mean well, yet they attach no notable significance to the Eucharist, to the sacrament of the bread and the wine. When one searches the matter honestly, one finds that only the ancient apostolic traditions retain a regard for the sacrifice of the altar that is proportioned to the language of the Gospel itself. The Coptic Orthodox Church, the Eastern Orthodox Church, the Roman Catholic Church, and the other communions that stand in that ancient stream hold the Eucharist in a superior regard that one simply does not meet in Protestant, charismatic, and Pentecostal environments. I count this a deep shame and a sorrowful reality, because many of God’s dear children are, in the Apostle’s words, “aliens from the commonwealth of Israel” (Ephesians 2:12), estranged from the participation that the sacraments make possible. They have not been told that the sacraments are more than ceremonies; they point to a divine reality, and that reality is essential for the transformation of the believer.
My thesis is this. God has made the material world a vehicle for the disclosure of Himself and a bridge into His immaterial life, and the sacraments are that bridge in its saving form: outward and physical actions that carry inward and divine grace, continuing the incarnation of the Son in the body of the Church. Baptism is the believer’s participation in the death of Christ, which was the destruction of death; the Eucharist is the believer’s participation in the life of Christ, which is immortal and sinless. The bread and the cup are not a memorial held at arm’s length but the tree of life itself, set before the sons of Adam once more, and to refuse them is to refuse the life they carry.
I shall argue the case in the following order. First, I shall show that the visible creation exists to teach us the invisible things of God. Second, I shall show that heaven and earth were made together, by one will, and that this fact fixes the dignity of the material order. Third, I shall explain why God gives sacraments at all, and why the doctrine of faith alone cannot stand beside the incarnation. Fourth, I shall turn to Eden, where the first sacrament was offered to Adam in the form of a tree. Fifth, I shall follow that tree into the person of Christ, the bread that came down from heaven. Sixth, I shall consider the testimony of the Apostle Paul, who will not allow the Eucharist to be reduced to a symbol. Seventh, I shall describe the sacramental life of the Church and why the adversary hates it. The stakes are not academic. A theology that offers its adherents only mental assent offers them no transformative reality, and a Christian who has received no transformative reality will remain what he was, however loudly he confesses what he believes.
The Invisible God and the Visible Creation
The Lord Jesus Christ said that “God is a Spirit: and they that worship him must worship him in spirit and in truth” (John 4:24). In His essence God is immaterial, and therefore in His essence He is unknowable, indescribable, and ungraspable. We do not stand before Him as an object stands before a microscope. The little that we can know of Him we know through what He has done and what He has revealed, and this is the first thing to be understood about the created order: it is not a decoration around the revelation of God; it is part of the revelation.
There is a mystery in this which deserves to be held for a moment before we move on. If God is Spirit, we might have expected Him to create only that which is spirit. Instead, when He made the universe He located within it a sphere, a domain, a realm designated for material purposes. In the beginning He made habitations and environments that are immaterial and spiritual, and He made others that are material and physical. The Lord said that “That which is born of the flesh is flesh; and that which is born of the Spirit is spirit” (John 3:6), and He did not say it as one who despised the flesh; He said it as one who knew that each kind of being has its own proper home. The Father, as Creator of the universe, built a material habitation to host material beings and material species, and that fact cannot be divorced from the character of God. No one may say that because God is Spirit the physical is therefore insignificant or unimportant. The material world exists because of His benevolence and His will, and what flows from His benevolence cannot be treated as beneath His notice.
The Apostle Paul captures the point in the first chapter of Romans, where he is speaking of the ungodliness of men who suppress the truth. “Because that which may be known of God is manifest in them; for God hath shewed it unto them. For the invisible things of him from the creation of the world are clearly seen, being understood by the things that are made, even his eternal power and Godhead; so that they are without excuse” (Romans 1:19–20). Notice what Paul asserts. The things that can be known of God are manifest in created things, and they exist within them. The invisible things of God, the things not seen, are seen in the visible things He has made. Paul goes as far as to say that His eternal power and Godhead may be understood by this means. In every created component of the material world there is a trace of the knowledge of God, and God has chosen to hide that knowledge there.
