Written by Keith A. Mathison |
Sunday, February 25, 2024
When we come together to worship, we worship with hurting people. Some are sick. Some are grieving. Some are struggling to support their families. Some have no family. But too often, we take no notice of these things. We are too worried about our own problems to concern ourselves with the problems of others. Calvin reminds us, however, that when one member of the body is in pain, it affects the whole body. When we come together for the Lord’s Supper, it should remind us of the oneness of the body and spur us to compassion that we might do what we can to share the burdens of our brothers and sisters in Christ.

We shall benefit very much from the Sacrament if this thought is impressed and engraved upon our minds: that none of the brethren can be injured, despised, rejected, abused, or in any way offended by us, without at the same time, injuring, despising, and abusing Christ by the wrongs we do; that we cannot disagree with our brethren without at the same time disagreeing with Christ; that we cannot love Christ without loving him in the brethren; that we ought to take the same care of our brethren’s bodies as we take of our own; for they are members of our body; and that, as no part of our body is touched by any feeling of pain which is not spread among all the rest, so we ought not to allow a brother to be affected by any evil, without being touched with compassion for him. Accordingly, Augustine with good reason frequently calls this Sacrament ‘the bond of love.’”1
For John Calvin, the primary benefit of the Lord’s Supper is that it strengthens our faith and our union with Christ. Communion with Christ, however, cannot be separated from the communion of the saints. Following Augustine, Calvin spoke of this “horizontal” aspect of the Lord’s Supper as “the bond of love.” The Supper is something that is to unite believers and encourage them to love one another. Paul tells us that Christ has only one body of which He makes us all partakers; therefore, we are all one body (1 Cor. 10:17).
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When Christmas lands on a Sunday, I often think that a great test is set before those who claim to follow Christ. Who and what are they really worshipping? Family? Sentimentality? People need to think beyond the mere fact of the birth of Christ to what his work accomplishes and where we are led in response.

Every year there is some new controversy over the celebration of Christmas. Of particular interest is the controversy that broke out this year in Dedham, MA over the local library’s decision to not set up a Christmas tree. The decision was made in response to the claim that “people were made uncomfortable last year looking at it.” An intense debate followed and many Christians protested against its cancellation expressing that “the Christmas tree is the symbol of Christianity.” As a result of the public outcry, the save the Christmas tree campaign prevailed and the Dedham library has now installed their annual Christmas tree.
Of Trees or Worship Services?
In all of this, we should not miss a much quieter cancellation that has not yet made it to Fox news. As Christmas this year falls on a Sunday, churches have announced that they are canceling worship on Sunday to accommodate those who want to be with their families. Kevin DeYoung has responded. But then, surprisingly, over at the Gospel Coalition, Fletcher Lang has written an article in response to DeYoung justifying the canceling of worship on Sunday due to Christmas celebration logistical challenges.
With a remarkable line of reasoning, Fletcher attempts to support the canceling of Sabbath worship (as required in the fourth commandment as it has been historically received across denominational lines), for the sake of difficulty and numbers. “ The problem is around 80 percent of our church travels for Christmas…We need to put out chairs, set up sound equipment, and place signs outside. While we have less work to do than many church plants, there’s still a considerable amount of setup required.”
Are these reasons legitimate? And why should we not make application here to Jesus’ warning about making the commandment of God of no effect for the sake of our tradition? Is the fourth commandment really a thing indifferent, as Fletcher suggests, by citing Romans 14 and the celebration of days? Does Sabbath worship all the sudden become a neutral issue only when it coincides with tradition, culture, and difficulty?
It might be helpful for the reader to know that when the Synod of Dordrecht met in 1618-19, they had a debate about challenges to public gathering for worship on the Lord’s Day. The consensus at the Synod was that even if the minister and his family are the only ones in attendance, the second service itself shall still be called on the Lord’s Day because the public gathering of the people to worship is not a neutral proposal of God’s Word.
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We would like to report that Evangelical Christians are always perfect in their handling of the word of God, but that is not always the case. Sometimes Scriptures are completely removed from their context. An idea loosely based on the Bible is, “God loves you and has a wonderful plan for your life.” Some will go so far as to quote Jeremiah 29:11 completely out of context: “For I know the plans I have for you, declares the Lord, plans for welfare and not for evil, to give you a future and a hope.” Here is the context: Israel was in captivity at the time, and they were listening to false prophets who were lying to them about their imminent peace and restoration as a nation. Jeremiah, in contrast, told the Israelites to settle in and to understand they will be there until seventy years of their prophesied judgment is completed.

In Matthew 22:23 – 33, we read of a group of Jewish religious leaders, the Sadducees, whose theology informed their understanding of Scripture rather than allowing Scripture to shed real light on their faulty theology. “This Jewish group apparently based its doctrine on the Pentateuch alone”1
So, when appealing to what Moses wrote in Deuteronomy 25:5-10, they attempted to trip Jesus up, formulating a hypothetical case of a woman that had married seven brothers, one at a time, from the eldest to the youngest as each one died. Sadducees were skeptics, who didn’t believe in the resurrection, which of course Jesus taught, so they used this question to make belief in the resurrection seem ridiculous. “At the resurrection,” they ask,“whose wife will she be of the seven, since all of them were married to her?” Jesus turned their ploy back on them in Matthew 22:28  when He replied from the Pentateuch, Exodus 3:6, to do so:
Jesus answered and said unto them, Ye do err, not knowing the scriptures, nor the power of God. For in the resurrection they neither marry, nor are given in marriage, but are as the angels of God in heaven. But as touching the resurrection of the dead, have ye not read that which was spoken unto you by God, saying, I am the God of Abraham, and the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob? God is not the God of the dead, but of the living. (Matthew 25:29-32 KJV)
“Ye do err, not knowing the scriptures, nor the power of God.” Ignorance of the scriptures does seem to be a popular way of misusing – intentionally (cults for example) or unknowingly – the word of God even today. Many miss, as did the Sadducees, the importance of the main character and theme in the story, God and His power. Many people miss the true teachings in the Bible because of their natural bias against the supernatural. In their thinking, God cannot do things which they deem impossible.
In 1923, J. Gresham Machen’s book, Christianity and Liberalism was published. Liberals of that day were the progressives of Machen’s day. His criticism wasn’t that the Liberals of his era did not claim to be Christian or that they had overtly abandoned the Scriptures. They used the methodology of the Sadducees to deny what seems impossible in human eyes. They held a cynical view of Scripture and created a “theology” which placed their unbelief and their feelings squarely on top of Scripture, vehemently denying what their biased minds could not, therefore did not, believe. Machen describes the premise of his book:
Modern liberalism may be criticized (1) on the ground that it is un-Christian and (2) on the ground that it is unscientific. We shall concern ourselves here chiefly with the former line of criticism; we shall be interested in showing that despite the liberal use of traditional phraseology, modern liberalism not only is a different religion from Christianity but belongs in a totally different class of religions.2
Many of the things Machen said in 1923 can be applied with equal validity to Progressives today. Like the Liberals in Machen’s day, Progressives do use “traditional phraseology” and may quote Scripture, but context is missing. Their understanding is guided by personal feeling and desire, not by the contextual intent of the word of God. In “Who’s More Political: Progressive or Conservative Christians?”3 George Yancy points out :
For progressive Christians, Jesus is primarily the model of inclusion and tolerance. For example, one progressive Christian drew a cartoon of Jesus saying, “The difference between me and you is you use Scripture to determine what love means and I use love to determine what Scripture means.” Progressive Christians focus on the actions and teachings of Jesus that reinforce their values of tolerance and inclusion, which they see as examples of love.
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