This is Part Seven of a special article on John Calvin written by Dr. Joel R. Beeke of Puritan Reformed Theological Seminary. Dr. Beeke also has an interesting web site on located at http://calvin500blog.org titled “The Calvin 500 Blog” “Fostering a healthy discussion for an international community about events, conferences, tours, reviews, studies, discussions, and developments related to the 2009 quincentenary of Calvin’s birth.” Dr. Beeke has given me permission to post his article here which I copied and pasted from his post at his web site. I hereby thank him for giving me this permission to post his article here and for giving us his web site as a resource to use.
Piety in the Sacraments
Calvin defines the sacraments as testimonies “of divine grace toward us, confirmed by an outward sign, with mutual attestation of our piety toward him.” The sacraments are “exercises of piety.” They foster and strengthen our faith, and help us offer ourselves as a living sacrifice to God. For Calvin, as for Augustine, the sacraments are the visible Word. The preached Word comes through our ears; the visible Word, through our eyes. The sacraments hold forth the same Christ as the preached Word but communicate Him through a different mode. In the sacraments, God accommodates Himself to our weakness, Calvin says. When we hear the Word indiscriminately proclaimed, we may wonder: “Is it truly for me? Does it really reach me?” However, in the sacraments God reaches out and touches us individually, and says, “Yes, it’s for you. The promise extends to you.” The sacraments thus minister to human weakness by personalizing the promises for those who trust Christ for salvation.
God comes to His people in the sacraments, encourages them, enables them to know Christ better, builds them up, and nourishes them in Him. Baptism promotes piety as a symbol of how believers are engrafted into Christ, renewed by the Spirit, and adopted into the family of the heavenly Father. Likewise, the Lord’s Supper shows how these adopted children are fed by their loving Father. Calvin loves to refer to the Supper as nourishment for the soul. “The signs are bread and wine which represent for us the invisible food that we receive from the flesh and blood of Christ,” he writes. “Christ is the only food of our soul, and therefore our heavenly Father invites us to Christ, that refreshed by partaking of him, we may repeatedly gather strength until we shall have reached heavenly immortality.”
Reformed Doctrine Daily Devotions 