We may say, with the Apostle’s other great phrase, that “we have this treasure in earthen vessels, that the excellency of the power may be of God, and not of us” (2 Corinthians 4:7). The earth is a vault. God has chosen to store certain mysteries about Himself within the material order, and there are certain things about God which, I am persuaded, the inhabitants of the celestial realms must descend into the material to understand, because God has chosen the material element of creation as the instrument by which certain unseen and spiritual realities are revealed. The world is a school, and the material is its scholastic element. God made the material world in order to teach creation the things invisible concerning Himself, even His Godhead.
It follows that when we come to the sacraments we are not stepping into an alien territory. A sacrament is a physical or outward action that manifests divine grace inwardly. It is material in its form, yet its significance is spiritual and divine. It is a vehicle, and it is a continuation of the incarnation. The same God who hid His power in the dust and the deep, in the tree and the grain, hides His grace in water, bread, and wine, and the Church receives it there with thanksgiving.
Heaven and Earth Created Together
“In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth. And the earth was without form, and void; and darkness was upon the face of the deep. And the Spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters” (Genesis 1:1–2). Observe that the spiritual and the physical are conjoined in the first sentence of the Bible. Heaven and earth exist pari passu, side by side, in parallel, and neither exists without the other. The text names the order of their creation, heaven first and then the earth, but it does not allow us to think of them as separable in the purpose of God. It was His will that heaven and earth be created together, which tells us plainly that He was unwilling to create heaven without earth. Heaven must have earth, because God has so decreed.
The prophet Isaiah saw the same thing when he looked toward the end of the age. “For, behold, I create new heavens and a new earth: and the former shall not be remembered, nor come into mind” (Isaiah 65:17). When God replaces the one, He must replace the other, since they stand or fall together in His counsel. No one is therefore entitled to cherish heaven more deeply than earth, as though earth were an unfortunate necessity on the way to something better. In function and in purpose they differ, and they hold several different purposes; yet in the estimation of the divine counsel it pleased God that heaven and earth be joined in creation, and they carry equal significance, importance, and value in His mind.
This matters for a reason that is pastoral before it is philosophical. Those who dwell on earth must not feel themselves inferior to those who dwell in heaven, and those in heaven must not feel themselves superior to those on earth. If God has made you material, you should not desire another form which He has not chosen for you. He did not create you an angel; He created you a man, and you are to remain within the estate that has been allotted to you. There is honour in this, and prestige, and a value that no desire for something higher can improve. The Scripture shows what happens to those who forget it. “And the angels which kept not their first estate, but left their own habitation, he hath reserved in everlasting chains under darkness unto the judgment of the great day” (Jude 6). They desired that for which God had not made them. At Babel men said, “let us build us a city and a tower, whose top may reach unto heaven” (Genesis 11:4), and “the LORD scattered them abroad from thence upon the face of all the earth” (Genesis 11:8). They also wished to be what they were not. In both cases the sin was a rejection of the estate which God had assigned, and in both cases judgment followed.
Return, then, to the second verse of Genesis. The Spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters. He was not with God in heaven in this verse; He was on earth, hovering over the deep. We are told elsewhere that this Spirit is Himself God, and so we behold the presence of God, in the person of the Holy Spirit, over the material world at the very outset of its history. The affinity and the affection of God for the material order could hardly be set before us more clearly. Spirit brooding over matter is the first picture in the Bible of what a sacrament is: the divine presence resting upon a physical substance in order to bring forth life.
The Bridge: Why God Gives Sacraments
If this is true, then the question of why God gives sacraments at all answers itself. Without sacraments, the spiritual and the physical cannot be united. The sacraments are what unite the two realities. They manifest and represent what God has accomplished, and they are the means by which we are made to participate in it. Christ died, and God says to us, in effect, that He wants us to experience that death for ourselves, and He says it in these words: “He that believeth and is baptized shall be saved” (Mark 16:16). Baptism is the experience of the death of Christ. When a man is baptized he participates in the very death that swallowed up death and destroyed it. It is not enough to be told about this death and to give assent to the report. Transformation comes from participation.
The reason is that the material creature can know God, and take part in His reality, only through the medium by which he himself exists. St Irenaeus put the matter in words that I have never been able to improve upon: the Son assumed our material substance so that we might assume, by grace, what He is by nature. The incarnation opened a door into a reality which we could not otherwise have entered. By becoming man, God opened the door for man to become God, not in the sense of the divine essence, which remains forever incommunicable, but in the sense of a transfiguration into His likeness by grace. The Apostle Peter speaks of the same hope when he says that we are given “exceeding great and precious promises: that by these ye might be partakers of the divine nature, having escaped the corruption that is in the world through lust” (2 Peter 1:4). That is my own extension of the argument, and I offer it because it is the destination toward which the whole line of reasoning runs. The grace of God now works through material substances that have been sanctified for that purpose.
Here the doctrine of faith alone meets its refutation, and the refutation is the incarnation itself. If salvation were accomplished by faith alone, God could have remained upon His throne and said, “By faith, I redeem the world.” He could have done so, and He did not. He went to the length of assuming a material form and coming in a physical body in order to die and save, and that fact tells us that for us to be saved there must be an incarnational participation. Faith is involved, and no one denies it, but faith does not stand alone. It requires participation, and participation requires a material means.
The Church is the extension of the incarnation. She is the continuation of the humanity of Christ, and she is His physical body in the world. “For we are members of his body, of his flesh, and of his bones” (Ephesians 5:30). If this is so, then a physical participation in that reality is not an optional addition to the Christian life but the very manner of it. The sacraments are works of divinisation, and they are such because God wants sons, and sons must resemble their Father. This is why true Christian theology is mystical. It deals with a mystery that is entered by participation, and only those who accept the offering of the Christian dogma in its fullness can truly share the faith and be called Christian, for to be a Christian one must share a commonality with the Christ.
I must say plainly what I think of the doctrine that opposes this. The most poisonous theology that Satan has propagated in Christianity is the theology of faith alone. When one examines its conclusions, one discovers that there are no substantive conclusions that it reaches except mental assent. It communicates no transformative reality to its adherents, and for that reason it is satanic: it has robbed a great part of Christendom of the blessing of participation in the life of Christ. No one can hold to the doctrine of faith alone and also enjoy a real participation in Christ, because participation in Christ requires adherence to the sacraments of the Church. No one in the history of the Church held this doctrine before Martin Luther and his fellow reformers. The apostles did not believe it, and the Fathers did not believe it. Faith, as they taught, is involved, but it requires participation.
The Tree in the Midst of the Garden
Christians were not the first to be offered a sacrament by God. Adam was the first. This fact disproves the thesis of faith alone and establishes that the relationship between God and humanity has always been sacramental in its structure. “And the LORD God formed man of the dust of the ground, and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life; and man became a living soul. And the LORD God planted a garden eastward in Eden; and there he put the man whom he had formed. And out of the ground made the LORD God to grow every tree that is pleasant to the sight, and good for food; the tree of life also in the midst of the garden, and the tree of knowledge of good and evil” (Genesis 2:7–9).
The Scripture singles out two trees from all the others, and it does so because their properties differ. Every tree in the garden was planted by the Lord, yet the Holy Ghost brings these two to the front. “And the LORD God commanded the man, saying, Of every tree of the garden thou mayest freely eat: But of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, thou shalt not eat of it: for in the day that thou eatest thereof thou shalt surely die” (Genesis 2:16–17). One tree would minister death to the man who ate from it, and the other ministered life. There stood in the garden a tree of death and a tree of life, and between them stood the commandment. I do not wish at this point to dwell upon the fall that ensued. I wish to dwell upon the presence of the trees and upon what they signify, because I think that we have passed too quickly over the tree of life.
Turn now to the third chapter. “And the LORD God said, Behold, the man is become as one of us, to know good and evil: and now, lest he put forth his hand, and take also of the tree of life, and eat, and live for ever” (Genesis 3:22). Remember what the Lord says in the sixth chapter of John, that if a man eat of the bread he shall live for ever. The tree in Eden was a physical tree, and the requirement for immortality, in the economy of the garden, was that the man should eat of it. God breathed into man the breath of life, and yet He did not, at that moment, impart immortality to him; why, then, did He plant a material garden, with a material tree, and give man access to immortality through the eating of its fruit, when it was God Himself who had breathed into his nostrils? The answer is that it was always the manner of God to communicate the mysteries of eternal realities through material or physical mediums. He did not impart eternal life when He formed Adam. The text does not say that God breathed life; it says that He breathed the breath of life, which is a fragment, a capacity for life, and not its fullness. If Adam had possessed the fullness of life there would have been no need of the tree of life.
The very presence of the tree tells us that the life of man, however long it might have run, would come to an end unless it were sustained. God offered man, through the tree and its fruit, access to immortality and participation in everlasting life. When the man had sinned, God removed him from the garden to prevent him from eating of the tree in a state of death, for he would then have lived for ever dead. We should observe the mercy in this expulsion. A man cannot be allowed to eat the food of immortality in the condition of death, because the food would preserve the condition. The tree was guarded, therefore, until the death that had entered the world should itself be destroyed.
In all of this God gives us the vocabulary of a sacramental theology. The sacraments are access points into eternal reality. God is God, and He can do whatever He pleases, yet He has chosen the medium of the sacraments to bring us into the life of His Son. Adam did not need a compass or a map to find the tree of life. It stood before him in the midst of the garden, and God had said to him, “Of every tree of the garden thou mayest freely eat.” He might eat freely, which is to say at any time and at his own convenience. When the Lord took the cup, He said, “this do ye, as oft as ye drink it, in remembrance of me” (1 Corinthians 11:25), and the words as oft belong to the same generosity. Participation in the Eucharist, in the bread and the wine, carries the same essence and the same value that eating of the tree carried for Adam.
That tree was not a symbol. The Bible calls it the tree of life, and it transmitted life. The proof is that when man was driven from it, he died.
The Bread That Is Also the Tree
When Jesus came, He announced Himself as the bread. Had He been speaking to Adam, He would have said, “I am that tree”; because He was speaking to Jews who had eaten manna in the wilderness, He used an allegory that they could receive. “I am that bread of life. Your fathers did eat manna in the wilderness, and are dead. This is the bread which cometh down from heaven, that a man may eat thereof, and not die. I am the living bread which came down from heaven: if any man eat of this bread, he shall live for ever: and the bread that I will give is my flesh, which I will give for the life of the world” (John 6:48–51).
Consider the manna. The children of Israel ate it for forty years and they were not malnourished. Their bodies received every nutritional requirement from that wafer which fell from heaven, and none of them grew sick or feeble on it. They became weak and ill only when they began to lust after things which God had not given them, and when they began to test and provoke God. With what God gave them, all were full and no one was hungry. And yet “Your fathers did eat manna in the wilderness, and are dead.” The manna sustained them for forty years, and then it ceased to sustain, because it was a sign and a shadow. Jesus comes and says, “I am that bread of life” (John 6:48). What the manna did for a generation, He promises to do for ever.
God had introduced Himself to Abraham as “the Almighty God” (Genesis 17:1), in Hebrew El Shaddai, the Breasted One, the God who gives nourishment. A God who names Himself by the sustenance He supplies will not leave His children to feed on air. He feeds them, and what He feeds them with is Himself.
When He speaks of this bread, our Lord is not tentative. He could have used any number of constructions. He could have said that the bread is like unto His body, or represents His body, or stands in for His body. He did not. “Except ye eat the flesh of the Son of man, and drink his blood, ye have no life in you” (John 6:53). “For my flesh is meat indeed, and my blood is drink indeed. He that eateth my flesh, and drinketh my blood, dwelleth in me, and I in him” (John 6:55–56). On the night of His betrayal, “Jesus took bread, and blessed it, and brake it, and gave it to the disciples, and said, Take, eat; this is my body. And he took the cup, and gave thanks, and gave it to them, saying, Drink ye all of it; For this is my blood of the new testament, which is shed for many for the remission of sins” (Matthew 26:26–28). He used material mediums, bread and wine, to communicate a spiritual reality, and He said is.
Let me state plainly what became of the bread. When Jesus gave it to the disciples, it did not change in its physical properties; it remained bread. Yet He said that it is His flesh, and the position that I hold, and the position that the Church has held, is that it is His flesh. When you eat the bread, you eat the flesh of Christ; when you drink of the cup, you drink His blood; and this is what communion means. Communion is not a pleasant word for a shared meal. If you would commune in His life and participate in it, you eat the flesh. You do not eat it by faith alone. You eat it sacramentally. When I stand at the table, I ask the Holy Spirit to bless and consecrate this bread and this cup, in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit, and I do so in the confidence that what is received is the food of immortality, by which we live and are vitalised.
Baptism and the Eucharist belong together. If baptism is how we experience the death of Christ, the Eucharist is how we experience and participate in His life. The one gives us the death that destroyed death, and the other gives us the life that death could not hold. The Lord Jesus ate death through death, and we are invited to eat of Him that we may be true claimants and true beneficiaries of all that He has done.
Not a Symbol Only: The Witness of the Apostle
“Wherefore, my dearly beloved, flee from idolatry. I speak as to wise men; judge ye what I say. The cup of blessing which we bless, is it not the communion of the blood of Christ? The bread which we break, is it not the communion of the body of Christ?” (1 Corinthians 10:14–16). The Apostle asks the same question that I have been asking throughout this essay. Is this not the tree of life? Is it not the bread of life? Is it not the blood in which we commune?
There are those in charismatic, Pentecostal, and evangelical circles who say that it is only symbolic. But if the bread and the cup were symbols alone, the Apostle’s warning to the Corinthians would be an absurdity. “Wherefore whosoever shall eat this bread, and drink this cup of the Lord, unworthily, shall be guilty of the body and blood of the Lord. But let a man examine himself, and so let him eat of that bread, and drink of that cup. For he that eateth and drinketh unworthily, eateth and drinketh damnation to himself, not discerning the Lord’s body. For this cause many are weak and sickly among you, and many sleep” (1 Corinthians 11:27–30). A symbol does not make men sick, and a mere memorial does not put them in their graves. There are spiritual ramifications here because the thing is real. The same gravity attends the words of the Lord Himself, who said that those who do not eat His flesh and drink His blood have no life in them, and that those who do eat and drink dwell in Him. A man does not speak so of a symbol.
The apostles and the Lord Himself attached enormous spiritual importance to the sacrament, and it is not open to us to arrive two thousand years later and announce that it is only symbolic. I am afraid that this is among the reasons why we are so weak. We are spiritually sick because we do not discern the Lord’s body in the bread, and we do not discern the Lord’s blood in the cup, and so we partake unworthily. To partake unworthily is not only to partake in sin without repentance; it is also to partake while believing that this is only bread and only wine, or only fruit of the vine. The Apostle calls that damnation, and the man who brings that mind to the table eats and drinks judgment to himself.
I recognise in this attitude a very old deception. “It is just the fruit. God knows. Eat.” The serpent said, “For God doth know that in the day ye eat thereof, then your eyes shall be opened” (Genesis 3:5), and in the garden he persuaded man to treat the tree of death as though it were only a tree. Today the same voice persuades man to treat the tree of life as though it were only bread. In both cases the enemy’s work is to empty the material thing of its spiritual weight, so that man will either eat what kills him without fear, or refuse what would give him life without regret.
The refusal is not new. After the Lord had spoken of eating His flesh, “Many therefore of his disciples, when they had heard this, said, This is an hard saying; who can hear it?” (John 6:60), and “From that time many of his disciples went back, and walked no more with him” (John 6:66). They could not tolerate it, and they could not bear it. Even among His own people, in the midst of His own followers, He was rejected. He said, “Here is life,” and men replied that all was done, that Christ had done it all, and that nothing more was required of them. To such men I must say that they are mistaken, because they are not the Saviour. If they were the Saviour, they might dictate the terms of salvation. Since they are not, they cannot.
There is no life from the pulpit. I will say it again: there is no pulpit on earth that produces life. Christ does. He is the one who dies and gives life, and that is why, at the centre of every Christian convocation, the thing that finally matters is the offering of the Eucharist. After the words have been spoken, the sermon has faded from the memory, and the congregation has gone home, the power of the Eucharist remains.
The Sacramental Life of the Church
Christ was the tree of life in the garden. He was the ark in the age before the flood. He was the manna that fell from heaven. He was present throughout the entire history of mankind, and even when men fell and rejected Him and rebelled, He was there. “She crieth at the gates, at the entry of the city, at the coming in at the doors” (Proverbs 8:3). Wisdom cries out at the gates, calling to the simple, and in our own time and in our own day Christ is still calling us to commune and to participate.
That is why baptism is so important, and the Eucharist, and confession, and marriage, and prayer. All of these point to an inward grace, and all of them are done outwardly. In prayer we hear the invitation: “Let us therefore come boldly unto the throne of grace, that we may obtain mercy, and find grace to help in time of need” (Hebrews 4:16). What we are offered in the Christian faith is nothing less than a share in His life, which is immortal, perfect, and sinless, and a share in His death, which is the destruction of death, the eating up of death. Each of the sacraments is a door in the house of God through which a man walks with his body and arrives with his soul.
It is for this reason that Satan hates the sacraments. He hates them because it is through the sacraments that we participate, through the sacraments that we experience, and through the sacraments that the change, the transfiguration, and the transformation by the Spirit of God take place. The adversary will tolerate a great deal of religion, and he will even encourage it, so long as it remains an affair of the mind. What he cannot tolerate is the sinner who kneels, eats, and is changed.
God has not ceased to reveal Himself. Now that Christ has fully assumed the material, He has by that assumption sanctified all flesh and has sanctified the material world, so that God may use anything in it to depict a divine truth. This is the glory of the incarnation, and nothing is worth more of your study, your meditation, and your research. The incarnation informs Christianity; it determines what kind of religion, and what kind of faith, the Christian faith must be. Without it, Christianity is nominal. With it, Christianity is lifted above every religion of shadow and promise, the Judaism from which it sprang included, because in no other faith does God become a man, taking the likeness of His creation in order that He may save it. There is none other; this is the culmination of the revelation of God to humanity and to creation. How we travel into His divinity, how we are transformed into His divine nature, and how we participate in it is through the sacraments.
The Church, then, is a vast sacramental sanctuary, because she manifests and reveals the body of Christ, and “the invisible things of him from the creation of the world are clearly seen” in her, even His eternal power and Godhead. When a man ingests the Eucharist rightly, it heals a part of his soul in a way that nothing else can, and it changes him in a way that nothing else can, once he begins to see it for what it is.
Bearers of God in an Evil World
I have argued that the visible creation was made to teach the invisible things of God; that heaven and earth were made together, so that no one on earth need feel less than those in heaven; that the sacraments are the bridge by which a material creature crosses into the immaterial life of God; that the tree of life in Eden was the first sacrament and the Eucharist is its fulfilment; and that the Apostle, the Lord, and the Church unite in refusing to let the bread and the cup be reduced to a symbol. The thesis stands where it began: the sacraments are the continuation of the incarnation, and through them the believer participates in the death and the life of Christ.
We have been raised crookedly and deficiently. Many of us have not learned the things that matter most in the faith we were brought into. We had teachers who were themselves ignorant, who themselves had no historical richness in the ancient faith, and to some degree we have inherited the confusion that they received. The Holy Spirit has had mercy on us. He has been bringing us in, little by little and slowly but surely, into the faith that the apostles walked in and the ancient Fathers walked in. As the day star rises in our souls, the eyes of the spirit are washed, the scales of our blindness fall away, and we begin to see the truth and the reality of things. Our faith then begins to grow in the right way, set in the right context. Thy word is a lamp unto our feet, and it is by that lamp that we find the table.
Christianity is not about superstardom. It is not about the syndrome of the man of God or the syndrome of the superior Christian. It is about learning to partake of the life of God, and about going through the transformative process that Christ offers us through His Church and through His word. A sinner, with all his sins and all his weaknesses, comes to the table and is matured slowly, but surely, into the likeness of Christ, until he bears the image of God. This is what Christianity is for: to be bearers of God in an evil world. We are not merely to speak about God or to sing about Him; we are to carry Him, to be bearers of Christ. We cannot do this without sufficient knowledge, and not only sufficient knowledge, but accurate knowledge. That is why these matters must be taught plainly.
The eschatological meaning of the sacramental life is the restoration of what was lost. The tree that Adam was driven from in the state of death has been replaced in the midst of the Church, and the death that kept the way to it has been eaten up by the One who died. The Lord who ate death through death now sets before His people the food of immortality, and by this we live. The hand that was driven from the tree in death is bidden to take it again in Christ, and the bread of that tree is on the table.
